The most revealing thing José Mourinho said after Real Madrid’s 1-2 win at Espanyol had nothing to do with Carlos Espí’s stoppage-time winner or Jude Bellingham’s opener. Asked about the way his team had attacked dead-ball situations at Cornellà, the manager did something he has always done and which tells you how a squad is being run: he named the staff who did the work. Real Madrid set pieces, it turns out, now have their own department.
“It’s the work of Pedro and Sami Khedira. They work on the defensive and offensive throw-ins,” Mourinho explained, according to Bernábeu Digital, crediting the two members of his backroom team with preparing dead-ball routines at both ends. It is a small quote with a large implication: after a trophyless 2025-26 played out under two different coaches, the new staff have gone looking for goals in the one area of the game a manager can genuinely control.
Why Mourinho is chasing set pieces
He was blunt about the reason. “We scored few set-piece goals last season, we have to score more,” Mourinho said, per Bernábeu Digital. That is not a criticism disguised as analysis; it is a target. Dead balls are the cheapest goals in football and the least dependent on form, fitness or the mood of a front three — which is exactly why managers who arrive at clubs needing quick, reliable improvement start there. Mourinho has been publicly relaxed about his squad since his summer of arrivals, and he has consistently pointed at margins rather than personnel as the thing he wants to fix first.
The delegation is the other half of the story. Mourinho has handed a specific, measurable brief to specific people and then said so in public, which is how accountability gets built into a coaching staff. Real Madrid supporters first met Sami Khedira in his new role on the bench in July; this is the first competitive evidence of what he is actually doing at Valdebebas.
Los Blancos have the bodies for it
The raw material is there in a way it has not been for years. This is a squad built with height and physical presence through the spine: Ibrahima Konaté and Dean Huijsen give Real Madrid two genuinely dominant aerial centre-backs, as we looked at last week, while Bellingham’s timing in the box and Kylian Mbappé’s movement offer different options once the first contact has been won. Bernábeu Digital notes all four as players who can hurt opponents from these situations.
Mourinho himself revealed that Konaté came close to scoring from a dead ball at Espanyol — on a night when Madrid needed until stoppage time to find a winner, that is not a footnote. One converted set piece at Cornellà turns an anxious evening into a comfortable one. Over 38 league games, a handful of them turn a title race.
The test starts now
A single throw-in routine and a header that flashed wide do not make a pattern, and it is worth being honest about that. Plenty of teams look organised from dead balls in August and lose the habit by November, and Real Madrid’s problem at Espanyol was never really the set pieces — it was the 90 minutes of open play that preceded Espí’s goal. Mourinho’s own framing, as The Guardian observed of his return, has been notably humble about how much work is still in front of this team.
But the direction is unmistakable. Real Madrid have spent recent seasons winning games on pure individual quality and losing them to well-drilled sides who defended their box better. A manager who has now told his players, in public, that set pieces are a scoring target rather than a restart is changing the terms of that argument. Judge it in November, not in August — but the first evidence is already on the tape.
