Real Madrid just hired a 63-year-old to fix a team where two players put a teammate in hospital last week. He hasn't won Europe's biggest trophy in 16 years. Chelsea, Manchester United, and Tottenham have all fired him in the years since. This is the rescue plan. It's been a brutal year. Real Madrid finished without a single trophy. Last week, Barcelona beat them 2-0 to clinch the Spanish league title for a second year in a row. Three days before that match, Federico Valverde ended up in hospital with a head injury after a training-ground fight with teammate Aurélien Tchouaméni. Both got fined €500,000. Back in January, after losing the Spanish Super Cup final, Kylian Mbappé was filmed ignoring coach Xabi Alonso's request to congratulate Barcelona. Real Madrid's president, Florentino Pérez, has been through four head coaches in twelve months. Carlo Ancelotti quit last May to coach Brazil's national team. Xabi Alonso took over that summer and was fired in January with more than two years left on his contract. A youth team coach filled in for the rest of the season. Now Mourinho. Mourinho had this same Real Madrid job from 2010 to 2013. He won the Spanish league once (with a record-breaking 100 points), the Spanish cup once, and the Spanish Super Cup once. But in the Champions League, the trophy he was hired to win, he was knocked out in the semifinals three years in a row. His final season was so bad that team captain Iker Casillas reportedly went to Pérez and said "either he leaves, or we will." Mourinho himself called it "the worst season of my life." Casillas posted this week that Mourinho is "a great professional" but the wrong choice. The squad he left behind in 2013 was the most stacked in Europe: Cristiano Ronaldo, Sergio Ramos, Casillas himself at his peak. He still couldn't make it work. Today's squad has stars too: Mbappé, Jude Bellingham, Vinícius Jr. It also has the two players whose last conversation ended with one of them in hospital. He's leaving Benfica, a Portuguese team that hasn't lost a single league match all season. Breaking his contract reportedly costs £2.6 million. He's coming back to a worse version of the job he failed at thirteen years ago. At 63.