Jose Mourinho got his home return: the pageantry, the ceremony, his second stint officially under way. Forty minutes in, Kylian Mbappe had already turned the whole evening into his own story.
Real Madrid beat Real Sociedad 4-1 at the Bernabeu on Wednesday, in a Matchday 1 game that got pushed back so World Cup players could recover. Mbappe scored a hat-trick spanning both halves, Vinicius Junior added a fourth, and Sucic pulled one back for the visitors. That's the score. My take: this was supposed to be Mourinho's night, and Mbappe took it from him clean. If that keeps happening this season, it says something about where the real power in this Madrid team sits.
This wasn't a wire-to-wire demolition, though. Madrid's midfield still looks unsettled: the Bernardo Silva-Fede Valverde pairing hasn't clicked yet, and Arda Guler looked disconnected out on the right. Madrid actually had a rough opening stretch before individual quality bailed them out. That matters more than the scoreline suggests. Mourinho inherited a squad reshaped by a busy transfer window, with Cucurella, Dumfries and Konate all folded in, and fitting those new pieces into a coherent structure is clearly still a work in progress. The Bernabeu got a rout, not a finished product.
What it did get was proof that whatever needs sorting in midfield, Mbappe can make it not matter most nights. Three goals in a home opener, with Vinicius also on the scoresheet, is the kind of output that can paper over structural cracks for a whole season if it keeps up. Mourinho's tactical fingerprints, the pressing intensity that Real Sociedad boss Pellegrino Matarazzo praised before kickoff, will matter in the biggest games. But on nights when the buildup play is scratchy, it's Mbappe doing the heavy lifting, not the coach's structure. That's a good problem to have, and it's the same dynamic that decided Mourinho's most successful sides before: a manager who organizes the machine, and a superstar who wins the games the machine can't quite finish.
For Real Sociedad, this is worse than one bad scoreline suggests. They arrived at the Bernabeu already without a win in their last several league games, a run stretching back into last season, and had already lost their opener to Real Betis. This loss just extends that skid. They're still the reigning Copa del Rey winners, worth remembering before writing them off, but a squad that made no signings this summer and is misfiring this badly two games in has a real problem, not a slump that fixes itself.
Mourinho will take the three points and the celebration that came with them. But what Wednesday actually showed is that this Madrid side runs on Mbappe more than on anything Mourinho has installed so far. Two games into a long season, that's not a crisis, just a reason not to crown this romp a statement about the coach.
