Were you listening, Jose Mourinho? Vincent Kompany's 12-minute monologue on Vinicius Junior and racism

Munich, Friday afternoon. The cameras rolled, notebooks opened, and for 11 minutes 57 seconds Bayern Munich head coach Vincent Kompany did not cede the floor. The question that triggered the soliloquy was simple enough: what did he make of the racism storm that erupted after Real Madrid’s Champions League play-off at Benfica, the one that ended with Vinicius Junior alleging monkey chants and Jose Mourinho branding the Brazilian a habitual complainer? What followed was a master-class in controlled anger, a point-by-point dismantling of Mourinho’s post-match narrative delivered without a single personal insult.

Kompany, multilingual but deliberately choosing English “to be precise”, began by underlining the obvious: he had watched the match, seen Benfica winger Gianluca Prestianni pull his shirt over his mouth, seen the video of fans in the stands making monkey gestures, heard Kylian Mbappe’s on-field testimony. “You cannot fake that reaction,” he said of Vinicius’s immediate approach to the referee. “There is no benefit to him volunteering for this misery.”

Then he turned to Mourinho. The Benfica coach had argued that racism was impossible in a stadium where Eusebio—Portugal’s Black icon of the 1960s—remains a deity, and that Vinicius provoked the crowd with his corner-flag dance. Kompany methodically unpicked both claims. “Was Mourinho on the bus with Eusebio in the 60s? My father, another Black man from that era, had only one option: be quiet, be ten times better, accept crumbs of praise. To use Eusebio’s name to silence a Black player who today dares to speak up is historically illiterate.”

Without ever calling Mourinho a hypocrite, Kompany listed the Portuguese’s own inflammatory celebrations: the knee-slide at Old Trafford in 2004, the sprint in front of Barcelona fans in 2010, the clashes with referees in last season’s Europa League final. “If someone racially abused Jose in those moments, I would expect us to listen, not point to his celebration and say he brought it on himself.”

The 38-year-old also revealed scars from his own career: monkey chants alongside the late Cheick Tiote at Real Betis in 2005, and being called a “brown monkey” by Club Brugge fans while manager of Anderlecht in 2021. “I complained; politics buried it. If that happens to me—with my profile—what chance does a player in Hungary or Serbia have?”

Kompany’s solution was not punitive but restorative: an admission, an apology, a reduced sanction. “We are stripping away the middle ground, forcing people left or right, black or white. The one thing you cannot do is punish unfairly or dismiss the pain of the person who reports racism.”

He finished with a plea for unity rather than division, praising Mourinho’s former players who still revere him and acknowledging the Benfica coach as “a good person” who “made a mistake”. Whether Mourinho, who declined to revisit the subject in yesterday’s four-minute club interview, will absorb the lecture is doubtful. Yet the monologue is now on record, 12 minutes that travelled well beyond the boundaries of a routine pre-match press conference and landed squarely in the conscience of European football.