Mourinho taxa: “I was happy in Benfica, but Real Madrid...”

José Mourinho granted, at the beginning of the morning of Friday, the podcast Bet it drives show, from GR8 Tech, in which, among other topics, addressed the return to Real Madrid, after the passage by Benfica.

In a conversation that was held inside a car, the Portuguese coach explained that he was happy in Benfica, but told that the decision to return to the merengue club was influenced by the way he was approached.

“I came back because the club wanted me to come back, but the way they addressed me also influenced my decision. I left Real Madrid in 2013, if I'm not mistaken, and since then, we've always maintained a close relationship. I left in excellent terms with the club, the president and the board. Therefore, we always kept in touch”, he started by saying Mourinho.

“At the end of last season, the club contacted me. I was told: ‘We know you, we know you, you know the club, the culture and the people. We know how you work. We want you to rebuild the team. We need you. We need you to rebuild and start another prodigious decade, just like the one the club lived in. We need you, we need someone with your profile’. I was happy at Benfica, happy in Portugal. I had left my country so many years ago that when I returned to Benfica, I was very comfortable. But Real Madrid is Real Madrid. Everyone at the club understood that my return was a great opportunity. So, once again, we left Portugal in good terms; I could not be happier or have more motivation than I have now,” he said.

“I like to have great ambitions, but always with my feet set on the earth. One of the things I felt when working in some clubs is that you didn't act real. I want to get past the goals. I do not want the targets to be modest, but realistic. I felt that, given the great success I had with ambitious goals throughout my career, at one point people looked at me and thought: ‘Only because of him, we can set off off goals’. But there are no miracles in football, and I don't think they exist in any other realm either. There is talent, teamwork, ambition and empathy; however, it is necessary to play with ambition, but with realistic ambition. Real Madrid is a club where, of course, they aspire to the greatest goals, but at the same time, the talent and organization at their disposal are also up to these aspirations”, he added.

In the same conversation, Mourinho talked about the demand for high-level football and the sacrifices that players have to make.

“ You're a football player 24 hours a day. That is also the point. You train two or three hours a day, but you're a football player 24 hours a day. So everything has an impact on your work: what you eat when you're not at the club, what you drink, how you sleep, and even aspects of your private life. Unfortunately, a footballer cannot ski or ride a bike. If you do, and some people do it in secret from the club... I don't care about the contract. What interests me is the way you look at your work. If you fall off your bike, you may lose three games, or worse still: you can break a leg or suffer a bruise that will prevent you from surrendering to the highest level. You have a group of friends, you're young, you're single, you're 22 or 23. Your friends go to the club on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Friday nights, but you can't go. You can only leave the night after the game, as long as you don’t have another game in three days, which can happen,” the 68-year-old coach shot.

“There are many things you must renounce to be a footballer. But after all, the career is short. By the time you're 35, more or less, you've got a lot of years ahead of you to enjoy life differently. But football, deep down, is not a job, it's a way of life. If you consider it a hobby, you're finished. If you consider yourself a football player only for a couple of hours a day, you won't make it to the top. After all, it's a way of life. I just saw a documentary about Rafa Nadal. Of course he's not a football player. He's definitely an amazing sportsman. It is impressive what you have renounced and the sacrifices you have made to achieve that career. In the end, there is always a relationship between what is achieved and what is given to achieve it”, he added.

“There are rules and rules. There are rules that are not negotiable. And there are others that I love that players break. I'll try to explain: if you need to be there at 9:00 sharp, it's 9:00 for everyone. And if you get there at 9:15, even if you're a superstar, you just can't do it. I won't accept it, I won't tolerate this simple rule being broken. But during the game, if a player, thanks to his talent, his creativity or his intuition, breaks the rule and risks trying something different, it happens to me the same. I prepare the game with my assistants and analysts, try to reduce the unpredictability of the game to the maximum. I'm trying to establish a plan: 'All right, that's how it's gonna be. If we are winning, I will do this; if we are losing, I will do that’. But when the game comes, I don't think about the analysts or the assistants. I simply have an intuition and act accordingly; I do so. And if, in the end, the result isn't what I expected, I don't blame myself, because I did it for the team. I did it because I felt like I was the best. So when the rules are broken like that, say, risking a little with the original structure or idea, and you do it guided by an intuition... sometimes you even feel that you have received divine inspiration. It's happened to me a few times. After the game, I start thinking about what I did and when the result is extraordinary, you think: ‘Wow, the one upstairs pushed me to do it’. That is why I trust even more the player that is in the field ", finished.