Mourinho's verdict: "At Real Madrid we only have good players, very good players and very, very good players"

A 3-0 win in Germany and a coach dropping lines with real intent. That's what Sunday's friendly between Real Madrid and Schalke 04 left behind, the last serious test before LaLiga kicks off. And from that test, Jose Mourinho emerged with a message that sounds more like a locker room headline than a medical report: on his roster, he said, there are only "good players, very good players and very, very good players."

The Portuguese manager spoke to Real Madrid TV after the match and took a measured approach when it came to singling out individual names. He preferred to talk about the collective, a group still under construction but one that, in his view, is already starting to look the part.

"Right now, it's hard to talk individually, because we're growing as a team. Here we only have good players, very good players and very, very good players. From combining the work of these players, we have to build a very good team. I think we're taking the right steps to do that"Jose Mourinho

Measured minutes, summer heat

No overdoing it in the middle of July. Mourinho was explicit about managing workloads: 45 minutes for Kylian Mbappe and Ibrahima Konate, and 30 for Jude Bellingham, Marc Cucurella and Yan Diomande. It's not a whim: these are the players who joined preseason later, and the coaching staff prefers to tread carefully ahead of the league opener.

The coach explained that these decisions don't come from gut feeling but from behind the scenes work: "Very happy with the last ones who arrived, it's not easy to come into high intensity, have double sessions morning and afternoon, incredible heat, and they arrived with a top mentality. The matter of the 45 minutes for Kylian, for Konate, 30 for Jude, Cucurella, Diomande, these are things we analyze scientifically with the data we have and with the player's own experience, knowledge of his body. We arrived in a very acceptable condition for this point in the season."

On the match itself, he called it positive on both fronts that matter to him: the collective and the individual. There he added an important nuance: not everyone is at the same fitness level, and that's only logical. "Those who started on day one have 30 training sessions and six matches, those who just arrived have three or four training sessions," he pointed out. The gap in legs is there, but according to him the tactical ideas are already sinking in across the whole group.

A locker room "starting to look like a team"

Beyond the result, what Mourinho wanted to highlight was the attitude. He spoke of details that, he says, make a difference: players showing up earlier than required, others who trained hard on their own before joining the group. For the Portuguese coach, that matters just as much as any tactical drill.

Real Madrid thus wraps up its preseason with its sights set on the league opener, next Saturday against Espanyol. From there, there will be no more measured workloads or friendlies: what begins is what Mourinho calls "the good stuff," competing for real and fighting for points.