Arda Guler should be the first name José Mourinho writes down. The fact that he isn't is Mourinho's problem to answer for. Guler started on the bench at the Stadio Olimpico on Wednesday. By full time he'd flipped a game Real Madrid were losing and dragged them to a 4-3 win in the Champions League. You don't need a longer trial than that.
Roma led 3-1 after an hour, with Donyell Malen scoring twice early in the second half. Mourinho, two goals down, finally went to his bench in the 59th minute, taking off Dumfries and Vinicius and sending on Guler and Endrick. Real Madrid went from chasing the game to running it. Guler left with two assists, eight crosses and five corners from a 31-minute cameo, and FotMob gave him an 8.3. His corner started the move for the goal that pulled one back, his corner found Endrick for 3-3, and his corner in the 90th set up Antonio Rüdiger for the winner. One substitute touched all three.
Why is a player who can do that to a packed defence not in the eleven when Real Madrid walk into a ground knowing the opposition will sit deep? Roma lined up with a back three and a low block. That is precisely the night you want your sharpest passer on the pitch from the first whistle, before you're two down and improvising. Mourinho instead paired two midfielders built to break things up, and watched Roma strangle the game until he corrected himself.
Thirty-one minutes against a Roma side already defending a two-goal lead is a thin pile of evidence to rebuild a team around. Teams protecting a lead sit back and invite exactly the kind of crosses Guler kept whipping in. It still doesn't get Mourinho off the hook. One half-hour doesn't prove Guler is the best player in Europe. This keeps happening, though: the thing he does to defensive sides is the thing Real Madrid most obviously lack, and the manager keeps waiting until the scoreboard forces his hand before he uses it. If you only trust a player once you're desperate, that's a nerve problem.
He rejoined Real Madrid this past summer and walked straight back into the Stadio Olimpico, the ground where he won the 2022 Europa Conference League with Roma, for the first time since leaving in January 2024. A reunion he'd have scripted as a statement turned into a lesson about his own team sheet. The bench won it, and the manager who built that bench had to come fix his own mistake.
None of this is Guler's fault. He drives the ball forward when the safe option is sideways. He finds the pass before the block resets. Against the deep, cautious sides that make up most of Real Madrid's calendar, that is the whole game. Keep handing it to him for half an hour and acting surprised when he changes everything, and eventually the only explanation left is the manager.
Start him. The evidence was on the pitch in Rome, and Mourinho was the one who had to run onto it and collect it.
