"Mourinho went crazy. He shouted at us and said we were to blame for everything"

The strained relationship between Jose Mourinho and Iker Casillas, captain of Real Madrid during the coach's first stint at the club, was well known. Now, as part of the Netflix documentary about Mourinho, the two and others who were in the dressing room at the time have revisited the conflict that shook the club.

Mourinho said he arrived and found a "fantastic team" at Real Madrid, where Casillas was "the captain and the best player." However, according to him, something was wrong: "Mentally, they were in a very bad place."

The Portuguese coach illustrated this with his first three conversations with the captain:

"The first thing he said to me was: 'I came to ask for more days off for the national team players.' In the second conversation, he asked me to delay training by an hour because there was a lot of traffic in Madrid at the time I wanted to start. In the third, he told me that they didn't want to go to the hotel, that they preferred to meet on the day of the match and travel directly to the stadium."

Following those conversations, Mourinho reached a conclusion: "I realized they were spoiled."

One of the turning points in the relationship between the two was Casillas' famous phone call to Xavi, which was intended to reduce tension between Real Madrid and Barcelona players and prevent a rift in the Spanish national team's dressing room. Mourinho did not like the move: "It's a match between Barcelona and Real Madrid. When you arrive at the national team you can give each other two kisses, but not now. This is war. There are things I don't accept and will never accept. When someone doesn't respect me, it becomes a problem."

Casillas explained his side: "The situation was complex, because I was the captain of Real Madrid and also the captain of the Spanish national team. You were facing players who were your enemies on the football pitch, but afterwards they were your teammates in the national team. I didn't like seeing this situation and I told the coach that."

Sami Khedira, who is currently on Mourinho's coaching staff at Real Madrid, told how the confrontation between the coach and the captain escalated: "Iker was a Real Madrid legend and very loved by the fans. Mourinho benched him and didn't talk to him, spoke badly about him in the media... The dressing room became a hell. After that, the relationship between Jose and many players, like Cristiano Ronaldo and the Spanish players, fell apart. These players were very important to the atmosphere in the dressing room, which became toxic."

Another topic that came up in the documentary was the "mole" affair and Mourinho's search for whoever was leaking lineups, tactics, and internal information from the dressing room to the media. "He went crazy," recalled Casillas. "He called us all, shouted all sorts of things at us, and said we were to blame for everything. I don't know if he kicked a bottle and slammed his office door."

Casillas added that even today he does not know who the leaker was: "Who leaked it? The mole, of course. And who is the mole? Go find him."

Marcelo, who was also present at that event, said: "He was just furious. That's how he is. He worked hard to help us win in the best way, and then something that only we knew was leaked. To this day we still want to know who that person was who leaked everything."

Rui Faria, who was Mourinho's assistant at Real Madrid at the time, claimed that the professional staff was almost certain of the leaker's identity: "We knew who the mole was, we were almost sure. In the end, the answers were in the newspapers. You can't prove it, but you're almost sure how things work."

Mourinho left Real Madrid in 2013, and now admitted that towards the end of his first tenure at the club, he too was exhausted by the situation. "I think the players were tired of me as a leader, and I was tired of them too. I was fed up with them, not just them with me," he said. "I was tired of the players and the media."

Mourinho also recalled a message he received from Florentino Perez: "Now comes the easy part, because we are going up and they, Barcelona, are going down." However, the Portuguese had already made his decision: "I wanted to leave. I felt I was done."