The first question anybody wanted answered was about the black eye. Jose Mourinho sat down with El Chiringuito on Tuesday night for his first external interview since returning to Real Madrid, and the mark on his face had already been through two days of speculation about another dressing-room flashpoint. The explanation was gloriously ordinary: a Castilla youngster drilled a ball at him during training, he was wearing his glasses, and the glasses lost. He also went out of his way to make clear it had nothing whatsoever to do with the boy being left out of the last squad.
That exchange, small as it is, sets the tone for everything else he said. Days out from the LaLiga opener at Espanyol, the Jose Mourinho who spoke to Josep Pedrerol was not the man who left the Bernabeu in 2013 looking for a fight. He was calmer, funnier and — on the substance — considerably more demanding.
‘I’m much more mature, less emotional’
Asked how he has changed in the years since, Mourinho did not hedge. “In many ways. As a person, as a coach… I’ve changed so much,” he said, in quotes carried by Managing Madrid’s transcript of the interview. He then drew the line he clearly wants everyone to understand.
“I’d say I have the same DNA. Obviously, I can’t hide who I am or try to be something I’m not,” he said. “I’m much more mature, less emotional, and more in control. As always, learning from mistakes. But I don’t regret this or that, because I think that in life, regretting something that’s already happened doesn’t help at all. Learning from experiences, yes. In this job as a coach, I believe that the more experience we have, the more ‘déjà vu’, the better you become.”
Put to him that this sounded a little duller than the Mourinho of old, he was unbothered. “No, I wouldn’t say more boring. I think that in the end, your DNA always wins out. But more boring… not entirely.”
The word Jose Mourinho keeps coming back to
The most revealing section was about the dressing room he inherited in June. “I found a locker room eager to win. I found a locker room open to common sense, because all I’ve asked of them from day one is common sense,” he said. “So far, I haven’t had any situations where I’ve had to be the aggressive leader that I can be. They’ve protected me from that side of me, which is also part of who I am.”
Asked what common sense actually means in practice, he was specific in a way managers rarely are in public. “Telling them they have to arrive an hour before training, not five minutes before, is common sense. That’s football today. You have to arrive early, you have to eat breakfast as directed by the nutritionist, you have to go to the gym every day to prevent injuries… it’s for your own good.” He described the squad’s behaviour so far as “impeccable”.
None of that will surprise anyone who has watched the last month at Valdebebas, where the double sessions have already changed the rhythm of the place. What is new is hearing him frame it as a standard the players have met rather than one he has had to impose.
‘Real Madrid is on a different level’
The line Managing Madrid led their report with was about recruitment. “Real Madrid is on a different level, it can’t have players who think twice about joining,” Mourinho said — a sentence that lands with some force in a summer where Madrid were snubbed by Rodri and where the club have frozen incomings until somebody leaves. It reads less like a complaint about any individual than a statement of the standard he expects the badge to set on its own.
For Madridistas it is the natural sequel to the day he told the Bernabeu he was one of them. The football starts this weekend at Espanyol, and if the season goes the way he described it on Tuesday night, the black eye will be the least interesting thing about this week.
