Marca<\/a>“: “At Real Madrid, I had very little to teach any of them. I couldn’t teach Ramos how to head the ball, and I couldn’t teach Cristiano how to score a goal.”<\/p>\nHe added: “My job was somewhere else, in the details, in the tactics, and most importantly in getting everyone to understand football in the same way.”<\/p>\n
Read also:<\/p>\n
Diomande: I moved to Real Madrid thanks to this man<\/p>\n
Mourinho: the coach of details<\/p>\n
Mourinho’s ideas did not stop at the plans he drew up before matches. He wanted training to reflect precisely what he would ask of his players on the pitch.<\/p>\n
Marcelo, one of Real Madrid’s most prominent figures during that era, recalls working under the Portuguese coach. The training sessions, he confirms, always had a direct link to what would happen during matches.<\/p>\n
Marcelo said: “He would explain everything to us, every detail. And in the end, when we reached the match after the training we had done, everything happened exactly as he had said.”<\/p>\n
That testimony from the former Brazilian full-back reveals one of Mourinho’s most notable coaching traits: a reliance on fine detail in preparation, alongside getting his players ready in advance for the various scenarios they might face during matches.<\/p>\n
Khedira reveals the Portuguese coach’s strictness<\/p>\n
Sami Khedira, for his part, spoke about the extent of Mourinho’s strictness in applying his ideas. A player under the Portuguese coach was required to carry out the instructions with the utmost precision.<\/p>\n
Khedira said: “You are like his brain on the pitch, and you have to follow him 100%. If you don’t do that… he will kill you.”<\/p>\n
This sums up part of Mourinho’s coaching personality. He was not content merely with a group of stars capable of settling matches individually. He wanted them to adhere strictly to the system he put in place, so that individual quality would turn into collective strength.<\/p>\n
“If they think like me, life will be easier”<\/p>\n
Mourinho himself summed up his philosophy for dealing with stars in a sentence that reveals a great deal about his coaching approach.<\/p>\n
The Portuguese coach said: “If they think the way I think, life will be easier for them.”<\/p>\n
His fundamental aim at Real Madrid was to strike a balance between the freedom needed by players with exceptional abilities and the tactical discipline he imposed on the team as a whole.<\/p>\n
Having Cristiano Ronaldo, Ramos, Marcelo, Xabi Alonso and others did not mean the coach would meddle in the simplest details of their skills. His role was to place these talents within a system that gave the team the best chance of achieving its objectives.<\/p>\n
The task repeats itself, but with a new generation<\/p>\n
Mourinho’s words take on added significance with his return to Real Madrid for a second tenure, this time surrounded by a new generation of stars in the dressing room.<\/p>\n
The circumstances and names differ from his first experience, yet the fundamental challenge looks largely the same. Having a group of great players is one thing. Turning them into a single team that works in the same way is another thing entirely.<\/p>\n
New stars, greater ambitions. Once again Mourinho will have to prove his ability to manage a dressing room full of names capable of making the difference on their own, and to place them within a single system in which tactical discipline and collective work are the basis for winning titles.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jos\u00e9 Mourinho has revisited part of his first spell with Real Madrid, revealing how he handled an exceptional…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":69231,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[12669,1414,85,82,83],"class_list":["post-69230","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-madrid","tag-c-ronaldo","tag-j-mourinho","tag-laliga","tag-madrid","tag-real-madrid"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69230","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69230"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69230\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/69231"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}