Jose Mourinho just became the coach of Real Madrid, and I hope Amazon is going to make a documentary for them next season…because Mourinho vs Vini vs Mbappe is about to make Real Madrid the new Hollywood FC.
So what is Hollywood FC? Let me give you a quick history lesson.
The Hollywood FC tag is like a virus that comes for big clubs. First, it was Bayern in the 90s, then the tag came to Manchester United during the Paul Pogba era, but today, Real Madrid has now become the New Hollywood FC.
But how did we get here? Let me take you back to life before Mbappe.
Friendship FC: Real Madrid Before Mbappe
Two seasons ago, Real Madrid was vibes and Friendship FC. Jude Bellingham was bagging 23 goals and becoming a household name. Luka Modrić and Toni Kroos were like two UNCs holding the young boys together. Vinicius and Rodrygo were terrorizing defenders.
Even Joselu turned into prime Raul for two minutes against Bayern in the Champions League semi-final. And this friendship FC helped Real Madrid to win their 15th UCL against Dortmund.
The vibes were immaculate, and everything looked perfect. So Florentino Pérez looked at all of that. He looked at the trophies. He looked at Friendship FC. And decided it was time to get Kylian Mbappe from PSG.
We all know that Kylian Mbappé has been Florentino’s white whale for a looong time. The man has been obsessing over Mbappé like a teenager. And finally, in the summer of 2024, Mbappé arrived in Madrid on a free transfer.
Galacticos 2.0 was officially open for business.
And just like that, the Mbappe regime as the dictator of Madrid was in full effect.
Galacticos 2.0: The End of Friendship FC
Here’s the thing nobody really planned for. Kylian Mbappé wanted to play on the left. Vini Jr also wanted to play on the left. And as a result, the team chemistry was all over the place. Even though Mbappe didn’t score much in the first few months, his form gradually came back with time.
But something was broken at Friendship FC. Bellingham looked worse than the previous year. Vini went from being the undisputed heartbeat of the team to a passenger trying to find his way. As for Rodrygo, he just completely disappeared.
And while the football was getting worse, Raúl Asencio, the so-called next Sergio Ramos, got himself tangled up in a case because he shared a sex tape involving a minor.
Real Madrid obviously tried to push this scandal under the rug and continued pushing Asencio back into the senior team. But since the case is still ongoing, I’ll reserve my comments for now.
Ballon d’Or Boycott
And down the horizon was the Ballon d’Or ceremony. For some reason, everybody already assumed Vinicius would be the winner. But shit really hit the fan in October 2024, when Fabrizio Romano announced that Vini Jr would not be the winner of the award.
Boy oh boy, this news sent the entire internet on fire. Real Madrid had built the entire run-up to the ceremony around the assumption that Vinicius Junior was about to be crowned. Vini was inviting his family and friends, his agents booked the flights, and the plane was on the tarmac about to take off.
And to the shock of everyone, Real Madrid released a Communicado Official announcing that the entire club delegation would cancel the trip. Incredible! I get the frustration, not like Rodri was the standout player or anything, but that hissy fit by the entire club was just so bizarre.
To add to the drama, Vinicius now went ahead to tweet that “I’ll do it ten times over.”
The War With Referees
A few weeks after the Ballon d’Or drama, Real Madrid TV decided to start a full-time war with the entire Spanish refereeing community. Every week, the club’s broadcaster was producing compilation videos accusing officials of corruption, favouritism toward Barcelona and Atlético, and conspiracies involving VAR.
And it didn’t help that Real Madrid limped through the rest of the 2024-25 season without a single major trophy, which was already a crisis in itself for a club of that stature.
The animosity towards the referees continued to escalate until that Copa del Rey final between Madrid and Barcelona. You know the one I’m talking about. The one with referee Bengoetxea.
Days before the game, Real Madrid TV produced a documentary hit piece on Bengoetxea. This made the referee give a press conference and break down in tears because his young son had been told at school that his father was “a thief.”
And how did Real Madrid respond? They skipped the press conference, skipped the open training session, and refused to attend the RFEF banquet. They told their own coach and Luka Modrić, both due to face the media, to stay home.
Real Madrid eventually played the match and lost to Barcelona. But instead of taking the loss in peace, the players decided to berate the officials and scream insults in their faces…Rudiger was on the scene of the crime, of course, as well as Bellingham.
The Xabi Alonso Era
All this drama was too much for Ancelotti because at the end of the season, he decided to leave the club of crybabies and head over to Brazil to become the new coach.
So in came Xabi Alonso, fresh off going an entire Bundesliga season unbeaten with Bayer Leverkusen.
Alonso arrived with his iconic 3-4-3 system, with rotating inverted full-backs, the same thing he did at Leverkusen. But right from the start, this formation looked like it was never going to work.
What do you mean you want Mbappe and Vinicius to press and track back on defense? That’s not happening.
The first sign of trouble came when Alonso decided to bring Vinicius off during an important game. Vini did not like that at all. He was ranting and gesturing like Alonso had insulted his mother. Just absolute disrespect on a live broadcast.
Behind the scenes at Real Madrid, the leaks started. Bellingham was unhappy. Camavinga was unhappy. Valverde was also not loving his new role at right back. Half of the senior players backed the manager. The other half wanted him gone, and as a result, the dressing room was split down the middle.
The losses and bad performances kept piling up. A 5-2 collapse away at Atlético in September was a bad one, especially to your sworn city rivals. Then it got worse when they lost 2-0 at home to Celta Vigo, with three of their own players being sent off in the same match.
The rumours of Alonso’s dismissal started coming out from the socios and the fans. You already know that when things got to that level, Alonso was already a dead man walking.
The breaking point arrived in January 2026 at the Supercopa final against Barcelona. After Barcelona clapped Madrid once again, Mbappe and some senior players walked past Alonso without acknowledging him. Mbappé even waved the players off when Alonso asked them to stand and applaud Barcelona.
Twenty-four hours later, Alonso was gone.
The Arbeloa Era: Start of the Madrid Civil War
But by then, the Real Madrid Civil War was already brewing, and people were taking sides. So basically, Arbeloa inherited a shitstorm way beyond his powers.
The dressing room split that had been bubbling under the surface immediately broke into public view. Mbappé, Courtois, and a faction of the senior squad were furious about Alonso’s sacking. Vinicius, Bellingham, Camavinga, Valverde, and others joined the other side.
Now the players who had been quietly undermining the manager were openly at war with the players who had been backing him, and the manager was no longer there to mediate, because he had been replaced by Álvaro Arbeloa, who was the Castilla coach.
More bad news followed almost immediately when Real Madrid lost in embarrassing fashion against Albacete in the round of sixteen of the Copa del Rey. This was one of the most embarrassing losses in recent cup history—up there with Manchester United losing to Grimsby.
Vinicius Jr. Racism Controversy
The drama continued. Fast forward to February 2026, Vinicius Junior was once again the victim of alleged racial abuse, this time from Gianluca Prestianni, who pulled his shirt up over his mouth before saying something to Vini that caused Vini to refuse to play on. The game stopped for ten minutes.
Mbappé later told Spanish TV that Prestianni had called Vini a monkey five times. After the game, José Mourinho gave a press conference in which he said that Vini had provoked the situation with his celebration.
Then, in classic Mourinho fashion, he reminded us that the biggest person in the history of this club was Eusebio. I still can’t believe that Mourinho gave us the 2026 version of “I can’t be racist, I love John Barnes.”
Becoming Hollywood FC
Back at Real Madrid, things were getting worse by the hour. After Mbappe injured his left knee against Celta Vigo, the medical staff sent him for an MRI scan. The scan came back clear, only for us to find out later that Real Madrid’s medical team had scanned the wrong knee.
How can such an institution with world-class doctors and medical equipment scan a player’s wrong knee? I swear you can’t make this stuff up.
By April, Real Madrid were still hoping for some magic in the Champions League quarter-final against Bayern. They tried, but Bayern was just too good for them. And with the second leg almost over, Eduardo Camavinga got himself sent off in injury time, which prompted Arda Güler and Dani Carvajal to shout and scream at the referee.
Now they only had to focus on the league and stop Barcelona from winning the league back-to-back.
Domestically, Madrid all but conceded the league title when Héctor Bellerín, of all people, scored a 94th-minute equaliser against them at Real Betis.
Behind the scenes, Raúl Asencio and Dani Ceballos were angry with Arbeloa for not including them in the squad. Leaks were flying up and down from the training ground, and everyone was pointing fingers at each other.
#MbappeOut
Which brings us to May 2026, which has been one of the most absurd months in the modern history of Real Madrid. And I want you to follow this carefully, because it really did all happen in the same calendar month.
So we start with the dictator himself. Mbappé, who was supposed to be rehabilitating his muscle injury, instead went on holiday to Sardinia with his girlfriend. Then, some paparazzi idiot released the photos of them on a yacht in the Mediterranean while the rest of the squad was actively grinding out a league fixture against Espanyol.
The backlash was so bad that the “Mbappé Out” petition reached more than 40 million votes. I think that’s the most votes on a non-political online petition.
Inside the building, reports leaked that Mbappe was only talking to the French-speaking players in the squad. He also liked, and then quickly unliked, a social media post linking José Mourinho to the head coach position for next season. Yes. That Mourinho. The one who had just been calling Vinicius a provocateur and lecturing about Eusébio’s legacy two months earlier.
Valverde vs Tchouameni
Just when you thought the dressing room couldn’t possibly be in worse shape, we heard the Fabrizio Bomba that captain Federico Valverde had been after an altercation with Aurélien Tchouaméni. Valverde reportedly had a head injury and was briefly unconscious.
The story was that both players got into a fight one day after an argument, and Tchouameni punched Valverde and almost knocked him out. Madrid has fined them and denied that any fight happened, but we all know that there’s no smoke without fire.
Almost at the same time, Antonio Rüdiger slapped Álvaro Carreras on the training ground. Carreras, who was also reportedly beefing with Arbeloa. At this point, every part of the squad had been involved in a leak, a fight, or a public meltdown.
The Florentino Perez Press Conference
And in the middle of all of this, with the season collapsing around him in real time, Florentino Pérez decided this was the perfect moment to call an emergency press conference. The expectations were sky-high. Maybe he wanted to announce Mourinho’s return. Maybe he would sack Arbeloa or even resign.
He did none of those things.
Instead, the 79-year-old sat at the podium for the better part of an hour and produced one of the most unhinged single performances any club president has ever given.
- He announced he was not resigning.
- He announced the club would hold elections.
- He attacked the newspaper ABC, which his own father had once subscribed him to, and cancelled his subscription on live television.
- He attacked the journalist María José Fuenteálamo and said he didn’t know if she even knew anything about football.
- He addressed rumours that he had terminal cancer by saying that if he had cancer, he would have been admitted to an oncology ward.
- He accused a media company called Vocento of running an entire digital newspaper, Relevo, purely to attack him, and claimed it had lost 25 million euros doing so.
- He announced that Real Madrid was assembling a 500-page dossier of evidence regarding the Negreira corruption case, in which Barcelona had paid millions to the former vice-president of the Spanish referees’ committee, and that this dossier would be delivered to UEFA at the end of the season.
- He claimed that seven league titles had been stolen from Real Madrid as a result of that corruption.
- He said, “they’ll have to shoot me to get me out.”
Bear in mind that Perez did not, in any way, shape, or form, address the dressing-room implosion or any of the other issues.
With Alvaro Arbeloa finally gone and Jose Mourinho now the manager of the Galacticos 2.0, the Hollywood FC era is now finally in full swing.
Who wrote this?
Ugochukwu is a sports enthusiast with an undying love for underdog stories.
