Between chaos and genius: has football rediscovered Mourinho's value?

Real Madrid lined up in a 4-4-2, with winger Vinicius Junior serving a suspension. Federico Valverde slotted in at right-back, Bernardo Silva partnered Aurelien Tchouameni in midfield, Arda Guler and Yan Diomande took the flanks, and Jude Bellingham led the line alongside Kylian Mbappe.

Mourinho did what he so often does in the big games. He handed one of his most energetic players the job of shackling a key opponent. This time Bernardo Silva chased Pedri all over the pitch. It was no easy task, but it blunted the Spaniard's influence.

The plan went beyond marking Pedri. Real Madrid read the aggressive high press Barcelona imposed, along with their habit of swarming the ball, and set about luring their opponents into wide areas before switching play sharply into the space left on the far side.

They did this through individual dribbles or long diagonals that carried the ball from one flank to the other. The mechanism showed itself clearly when Madrid flipped play from right to left, the moment Marc Cucurella drifted in behind Lamine Yamal.

That is how Real Madrid attacked the gaps behind Barcelona's advanced line, punishing the very attacking philosophy that defines Hansi Flick's side.

Mourinho broke from his usual habit after the match, where he tends to avoid any talk of precise tactics. This time he explained part of how his team unpicked Barcelona's defence, pointing to the deep runs of his midfielders as one of the things that caused the opponent the most trouble.

His words may not have been a simple analysis of the Clasico. Mourinho knows how to use a press conference as an extension of the battle on the pitch, and he may also have wanted to flag up the weak points other teams could exploit against Barcelona.

Big-match wins usually earn Mourinho the praise he deserves. His wider coaching philosophy rarely gets the same attention. Much of the footballing debate in recent years has swung towards coaches with clear, fixed styles, repeated patterns of movement and precisely defined roles for every player.

Mourinho hasn't followed that path rigidly. He leans instead on what his players can do, switching his methods to suit the team he's leading and whatever a given match demands of him.

That approach has sometimes made his work hard to read from the outside. And that, perhaps, is why his philosophy gets misunderstood or undervalued.

According to a report by the "BBC" network, Mourinho is linked to the concept of "tactical periodisation", a coaching approach developed by the Portuguese Vítor Frade. It treats the technical, tactical, physical and psychological aspects as interconnected elements, not separate files each trained in isolation from the others.

Frade also formed part of the coaching staff when Mourinho worked alongside Bobby Robson at Porto in the mid-1990s. That exposed Mourinho to ideas drawing on psychology, sociology, neuroscience and systems theory.

The school starts from one fundamental idea. A player does not use his technical, physical, tactical and psychological abilities separately during a match. He needs them all at the same moment, while making decisions and dealing with changing situations.

When Mourinho took charge of Real Madrid this season, "The Athletic" reported that training sessions became shorter and more intense, with a constant focus on the ball. Even the physical preparation of players to reach match readiness was carried out with the ball, rather than relying solely on separate physical training.

Coaching philosophies, under this conception, split into two main approaches. Some coaches seek to reduce the chaos imposed by matches. Others accept that chaos and try to prepare their players to deal with it. Mourinho belongs to the second camp.

Mourinho's coaching career began with a flurry of major honours. He led Porto to the UEFA Cup and the Champions League, turned Chelsea into a dominant force in England, guided Inter Milan to a historic treble and then won the Spanish league with Real Madrid.

Between 2019 and 2025, though, he took charge of teams with more modest ambitions than the projects he had run earlier in his career. Since lifting the English League Cup and the Europa League with Manchester United in 2017, he has added just one trophy to his record: the UEFA Europa Conference League with Roma in 2022.

A new breed of coach emerged during that spell, cutting the randomness out of matches through possession, balanced and symmetrical formations and fixed roles for players, such as wingers glued to the touchlines or full-backs drifting into central areas.

Opposing teams often leaned on zonal defence too, closing off specific spaces. That allowed possession sides to plan movements designed to create a numerical advantage in certain areas of the pitch.

The rise of individual pressing and man-to-man marking changed all that. Teams could no longer build that overload so easily. Pressure the ball carrier directly and quickly, and his decisions become rushed, making those pre-calculated attacking movements far harder to pull off.

Matches have grown more chaotic as a result. That may just suit a coach like Mourinho, who sees chaos not as something to be removed from the game but as a reality to be prepared for.

Supporters of Faraday's school of thought believe chaos is an integral part of football. Holistic training, they argue, helps players develop the ability to solve problems during a match rather than relying on memorised patterns that do not suit every situation.

That perhaps explains why Mourinho's teams look so strong in difficult circumstances, when matches enter their decisive stages or events deviate from the scenarios planned in advance.

He does not necessarily seek to control every decision his players make. Instead, he works to prepare them to handle situations themselves. According to this philosophy, better players raise the chances of finding better solutions.

Against Barcelona, different roles came together in service of the team. Mbappé attacked the last line of defence and pounced on chances to finish off attacks. Bellingham combined strength in duels with elegance on the ball and in his dribbling, while Bernardo Silva showed his knack for calming the play under Barcelona's pressure, then feeding teammates in advanced areas once the opponent had pushed forward.

None of them performed the same role, nor did they move to a single mould. The difference in their characteristics became a source of strength when Real Madrid needed the best they had in the decisive moments.

Mourinho's career reads like a set of repeated chapters. He started out with Benfica, then returned to the club some 25 years later, in September 2025. He won back-to-back Premier League titles with Chelsea before coming back six years on to lift a third. And now, 13 years after his first Real Madrid spell ended, he begins a second stint at the Santiago Bernabeu.

His latest return looks like more than just a new chapter, though. Football itself may be about to hand him a fresh chance to prove his tactical philosophy, at a time when controlling the rhythm and spaces of matches is only getting harder, and a player's ability to handle the unexpected matters more than ever.

So will Mourinho's return to the top table be the moment we rediscover a coach who was never merely a "translator", but a man with a vision that might just suit modern football better than ever?