Why do they keep hiring Mourinho?

The situation that made Mourinho the answer

Real Madrid hired Mourinho after two consecutive trophy-less seasons, back-to-back Champions League group-stage exits, and a fractured dressing room that three previous managers failed to fix. The dressing room had fractured under Álvaro Arbeloa due to public clashes, ego conflicts, and an absence of discipline. When a club of that size goes two years without silverware and its own players are openly disrespecting the manager on the touchline, it needs someone the players are more afraid of than they are of looking bad.

Why Mourinho specifically

According to MARCA, Real Madrid's decision to bring back Mourinho was driven by more than tactics. It was about authority. The club wanted Mourinho to put an end to the disrespect that Xabi Alonso and Arbeloa had suffered, with the message behind the appointment described as: "Let's see who raises their arms now."

Mourinho was not hired to be liked by everyone. He was hired to take control. His intimate knowledge of the club and his larger-than-life aura made him, in Pérez's mind, the greatest candidate to work his magic in Madrid.

That personal relationship matters too. Mourinho fell out with a lot of people while in charge of Real Madrid the first time, but president Florentino Pérez was not one of them. When a club president trusts a manager that much, the criticism from outside barely registers.

The uncomfortable truth about why this keeps happening

Mourinho gets hired for the same reason he eventually gets fired: he is extreme. When a club is in chaos, extreme authority feels like the cure. When things stabilize, that same extremity becomes the new problem. His track record of wearing out dressing rooms eventually is well documented, and it is why his spells rarely last more than 3 years anywhere. But clubs in crisis do not think about year 3. They think about right now.

Despite past tensions, Real Madrid's leadership appeared convinced that Mourinho's personality is exactly what the current squad needs, with enormous curiosity surrounding how he will manage superstars like Kylian Mbappé and Vinícius Júnior amid reports of internal tensions.

The pattern holds across his whole career: a club hits a wall, patience runs out, someone says "we need someone who can impose himself," and Mourinho's name lands on the table. He will almost certainly do what he always does, restore order, win something, then push one relationship too far. And a few years after he leaves, some other club in crisis will call him again.