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"I am not a blue anymore. I am red and I want to win."
The message from Jose Mourinho could not have been any clearer. The 62-year-old, almost a decade on from departing Chelsea for a second time, has returned to Stamford Bridge. His Benfica side take on the Blues on Tuesday evening in the second fixture of the Champions League league phase.
While Mourinho is delighted to return to a stadium that means a lot to him, he is completely focused on helping Benfica produce a shock. "Of course I will always be a blue. I'm part of their history and they are part of mine. I helped them to become bigger Chelsea and they helped me to become a bigger Jose.
"When I say I'm not a blue, I'm talking about the job I have to do tomorrow. There are not many clubs that do these pictures. There is a fear in many clubs about what happened in the past. Sometimes it looks like they want to delete people who made history in the clubs. This shows Chelsea are a big club."
Mourinho, who was very friendly with all of the English journalists after the press conference, is very impressed with the job Enzo Maresca has done at Stamford Bridge over the last year. Describing the club as a "winning machine", Mourinho has been impressed with the job Maresca has done since becoming head coach in the summer of 2024.
"Honestly, I don't know the model," Mourinho said. "I never studied their model. There was a set period where myself, from the outside, was putting some question marks [on it] because it looked like Chelsea had lost their identity as a club. But what happened in the last season got things back on track.
"They gave trust to Enzo and gave his ideas. He's fitted in well with the philosophy of the club."
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The Benfica boss continued: "Chelsea is a winning machine that had in the past two or three years a moment without trophies, but Chelsea won something before my time, and then they stopped winning and then my team started winning. Chelsea is a winning machine."
Mourinho will be managing just his fourth game as Benfica boss following his appointment last week. His counterpart, Maresca, said earlier in the day that he is not worried about any pressure on his position after Chelsea were booed on Saturday afternoon when they lost to Brighton.
football.londonunderstands the Chelsea board have no plans to sack the Italian and believe some of the reaction to the club’s start to the season has been somewhat overblown.
Maresca said: "So for sure we like winning games, there is no doubt. But also the reality is that there is not any pressure. The pressure we have is the pressure that we know that being at Chelsea as a player, as a manager you need to win games, no doubt.
"But at the same moment the reality is that for different reasons, injuries and red cards, we lost five games in almost six months. But at the same time I think it's something not bad."
Maresca will be hoping Joao Pedro, Andrey Santos and Moises Caicedo are all fit for Tuesday’s European match, with the trio set to be assessed. Santos was not spotted at open training on Monday afternoon, while Joao Pedro and Caicedo took part in the session.
Cole Palmer, Wesley Fofana, Tosin Adarabioyo, Liam Delap, Dario Essugo and Levi Colwill are all unavailable through injury.
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