Older, calmer, but still playing the hits: Mourinho and Madrid primed for clásico

Once Bobby Robson’s translator at the Camp Nou, Mourinho is tasked with bringing down Barcelona on Sunday

José Mourinho has done the por que?, the printout and the press conference no-show, and he’s been here only three months. The Real Madrid manager has played the classics without even playing a clásico. Not yet anyway, but it’s time: on Sunday night he returns to the stadium he first arrived at 30 transformative years ago as Bobby Robson’s talented young translator, and last visited in 2013 as the most famous manager in football.

The coach who once declared “today, tomorrow and always, Barcelona in my heart,” and claimed he would only ever go to Real Madrid to destroy them, has been entrusted with attempting to bring about the destruction of Barcelona. It is not the first time: if his return is about nostalgia, which it is, that’s wrapped up in their rivals too.

“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, and he knows. As for Barcelona’s latest star, he’s looking forward to seeing Mourinho again. “I love the needle,” Lamine Yamal says. “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 things, sure; life beyond Barcelona. Madrid’s astonishing Champions League record since Mourinho was last here – following up the elusive decima, the 10th title which had evaded them for 12 years, with the 11th, 12th, 13th, 14th and 15th in 10 years – played out without Barcelona. There has not been a European clásico since the 2011 Champions League semi-final when the man Pep Guardiola had just called the puto amo, the fucking master, produced his por que speech, asking why Barcelona were favoured by the continent’s referees and accusing Uefa of fixing it for them.

Yet right now it doesn’t feel as if anything is bigger, this week’s Champions League matches framed around what they meant for the game that really matters, even with Barcelona going to Paris. The rivalry is always there; in Mourinho’s case it is at the heart of it. The day he got the Madrid job in 2010 was the day he won the Champions League with Inter but its genesis lay in the semi-final, when he had sprinted across the Camp Nou pitch, finger raised, celebrating. Madrid were relieved and grateful, spared the sight of Barcelona lifting the European Cup in their stadium and shown how to stop a team that appeared unbeatable. Mourinho, leaving the Santiago Bernabéu in Florentino Pérez’s car while his joyful players returned to Milan, was asked to repeat that with Madrid.

Pérez, who had presided over the galácticos’ failure and walked away, had returned in 2009 but won nothing. Instead, Barcelona dominated. They had the core of Spain’s World Cup 2010 winners: six starters in the final. Madrid needed a culture shift, to go to war, a manager to rule over the dressing room. “This year’s galáctico is José Mourinho,” the president said.

By the time Mourinho left, it had turned nasty, his enemies internal too. They had been, Mourinho later said, “three intense, almost violent years”. Yet Pérez had always felt drawn towards the only manager he has truly liked. Including when Mourinho was belligerent; especially when he was belligerent. Mourinho had, Pérez said, returned Madrid to their rightful place. After every subsequent success the president called to tell him he started this. And if Mourinho’s first clásico brought a 5-0 defeat, Barcelona going on to win the league and Champions League; if his final season had ended trophyless; and if Guardiola had won twice as many trophies, it was also true that of the four competitions Guardiola failed to win at Barcelona, three were taken from him by Mourinho.

Time has passed, things have changed, but the parallels are clear. Madrid have gone two years without a trophy. In the first of those, Barcelona won the league with two weeks to spare, completing a domestic treble. They had defeated Madrid four times, scoring 16 goals. Last season they wrapped it up with three weeks to spare via a clásico victory as incontestable as their superiority throughout a season when Madrid’s splits played out in public. Then Spain won the World Cup with eight Barcelona players in the squad. Madrid’s only representative, Marc Cucurella, joined the club after the tournament started.

If this was a crisis, it was time for Mourinho. A man whose flaws had been forgotten over time, nostalgia eclipsing all else. A man with the authority – a man afforded the authority – to impose on the dressing room. One with the personality to fight, go to war again. With just about everyone, and Barcelona especially. When you listened to Pérez’s extraordinary rant in May, the quiet part said out loud, all campaigning and conspiracy, politics and paranoia, it made sense.

When it comes to the still unresolved Negreira case, in which Barcelona paid the vice-president of the referees’ committee, José María Enríquez Negreira, more than €7m between 2001 and 2018, there is substance to Madrid’s complaints. Barcelona have denied corruption, saying Negreira worked as an adviser, but that case has become the centrepiece of Madrid’s discourse, unlike when the two clubs were still holding out in the Super League. It doesn’t help when the league president likens your TV channel to Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda.

Whether those complaints have validity now is a different question; whether the discourse of conspiracy does is another step again, even when decisions go against you. Every mistake – and decisions that are not even mistakes – is framed as a machiavellian plan, the insinuations constant – when they are not said outright.

When Mourinho arrived he said he was older, calmer, but here he is. In defeat, perhaps he was always likely to be. After losing to Betis, he asked por que? (Why? Because that’s the rule, the decision correct.) After losing to Atlético, he turned up with a printout. And then he didn’t turn up to the press conference after he had run on to the pitch to embrace Vinícius Júnior after the Brazilian scored against Villarreal only for the goal to be ruled out and Vinícius sent off for pulling Nathan Saliba’s hair. That led to a four-game suspension, the forward ruled out of the clásico.

The reason for the no-show was that Mourinho didn’t want to risk saying something that would earn him a suspension for the clásico, the game. And he is happier now, if only for a little while, something shifting. When last Saturday Barcelona made it 11 wins from 11, averaging more than four goals a game, most agreed they would win the clásico and the title would be done: they were flying, led by Lamine Yamal, while Madrid, beaten twice, hadn’t taken off. Mourinho’s team had not been very good, familiar problems still there. In short, there was not much football.

The previous Wednesday Madrid had delivered another of their seemingly inexplicable comebacks, from 3-1 down at Roma, to win 4-3 in the final seven minutes, but was there really anything to build on? It turned out there was something of an explanation. In those minutes Arda Güler played, Yan Diomande played, Fede Valverde played at right-back, and Vinícius didn’t play.

It seemed so obvious to everyone, including the manager. So he did it again, and Madrid scored four against Sevilla – three of them glorious – last Sunday and four more against Leipzig on Wednesday, Diomande belting in a wonderful volley once Vinícius had gone off. The night before, Barcelona conceded four at the Parc des Princes.

Hansi Flick admitted he prioritised the clásico over PSG, leaving out Rodri and withdrawing Pedri and Raphinha early to keep them fresh for a game that could be decisive and tends to shape a season. But he has injury concerns at the back and warned his players that 15 goals conceded is too many. Mourinho couldn’t resist complaining that Madrid have a day less rest for the clásico – something perhaps mitigated, much like any analysis, by playing at home against Leipzig rather than away at Paris Saint-Germain – which got the excuse in early, more evidence of how “they” have it in for his side.

“We need to cut the gap and we can only do that by winning,” said the Real Madrid goalkeeper, Thibaut Courtois, of the six-point deficit. “We’re going with confidence.” Yet things do feel a little better now, defeat for Madrid not inevitable, a title still there to played for and something like a team taking shape. “I had to get to know them,” Mourinho said on Wednesday night. “I’ve only been here 105 days; it’s not long.”