José Mourinho begins his second spell at the Bernabéu bench with the exact defensive scenario he had lobbied his board to prevent.
Ahead of the LaLiga opener at Espanyol on Saturday, 22 August, Real Madrid have only three fit senior centre-backs: Dean Huijsen, Antonio Rüdiger and summer arrival Ibrahima Konaté, the France international who joined on a free transfer from Liverpool and only re-entered group training on 10 August.
Éder Militão is still working his way back from the hamstring surgery he underwent in April, following an individual programme at Valdebebas. Raúl Asencio was diagnosed with a rectus femoris tear in his right leg during a pre-season friendly against Leganés and is not expected back until mid-September.
The signings that did not come
Real Madrid have already spent around €225m this summer on six new players: Denzel Dumfries, Konaté, Marc Cucurella, Bernardo Silva, Carlos Espí and Diomande. According to Fichajes, Mourinho asked the sporting department for two more before the LaLiga window shuts on 1 September: another centre-back, and a midfielder.
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Neither has arrived. With Militão and Asencio out and Rüdiger only recently declared match-fit after last season’s knee problem, one more setback in the back line would push the club straight into its Castilla ranks, where 18-year-old Joan Martínez and 19-year-old Mario Rivas have already played the pre-season friendlies as an emergency pairing.
“Very, very, very good players”
Publicly, Mourinho has kept the tone upbeat. After Saturday’s 4-0 win against Schalke 04 in the final friendly of the summer, he told reporters at Real Madrid TV that his squad had reached “a very acceptable condition for this moment in the season.”
“Here, we only have good players, very good players, and very, very, very good players,” he added.
“The team is starting to look like a team.”
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Behind that message sits a fixture list Mourinho himself has described as unforgiving: four competitive matches in the fourteen days from 22 August, and seven in total across August, in a squad that had barely any pre-season abroad after most of its regulars returned late from the FIFA Club World Cup.
The 1 September deadline, ten days into the season
The first three matches after Espanyol, all in LaLiga, will be played with the same three-man core Mourinho has now. If any one of Huijsen, Rüdiger or Konaté picks up a knock at Cornellà-El Prat on Saturday, Real Madrid’s second-choice partnership becomes a teenager alongside another teenager.
The club has until 1 September to change that. Mourinho, whose contract runs for three years after he was appointed on 11 June, has not repeated his transfer request in public since the friendlies began. The window will close ten days into his LaLiga campaign.
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