Jose Mourinho is back in the Champions League with Real Madrid, and the first night of the new spell sends him straight into a meeting with Inter at the Bernabeu on Tuesday evening. It is the kind of fixture that gives a manager a story before the match has even begun.
The reason people are looking at it now is simple: Mourinho once won a Champions League treble with Inter, then returned to Madrid at the end of 2009-10 with the club still chasing the European crown that had eluded them for years. Real Madrid have since won six Champions League trophies, three under Carlo Ancelotti and three under Zinedine Zidane, which is a reminder of how much the club moved on after Mourinho left in 2013.
That is also why this game carries more weight than a routine group-phase night. Mourinho’s last main-draw Champions League knockout tie win came in the 2013-14 season, when Chelsea reached the semi-finals before being beaten by Atletico Madrid. Since then, his Champions League story has been one of near misses and exits: Chelsea went out to Paris Saint-Germain on away goals in the 2014-15 last 16, Manchester United won five of six group-stage games in 2017-18 but then drew 0-0 with Sevilla before losing the return leg, and Tottenham got through the group stage in 2019-20 before falling 4-0 over two legs to RB Leipzig.
That run is what turns Tuesday into a test of timing as much as memory. Mourinho was once seen as the man most likely to end Real Madrid’s wait for a 10th European Cup, yet during his three seasons there the club reached the semi-finals every year without going further. He arrives back at the Bernabeu with the old expectation attached to him, but the recent record says the harder part has not been getting to the big stage. It has been winning the tie that follows.
Inter make the return sharper because they are not just any opponent for Mourinho; they are the club with which he built that treble, now standing opposite him at the start of another Champions League chapter in Madrid. The next question is not whether the history is there. It is whether Real Madrid can turn it into a result that changes the old pattern for Mourinho, or whether Tuesday night becomes another reminder of how long 12 years can feel in this competition.
