Mourinho's Early La Liga Challenge: Betis Shocks Real Madrid
Jose Mourinho’s second coming at Real Madrid just hit its first brick wall – and the man who landed the punch is a striker he once told to go back and prove himself with the kids.
At La Cartuja, under the Friday night lights, Real Betis beat Madrid 1-0, snapping Mourinho’s perfect start to the La Liga season and planting an early seed of doubt in the title race.
Mourinho’s fast start, abruptly checked
Madrid arrived in Seville looking ruthless. Three league games, three wins, four goals each past Real Sociedad and Malaga. The attack looked slick, the swagger familiar. This was the Mourinho machine, version two, humming nicely.
Then came Betis. Then came Manuel Pellegrini. And then, late on, came Troy Parrott.
Mourinho’s side huffed and pushed, but they never quite shook off a nagging flatness. The final insult came when Kylian Mbappé saw a late penalty saved, the kind of moment that usually rescues these nights for Madrid. Not this time.
The story belonged to a different forward.
Parrott’s moment – and Mourinho’s old lesson
With nine minutes left, Betis forced a corner from the right. Pablo Fornals swung it in, Nelson Deossa met it with a firm header, and Thibaut Courtois produced the sort of reflex save that normally kills a move stone dead.
The ball dropped back into the six-yard box.
Parrott didn’t hesitate.
The Republic of Ireland striker crashed the rebound high into the net, a ruthless, emphatic finish for his first-ever La Liga goal. One chance, one statement. La Cartuja erupted; Betis had their famous lead, Madrid had no reply.
It was a breakthrough that had been a long time coming. Betis signed the 24-year-old after he hit 20 goals across the last two seasons with AZ in the Eredivisie, a steady, hard-earned rise away from the English spotlight.
But his story began at Tottenham, where a teenage Parrott was handed his Premier League debut in 2019 by Mourinho himself.
Back then, the Portuguese coach was careful not to feed the hype. An injury crisis at Spurs in March 2020 left Parrott as the only fit striker, yet Mourinho resisted the noise around him and kept him on the fringes.
He challenged the youngster instead.
“I told him: ‘Every time you play with the kids of your age, you have to show your colleagues why you are the privileged one,’” Mourinho said at the time, explaining that Parrott had been turning out for the Under-23s with the wrong mentality, as if he were “too good” to be there.
“Troy cannot go there with discontent, contempt. It is a process,” he warned, frustrated by the clamour from outside. He even recalled a voice behind the bench yelling, “Play Troy, play Troy,” insisting the fan probably didn’t even know who Parrott really was.
Then the pandemic hit. Football shut down, Parrott’s immediate window at Spurs closed, and the following season he headed to Millwall on loan – the first of several moves in search of minutes and maturity.
Advice that came back around
When he arrived at Millwall in August 2020, Parrott made it clear he had taken Mourinho’s words to heart, not as a slight but as a lesson.
“He’s such an experienced manager and he’s done nearly everything in the game,” Parrott said, accepting that “there must be some truth in it” and that he had to “take it on the chin”.
He spoke of keeping his head down, working in training, using the loan to improve and push on. He sought out coaches and team-mates, asking what he needed to do better. Mourinho, he knew, had worked with some of the greatest strikers in the game. Any advice from that source, he decided, had to be useful.
On this night in Seville, that education looked complete for a few, decisive seconds.
Parrott reacted quicker than anyone in a penalty area full of stars, punished a rare Courtois spill, and landed a blow that may yet shape the early La Liga landscape – and Mourinho’s title ambitions – far beyond a single famous Betis win.
