Mourinho opens up on his Real Madrid return and jokes about the Manchester City case

Some coaches talk tactics, and some coaches, once they sit in front of a microphone, end up telling you practically a novel. Jose Mourinho falls firmly into the second category, and he proved it again in a lengthy interview with Italian newspaper Corriere dello Sport, where he looked back on his return to Real Madrid, his never-ending battles with referees, and even found room to joke about the Manchester City case.

The first thing that stands out is how Mourinho himself describes the start of his comeback to Madrid. It wasn't, he says, the usual way these things go. "Normally, there is contact first and then the noise starts once something already exists. Here, it was exactly the opposite: the noise started when there was no contact at all," explained the Portuguese coach, who at the time was at Benfica and says he was completely unaware of any rumors.

"I was at Benfica, happy. It's a special club for me, ten minutes from home, something that hadn't happened in twenty years. It was a club that needed a radical change. I thought I would stay there with my three-year contract"Jose Mourinho

The coach remembers those days with a mix of disbelief and surprise. Real Madrid had changed coaches midseason, and then Alvaro Arbeloa took over the bench amid uncertain results, right as rumors about his possible return began to grow louder. "Nobody had told me anything. When the rumors started, I thought: 'This can't be true.' I was at Benfica, with my mind on Benfica and Benfica's future. I never thought it was true," Mourinho recalled. His arrival was confirmed shortly after Florentino Perez was re-elected club president.

Eight matches in, and controversy has already arrived

If there's one thing that hasn't changed with Mourinho's return, it's his habit of ending up tangled in refereeing disputes. Just eight matches into his second spell at the Santiago Bernabeu, he had already been at the center of several controversies, the most recent coming in the clash with Atletico Madrid. Asked about this run of run-ins with officials, the Portuguese coach offered his own particular theory on bad luck.

"I don't think the problem is me. The problem is the bad luck I have whenever I arrive at a particular club. I lived through the important Negreira period here at Real Madrid. Nobody knew about it, but we lived it. It happened. I left afterward, and now everyone knows about it. But I was thinking about something: in Turkey, after a huge Turkish scandal, this kind of thing happened to me often too"Jose Mourinho

A curious coincidence, as he frames it himself: wherever he goes, something murky tends to surface sooner or later.

The Manchester City case, handled with humor

The conversation also touched on another sensitive topic: the verdict on the 115 charges of financial rule breaches facing Manchester City in the Premier League, a case covering a period during which Mourinho himself managed in English football. The Portuguese coach was in charge of Chelsea from 2013 to 2015 (a spell in which he won a league title), then Manchester United from 2016 to 2019 (where he finished runner-up to the Citizens in 2018), and finally Tottenham between 2019 and 2021, already outside the period under investigation.

With eight years having passed since it all began, including the last three spent in front of an independent commission, Mourinho preferred to take it with humor.

"I'd rather laugh about it a little, because I think we'll eventually get an ending. But the two of us, both around 60 years old, should be lucky enough to still be around when the final verdict comes down. Because now the ruling will come, and then after a year, there'll be an appeal"Jose Mourinho

Between the unexpected return to Madrid, the shadow of the Negreira case, and the endless wait for a verdict in England, Mourinho made clear he remains exactly who he's always been: direct, controversial, and with a line ready for every occasion.