José Mourinho has denied that he wants to oversee a dressing room overhaul at Real Madrid, saying he wants the team’s top players to stay and turn their form around.
Madrid have already signed Marc Cucurella, Bernardo Silva and Ibrahima Konaté for Mourinho ahead of next season, while president Florentino Pérez also made signing Denzel Dumfries one of his election promises.
The LaLiga giants have gone two seasons without winning a major trophy, with stars Kylian Mbappé, Vinícius Júnior — who is out of contract next summer — and Jude Bellingham unable to lead the team to success.
“We shouldn’t be speaking about Real Madrid but I can just touch on a little point,” Mourinho said in an interview with the Beast Mode On podcast. “I read a few things where people were saying: ‘José Mourinho is coming here and he’s going to cut some of the top players that supposedly they had some problems during the season’. No.
“I want these players! I want the best players. Now I have to find a way to have a team and not to have problems like, eventually, I don’t know, I’m just reading, that they had in previous seasons. But the best players are the players that you want. If you have problems with not very good players, that is a big problem. The big players are the big players.”
Mourinho arrives after a season which saw Madrid hire and fire two coaches, Xabi Alonso and Álvaro Arbeloa, amid dressing room clashes between players and coaching staff, including one in which Federico Valverde was hospitalised after a confrontation with Aurélien Tchouaméni.
The Portuguese manager was last in charge at the Bernabéu between 2010 and 2013, when he helped Madrid compete with Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona.
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He will take charge of Madrid when the squad return for pre-season training next month.
“When I arrive at a club — since the beginning and now it’s not different — I don’t like to speak much,” Mourinho said. “I don’t speak about myself, and I don’t like to speak much. I need to know the players, and I want the players to know it’s not about what people say about me, it’s about what they see in me.
“We need to know each other well. And then I always say, I don’t make miracles. But I can improve the guys that are improvable, the guys that want to improve. [With] some other guys, it’s an impossible job. You have to just accept the way they are.”
