Real Madrid’s season starts on Saturday, and the question hanging over José Mourinho’s first competitive week back is not who scores the goals. It is who chases them back. According to Cadena SER, in reporting carried by Bernabéu Digital, the biggest single challenge on the Portuguese’s desk this season is persuading Vinicius Júnior and Kylian Mbappé to work as hard without the ball as they do with it.
Next to a summer of signings and contract sagas it sounds like a footnote. It is not. The same report frames it as the job that beat everyone who has recently sat in that dugout: neither Carlo Ancelotti, nor Xabi Alonso, nor Álvaro Arbeloa found a way of turning Madrid’s two most expensive attackers into reliable defenders from the front. Mourinho has spent pre-season building a team that assumes they will be.
Mourinho, Vinicius and the pressing problem
Per Bernabéu Digital’s account of the SER report, Mourinho wants both forwards inside the defensive work, in a system where the press is central rather than optional. Going forward there is nothing to argue about — few clubs in Europe would swap that pair for anything. Without the ball, the report is blunt: both have shown less appetite and a worse attitude when the job is to press the first pass or drop in and help. That is the gap Mourinho has set himself to close.
It matters more now because of what else the coach has decided. Bernabéu Digital’s reading of pre-season has him settling on a 4-2-3-1, fast and vertical in possession, with a deliberate increase in defensive commitment across the team — the same piece, citing Marca, describes his puzzle over Jude Bellingham and Arda Güler in the number-10 role. A shape with an attacking playmaker behind the striker only functions if the men in front of him do the running.
The World Cup version is the benchmark
Mourinho’s reference point, according to the report, is the summer just gone. Both players were among the best performers for their national teams at the World Cup, above all in attack — but they also pressed, and they dropped in to help at several points in games. The argument is not that they cannot do it. It is that they have done it recently, for someone else, and now have to do it every week in white.
Neither man arrives at matchday one short of attention. Mbappé’s fitness before the opener has been picked over all week, while Vinicius’s contract situation ran through the whole of Madrid’s summer. What the coach is asking for now is the other half of the deal — the part that does not show up on a highlights reel.
Nowhere to hide at Espanyol
Saturday will not settle anything on its own. It will, though, give Madridistas the first competitive look at whether the message has landed: how high the forwards start, who leads the press, and whether the two biggest names in the building sprint backwards when the ball is lost. The kick-off time and TV details for Espanyol vs Real Madrid are worth having to hand. If Mourinho gets this one thing right, the rest of his ideas have somewhere to live.
