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7 September 2026

Real Madrid manager Jose Mourinho has said there will be no room to dwell on his "beautiful past" with Inter Milan before his side begin their Champions League campaign. Mourinho guided Inter to the 2010 Champions League title, becoming the only manager in Italian football history to win the treble. His Inter side beat Bayern Munich 2-0 in the final at the Santiago Bernabeu, with current Inter coach Cristian Chivu starting at left-back that night. Sixteen years later, the pair return to the same stadium as rival managers, but Mourinho insists neither man will be thinking about those shared triumphs once the match starts. "Chris is and always will be one of my own. I’m always happy when things go well for him," Mourinho said.

"This isn’t a normal match for me. If Inter see me as a friend, it will be before and after the game. I don’t imagine that they would think about me like that during the match. That’s the nature of football. It is always a pleasure to see people who represent Inter. But during the match I want to win and they want to win, and there won’t be time to think about that beautiful past." After making a strong start to the league season, Madrid suffered their first loss on Friday, going down 1-0 away to Real Betis. The Portuguese coach said he has been encouraged by the way his players reacted. "I liked the way my players were after the defeat," Mourinho said. "They were dead on their feet in the changing room, then looked like they had recovered in Sunday’s training session. After analysing the game, we are more and more convinced that we played well and played as a team, and that all our missed chances were extremely unusual." "I want to win. I want to play well, but not play well like we did against Betis and lose. I want to win." The Betis goal was scored by Republic of Ireland striker Troy Parrott, a player who, ironically, made his Premier League debut for Spurs under Mourinho in 2019. The Portuguese manager will hope Chivu does not become the next former player to hurt him, though he admitted Inter hold certain advantages over Madrid. "When you compare us with Inter, we are speaking about stability. We are speaking about a team that even while having changed coaches in the past six or seven years, they have stability. So Real Madrid has to gain a level of stability, but we still have to win," Mourinho said. "Real Madrid is Real Madrid. The club has had some very complicated seasons recently, but we want to win all the time. Tomorrow and every other game. We want to win every competition."

The Bernabeu has also been the setting for some of Mourinho’s most painful Champions League experiences, as he lost three straight semi-finals during his first spell in charge of Los Blancos. "I have had the best and worst Champions League experiences in this stadium, but I don’t think about it, not the positive or the negative ones," Mourinho said. "I only think that I am now Real Madrid’s manager and that tomorrow we will play in the Champions League. Tomorrow is not ultra important because it doesn’t decide anything. It’s not a knockout game. There are seven other games and I think both us and Inter will qualify. But every point is important."