José Mourinho Returns to the Clásico with Real Madrid

José Mourinho has already done the por que?, waved the printout and swerved a press conference – and he has only been back at Real Madrid for three months. The classics are back before he has even reached the clásico. That comes on Sunday night, when he walks again into the stadium where he first appeared 30 years ago as Bobby Robson’s gifted young translator, and last stood in 2013 as the most polarising, and perhaps most famous, manager in the game.

The man who once declared “today, tomorrow and always, Barcelona in my heart,” and insisted he would only ever join Real Madrid to destroy them, now carries the responsibility of trying to destroy Barcelona. It is not a new role for him. The nostalgia around his return is wrapped tightly around the rivalry that shaped him.

“The clásico is just another game in the championship but to say it’s a game like any other would be to lie, totally unreal,” Mourinho said on Wednesday.

He knows better than most. On the other side of the divide, Barcelona’s new star is relishing his presence. “I love the needle,” Lamine Yamal said. “The Mourinho-Guardiola era, I loved all that. That’s football. Sport is serious but I want a show and we have more fun.”

There are bigger stories in European football, of course. Madrid’s astonishing Champions League run since Mourinho’s last spell – turning the longed-for décima into the 10th, then adding the 11th, 12th, 13th, 14th and 15th in a decade – unfolded largely without Barcelona on the continental stage. There has not been a European clásico since the 2011 semi-final, when Pep Guardiola had just called Mourinho the puto amo, “the fucking master”, and the Portuguese launched his por que? tirade, accusing Uefa and referees across Europe of favouring Barcelona.

Yet this week nothing feels bigger than this clásico. Even the Champions League ties have been viewed through the prism of what they might mean for Sunday, despite Barcelona’s trip to Paris. The rivalry is a constant. For Mourinho, it is the centre of his Madrid story.

The day he took the Madrid job in 2010 was the day he lifted the Champions League with Inter, but the roots lay in the semi-final that preceded it. That was when he sprinted across the Camp Nou pitch, finger raised, celebrating Inter’s resistance. Madrid were spared the nightmare of Barcelona lifting the European Cup at the Santiago Bernabéu and shown how to stop a side that had looked untouchable. As Mourinho left the Bernabéu in Florentino Pérez’s car that night, while his players headed back to Milan to party, the president asked him to do the same with Madrid.

Pérez, who had overseen the original galácticos’ failure and then walked away, returned in 2009 and won nothing. Barcelona ruled. They formed the spine of Spain’s World Cup 2010 winners, with six starters in the final. Madrid needed a rupture, a manager to tear up the hierarchy in the dressing room and drag the club into a new kind of fight. “This year’s galáctico is José Mourinho,” Pérez announced.

The three years that followed were as poisonous as they were compelling. By the time Mourinho left, it had turned ugly, the conflict as fierce inside the club as outside. He would later describe them as “three intense, almost violent years”. Pérez, though, remained drawn to him, perhaps especially when he was at his most confrontational. Mourinho, the president insisted, had restored Madrid to their “rightful place”. After every European triumph that followed, Pérez picked up the phone to tell him: you started this.

The record is mixed but loaded. Mourinho’s first clásico ended in a 5-0 humiliation, Barcelona going on to win both the league and Champions League. His final season brought no trophies. Guardiola still finished with twice as many titles. Yet of the four competitions Guardiola failed to win at Barcelona, Mourinho took three away from him. That counted in Madrid.

Now the cycle feels familiar. Madrid have gone two years without a trophy. In the first of those seasons, Barcelona wrapped up the league with two games to spare and completed a domestic treble. They beat Madrid four times, scoring 16 goals. Last season they clinched the title with three weeks to spare, doing it with a clásico win that underlined their dominance in a year when Madrid’s internal splits were played out in public. Then Spain won the World Cup with eight Barcelona players in the squad. Madrid’s only representative, Marc Cucurella, did not join until after the tournament had begun.

If that is not a crisis, it is at least a reckoning. And in Madrid, a reckoning calls for Mourinho. Time has softened memories of his excesses; nostalgia has done the rest. He returns as the one man granted enough authority to impose himself on the dressing room, to turn the club combative again. With everyone. And especially with Barcelona.

Listen to Pérez’s extraordinary speech in May – the quiet part shouted, a cocktail of grievance, campaigning and conspiracy – and Mourinho’s reappointment makes sense. The Negreira case, in which Barcelona paid the then vice-president of the referees’ committee, José María Enríquez Negreira, more than €7m between 2001 and 2018, has become the centrepiece of Madrid’s narrative. Barcelona deny corruption, insisting Negreira acted as an adviser, yet the case has become the drumbeat behind Madrid’s complaints, long after the two clubs found common cause on the Super League.

The temperature has only risen. It hardly helps when the league president compares Madrid’s television channel to Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda. Whether the specific complaints are justified is one question; whether the broader discourse of conspiracy is credible is another. Every contentious call, and many that are not even errors, is framed as part of a grand design, the insinuations relentless when they are not spelled out.

Mourinho arrived claiming to be older, calmer. The last few weeks have shown the limits of that. In defeat, the old instincts return. After losing to Betis, he rolled out the por que? again – this time the answer was simple: that is the rule, the decision correct. After losing to Atlético, he appeared in the press room brandishing a printout. Then came the no-show.

He skipped the press conference after running on to the pitch to embrace Vinícius Júnior when the Brazilian scored against Villarreal, only for the goal to be ruled out and Vinícius sent off for pulling Nathan Saliba’s hair. The incident brought a four-game ban. Vinícius will miss the clásico.

Mourinho stayed away from the microphones to avoid a suspension that would have ruled him out of the game that matters most. Protect the clásico at all costs. He is lighter now, for the moment at least, because something has shifted.

Last Saturday, when Barcelona made it 11 wins from 11 in the league, averaging more than four goals a game, the consensus was brutal for Madrid: Barcelona would win the clásico and the title would effectively be over before winter. Lamine Yamal was leading a side in full flow. Madrid, beaten twice already, had not found their rhythm. Mourinho’s team looked flat, the same old flaws exposed. There was not much football to cling to.

Then came Rome. On the Wednesday before, Madrid had produced another of those comebacks that defy logic, turning 3-1 down at Roma into a 4-3 win in the final seven minutes. It felt like chaos, not construction. Was there really anything there to build on?

There was, as it turned out. Those frantic minutes had a pattern. Arda Güler played. Yan Diomande played. Fede Valverde shifted to right-back. Vinícius did not play. The shape changed, the energy with it. It seemed obvious. To everyone. Including Mourinho.

So he went back to it. Madrid scored four against Sevilla on Sunday, three of them outstanding goals. Then four more against Leipzig on Wednesday, Diomande smashing in a superb volley after Vinícius had gone off. The same night, Barcelona conceded four at the Parc des Princes.

Hansi Flick did not hide his priorities. He admitted he had managed his squad with the clásico in mind, resting Rodri and withdrawing Pedri and Raphinha early in Paris to keep them fresh for a game that can define a season and usually does. His problem lies behind them. Defensive injuries bite, and he has warned his players that 15 goals conceded already is far too many.

Mourinho, never one to let a perceived slight pass, could not resist pointing out that Madrid have one day less to prepare for the clásico. The detail that Madrid played at home to Leipzig while Barcelona travelled to Paris softens the complaint, but the message is the same: another example, in his eyes, of how “they” are against his team. The groundwork, the excuses, are laid early.

“We need to cut the gap and we can only do that by winning,” said Thibaut Courtois, speaking about the six-point deficit. “We’re going with confidence.”

The mood has shifted. A Madrid defeat no longer feels inevitable. The title no longer looks like a procession in blaugrana. A team, or at least the outline of one, is starting to emerge.

“I had to get to know them,” Mourinho said on Wednesday night. “I’ve only been here 105 days; it’s not long.”

One hundred and five days in, the old feud is back on centre stage, the old protagonist in his favourite role. Now he walks into the clásico again, not as the translator in the shadows, not as the visiting villain, but as the man Madrid have chosen – once more – to fight their biggest battle.