Jose Mourinho has decided that Nico Paz will not be part of his plan for next season, closing off what looked like a possible route back to Real Madrid. The move leaves Arda Güler and Jude Bellingham as the names shaping that area of the pitch, and it puts Paz’s future back in question.
That decision matters now because Paz is still a player Real Madrid fans have taken to, even after being sold to Como with a buy-back option worth between 9 million euros and 11 million euros. His case is no longer only about talent or sentiment. It is about whether a club that once developed him sees a place for him in a squad already crowded in the same attacking spaces.
Paz came through the Real Madrid academy, and that history is part of why his name keeps coming back into the discussion. El Nacional reported that Mourinho’s thinking is tied directly to Arda Güler and Bellingham, with all three described as players who like to operate close to the penalty area, receive the ball between the lines and dribble with freedom. In Mourinho’s view, those are overlapping roles, not separate ones.
That overlap is the crux of the problem. The report says Mourinho does not want Paz sitting on the bench, and he does not believe the midfielder would get minutes ahead of Güler or Bellingham. If all three were in the same squad, the playing time would have to be split, and one of them would inevitably be left out of the biggest matches. For Mourinho, that makes the return too costly in football terms, even if the buy-back clause exists on paper.
So the open question is not whether Paz has a route back in theory. It is whether Real Madrid will still consider exercising that option at all, after a decision that effectively treats his space on the pitch as already occupied. For now, the answer from Mourinho is clear enough: Nico Paz would not be wearing the Real Madrid shirt again in the short term.
