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The Special One has started a second honeymoon at Real Madrid, but the bigger question is whether it can really endure.

Real Madrid, clearly, are not believers in football’s old warning about never going back.

Second spells are nothing unusual at Real Madrid. Of the 52 managers appointed either on an interim basis or permanently across the club’s 116-year history, 13 have been given another chance, with some returning more than once. Almost half of those repeat appointments, including Carlo Ancelotti and Zinedine Zidane, have come in the last three decades alone.

That sense of romance fits neatly with a club known as ‘La Casa Blanca’, where seeing a familiar figure back in the Bernabeu dugout feels less like an exception and more like part of the institution’s identity.

Jose Mourinho is the latest man to benefit from a return to the Spanish capital, 13 years after his first stint ended on sour terms. The attempt to complete unfinished business has become a familiar thread in the Portuguese coach’s career, with Madrid now the third club he has managed on more than one occasion after repeat spells at Benfica and Chelsea.

Even so, the decision prompted surprise, coming only months after he clashed with his former club over the alleged racist abuse aimed at Vinicius Junior by Gianluca Prestianni during the second leg of February’s stormy Champions League knockout round play-off.

Even before that row, the relationship had hardly remained warm during Mourinho’s near 15-year absence. His post-Bernabeu existence became as much a subject of ridicule as fascination. In 2018, after Manchester United were knocked out of the Champions League by Sevilla, Madrid-based sports daily MARCA compared him to ‘a washed-up rock star, one of those guys who goes around holiday hotels for pensioners, playing old hits on an organ with the base and percussion playing on a tape recorder’. Few comparisons have been as brutally dismissive of the now sexagenarian ‘Special One’.

At Los Blancos, they saw the birth of Mourinho’s villainous image and, arguably, its most combustible form during a three-year spell in which only one LaLiga title and one Copa del Rey counted as major honours. Unlike the return appointments of Ancelotti and Zidane, president Florentino Perez built a successful re-election campaign around the idea that lightning could indeed strike twice, bringing back the two-time European champion to try once more to stop Barcelona’s latest era of domestic supremacy.

But the early signs already look troubling. The Catalans cruised to last season’s title by eight points, and that margin would have stretched into double digits had Hansi Flick’s side not eased off in two of their final three matches after defeating their great rivals in the latest El Clasico. There remains strong belief that they can continue to hold the upper hand over Madrid, with the two clubs level on 106 wins each in their regular meetings, while Barca could soon match and even surpass their rivals’ once unmatched total of 105 major trophies after moving to within two thanks to their 29th league title.

Mourinho, meanwhile, takes charge of a squad short on confidence and discipline, something underlined by the ugly conclusion to Xabi Alonso’s brief reign and the limp finish under interim successor Alvaro Arbeloa. Age, too, has done little to soften Mourinho’s combative instincts, which surfaced repeatedly during his first spell. Public disputes with Cristiano Ronaldo, Iker Casillas and Sergio Ramos scarred the latter stages of that tenure, while he also openly mocked Perez’s idea of building a side of ‘Zidanes y Pavones’, blending galacticos such as Zidane with academy products like Paco Pavon. In one particularly tense press conference, he tore into youngster Pedro Leon — one of Pavon’s successors — by suggesting he was nowhere near either ‘Zizou’ or Diego Maradona.

With hindsight, Mourinho might have been better served trying to win over a younger, more impressionable group rather than confronting an already influential dressing-room bloc. A quick look at Madrid’s early summer transfer activity points towards a similar challenge now, with Bernardo Silva, newly crowned World Cup winner Marc Cucurella and Ibrahima Konate among the strong-willed figures Mourinho must get onside at the Valdebebas training ground. Then there is the added issue of rebuilding ties with Vinicius after implying the Brazilian had provoked some of the racist abuse he has repeatedly endured, even if the expected arrival of Yan Diomande appears to have cast serious doubt over Vinicius’s long-term future at the club.

‘Words aren’t enough, because this feels like a mission. This isn’t about me or whether I win, more or less. I’m here to help everybody become better.’

At the very least, he seems determined to break with some old habits in an effort to avoid repeating old errors. Mourinho has already declined a formal media presentation, something that in the past would have ensured a grand entrance and a flood of headlines. By avoiding the spotlight, he has instead spent his time working hard on the training pitches with the club’s less established players while the bigger names in the squad were away at the World Cup earlier this summer.

The only words Madrid supporters have so far heard from their new manager came in a short clip released through the club’s official channels, in which he said: ‘Words aren’t enough, because this feels like a mission. This isn’t about me or whether I win, more or less. I’m here to help everybody become better.’

Mourinho understands that Madrid is likely to be his final major role in top-level management, having received offers only from Roma, Fenerbahce and Benfica since his last Premier League spell ended in very familiar fashion five years ago. Failure is simply not an option, yet it appears he may have little chance of avoiding it with so much already working against him.