How Mourinho is fine-tuning Real

Posted Thursday, June 16, 2011 by ESPN

How Mourinho is fine-tuning Real
It's been a quiet summer so far for Real Madrid, but in signing players like Nuri Sahin, Jose Mourinho is sculpting a team in his own image to overtake Barcelona.

For Jose Mourinho, this past season must have felt like living in a mansion with a faulty roof. His was generally a position of luxury, but every time it seemed as if everything was in perfect order -- such as the occasion on which his Real Madrid side arrived at Camp Nou to face Barcelona in November as La Liga leader -- a huge, ugly leak sprang open. With this sole but significant fault in his structure, Mourinho never had the time to decorate as he wanted, in the way every new resident is always eager to do.

It's different now. The power structure of Real Madrid is established, with Mourinho at the top of it. The sporting director, Jorge Valdano -- an erudite, cultured man with a lengthy history with the club and its principles as well as a deep distaste for pragmatic football -- has been fired, having never seen eye-to-eye with Mourinho. When president Florentino Perez hired the Special One as manager, Perez knew that his club would play a brand of football less aesthetically pleasing than Barcelona. Now, after the 2010-11 season, Perez also knows that if Mourinho is to be allowed to work his magic, he has to be given the freedom to entrench his methods and values as deeply as possible.

Mourinho's enduring belief is in the collective's importance over that of the individual, a mindset starkly at odds with Perez's hallmark "galactico" policy. So this summer, instead of Real Madrid rampaging through the transfer market like Godzilla, there's been a rare tranquility as Mourinho fine-tunes his team in his own way.

Mourinho's first signing of the summer was a modest one, with the option exercised to bring former Real B player, winger Jose Maria Callejon, back from Espanyol. Eyebrows have been similarly raised over the decision to hand Hamit Altintop -- only a bit-part player at Bayern Munich -- a three-year deal, even taking his free-agent status into account. Callejon may end up being an Alvaro Negredo-style makeweight in future deals, but Altintop is Mourinho's ideal squad player, someone who can come in and perform well despite sporadic game time, as he did to spectacular effect in Bayern's Champions League semifinal second leg against Lyon in 2009.

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