Everything is falling apart at Real Madrid. Here's the full story..

If you told a Real Madrid fan two years ago that Kylian Mbappé would be coming off the bench to a chorus of boos from his own supporters, they'd have laughed you out of the room. But that's exactly what happened this week — and it's just one thread in a tapestry of chaos that's been unravelling all season at the Santiago Bernabéu.

To understand how bad things have gotten, you need to zoom out. Real Madrid has now gone two full seasons without winning a major trophy. For almost any other club on the planet, that would be considered a decent run of bad luck. At Madrid, it's basically a constitutional crisis. This is a club where failure to win is treated as a personal insult to history itself.

First, they sacked Xabi Alonso. In January.

The opening act of this particular drama came in January, when Xabi Alonso was released from his role as manager following a poor start to the season. Alonso — a World Cup winner, a Champions League winner as a player, and one of the most admired young coaches in Europe — didn't survive long enough to see spring. That's how unforgiving this environment is.

His replacement was Álvaro Arbeloa, the club's B-team manager. To be clear: the B-team coach is now in charge of a squad that cost the best part of a billion euros to assemble. Arbeloa has been unable to turn results around, and the pressure on him has only intensified as the weeks have gone by.

Then two first-team players beat each other up at training

Just days before the El Clásico, reports surfaced that Aurélien Tchouaméni and Federico Valverde had come to blows on the training ground. Not a heated exchange of words. Not a shove. An actual physical altercation serious enough that the club fined both players $588,000 each — that's over a million dollars in internal discipline from a single incident between teammates.

Álvaro Carreras was also reportedly caught up in a separate minor incident around the same time. The picture it paints of the Real Madrid dressing room right now is not a pretty one. This is not a united group of men hunting for a comeback. This is a squad that is cracking under pressure.

Barcelona won the league. At the Camp Nou. And it still hurt.

On May 10, Real Madrid travelled to the Spotify Camp Nou and lost 2-0 to Barcelona in El Clásico. The result meant Barcelona officially clinched the La Liga title. There was no miraculous comeback, no last-gasp equaliser to keep the dream alive — just a flat, deflating defeat that handed their fiercest rivals the championship in front of a delirious home crowd.

You don't need it to happen at your own ground for it to sting. Watching Barcelona celebrate a title you couldn't stop them from winning is painful regardless of postcode. For Madrid's players, staff and supporters, it was the lowest point of a season that had already produced plenty of low points.

Then Florentino Pérez went on television and declared himself a victim

With Mourinho's name being whispered in corridors and the fanbase desperate for some kind of clarity, club president Florentino Pérez called a press conference. Everyone expected him to address the coaching situation, to offer a plan, to steady the ship.

Instead, the most powerful man in football stood at the podium and launched into an animated tirade, declaring that he was the target of an "organised campaign" to remove him from power. He called for new club elections and challenged his opponents to publicly announce their intentions. The normally composed Pérez was rattled, defensive and clearly furious — and it was all playing out in front of the cameras. It was extraordinary television, even if it wasn't exactly what the club needed in that moment.

And then there's the Mbappé situation, which has its own chapter

Kylian Mbappé arrived at Real Madrid in 2024 as the centrepiece of a new era. The numbers have been decent enough, but Real Madrid haven't won a single major honour since the day he signed — and some of the fanbase has started drawing a direct line between his arrival and the team's dysfunction, even if that's not entirely fair.

He missed El Clásico altogether, having been away in Italy — with the club's authorisation, he confirmed — while his teammates were being beaten at the Camp Nou. When he returned for the match against Real Oviedo, he came off the bench to boos and whistles from the home supporters. His response afterwards was measured but revealing.

But it was what he said next that really made headlines. Mbappé revealed that Arbeloa had told him he is currently the fourth-choice striker at the club — behind Vinícius, Mastantuono, Brahim and Gonzalo. Arbeloa quickly denied the interpretation, saying he didn't know what Mbappé had misunderstood. But the damage was already done. A public back-and-forth between a manager and his star player, played out in the press, is never a good look.

Mbappé's own take on Pérez, at least, was glowing: "The president is the best president in the world, the best in the history of Real Madrid. It is difficult how he has been treated." Make of that what you will.

So what happens now?

Mourinho's name keeps surfacing as a potential next manager, and honestly, if you're going to hire someone to walk into a fractured dressing room and immediately impose order through sheer force of personality, he's your man. Whether that's the right long-term call is a different conversation — but right now, Madrid need someone who isn't scared of the mess.

The problems, though, run deeper than any one manager can fix overnight. Mbappé and Vinícius still haven't found the kind of partnership that makes opponents genuinely afraid. The squad is unbalanced and internally divided. The president is in a political fight of his own. And the fans are running out of patience.

Real Madrid will recover — they always do. History, money and global pulling power guarantee it. But right now, in May 2026, the most storied club in football looks less like a dynasty in waiting and more like a very expensive, very complicated mess.