An iron fist joining a broken club: Inside Mourinho's Real return

So what would a wiser return look like? The areas where Mourinho must improve are not mysterious. He needs to recognise that winning is a shared vision, not a slogan he imposes. The bullet points from his Spurs and Manchester United tenure read like a manual of what not to do: failing to fully adapt his methods to his squad, ignoring the needs of some of the people around him, taking credit for victories while offloading blame for defeats. There is also the matter of an incident that, in Spain, never quite became the scandal it perhaps should have. Mourinho responded to allegations of racist abuse from Benfica's Gianluca Prestianni directed at Vinicius by invoking Eusebio, arguing, clumsily, that a club whose greatest legend was a black man could not be racist. It caused a stir and then, remarkably, disappeared. It has barely surfaced in the debate about his return to Madrid, which perhaps tells you everything about the current mood at the club, so desperate for a solution that certain questions get quietly filed away. At Madrid, with Vinicius and Mbappe already in a fragile coexistence, with a dressing room that has been allowed to run its own politics for two years, any repetition of them falling out might produce a quick catastrophe. The Vinicius-Mbappe problem deserves more attention. Three managers - Carlo Ancelotti, Xabi Alonso, Arbeloa - have been unable to make them function as a partnership. …