There were easier answers available to José Mourinho on Tuesday night. Last season ended with Real Madrid empty-handed for the first time in five years, two coaches were moved on inside six months, and the man now in the dugout had nothing whatsoever to do with any of it. Asked on El Chiringuito what had actually gone wrong, he could have shrugged and pointed backwards. Instead he handed out the blame in every direction — and went out of his way to stand up for the two men who lost their jobs.
“Arbeloa and Xabi Alonso paid the price,” Mourinho said, in quotes carried by Bernabéu Digital. “A lot of people failed last year: the players, the coaches, the club… It is not just one side’s fault.”
It is the first time the Portuguese has addressed 2025-26 head on since he arrived, and it is a notably generous reading from a manager whose reputation says he would rather draw a line under the past and let it take the weight. He has spent the summer talking about standards; this was him declining, pointedly, to make scapegoats of the men who came before him.
The year Mourinho refuses to pin on one man
The record is bleak enough on its own. Los Blancos finished 2025-26 without a trophy for the first time since 2020-21, Barcelona took LaLiga and the Supercopa, and the Champions League ended at the quarter-final stage against Bayern Munich. Xabi Alonso left by mutual agreement in January, Álvaro Arbeloa took the team through to the end of the season and departed in June, and Mourinho was appointed on 11 June on a contract that runs to 2029.
Spreading the responsibility across the players, the staff and the boardroom is not the softest thing he could have said — it is the hardest. If the squad failed too, then the squad has something to prove from Saturday onwards, which is precisely the message he has been drilling into the double sessions at Valdebebas since July. It also chimes with what he told the same programme about the club’s standing, covered in his ‘different level’ interview earlier this week.
Mbappé, and the day he turned up early
If there was a player Mourinho wanted to single out, it was the No. 10. “I laugh in training with him because of the things he does,” he said. “Mbappé is too good, he is a stratospheric player. It says a lot about a guy who could have reported on the 14th and arrived on the 12th because he wanted to play against Schalke.”
That detail matters more than the compliment. A forward coming back early from his break to feature in a pre-season friendly in Gelsenkirchen is exactly the behaviour Mourinho has been describing as “common sense” all summer, and it explains why Kylian Mbappé’s condition heading into the opener has been one of the few things at the club nobody has needed to worry about.
‘I like this squad’
On reinforcements, he was equally direct. “Do I need more signings? No. I like this squad. We have solutions, quality and players. I also believe I can improve players,” he told Madrid Universal — a line that will be read closely at a club still weighing one last move in midfield before the window shuts on 31 August.
Mourinho was presented to supporters on Tuesday in a closed-door event alongside Florentino Pérez, a formality after more than a month on the training ground. He has now had his say on the year that got his predecessors sacked. From Saturday at Espanyol, the results are his.
