Real Madrid Faces Pre-Season Challenges Without Key Players

Real Madrid will board the bus for Deportivo La Coruña on Wednesday with the squad list of a club still very much in pre-season mode – and a treatment room that tells its own story.

With the new 2026/27 La Liga campaign less than a fortnight away, José Mourinho has named his travelling party for the friendly against the newly promoted Galician side. The headline is not who is in. It is who is missing.

Eleven first‑team players have been left out, a blend of those short of match fitness and those nursing injuries, as Madrid try to sharpen up for another tilt at Barcelona in the title race.

This is supposed to be the stage where rhythm returns, combinations reappear and the spine of the side locks into place. Instead, Mourinho is forced into a different kind of exercise: stress‑testing the depth of a squad built for a long season, not a quiet August.

The absence list reads like a Ballon d’Or longlist.

Marc Cucurella will not feature. Jude Bellingham stays behind. Thibaut Courtois, the club’s wall in goal, is out. Rodrygo sits this one out as well. Kylian Mbappé, the marquee forward around whom much of Madrid’s attacking identity is expected to revolve, is unavailable.

They are joined on the sidelines by Yan Diomandé, Ferland Mendy, Raúl Asencio, Ibrahima Konaté, Thiago Pitarch and Éder Militão. Eleven names. Eleven solutions Mourinho will have to find elsewhere.

For a coach renowned for his control of detail, this kind of disruption in the final stretch of pre-season is hardly ideal. Yet this is also the window in which managers discover who can be trusted when the lights go up and the points start counting.

Madrid have already faced Fiorentina and Ferencváros in their warm‑up programme, useful run‑outs that offered hints but not hard conclusions. Deportivo, fresh from securing their return to the top flight, bring a different edge. A historic stadium, a fanbase hungry to prove they belong back at this level, and a squad eager to test themselves against heavyweight opposition.

It is exactly the sort of environment in which fringe players either shrink or step forward.

For Los Blancos, the trip now doubles as an audition. Without Courtois, someone else must command the box. With Bellingham and Mbappé not involved, creativity and cutting edge will have to come from different sources. Wide players, squad midfielders, younger defenders – all know that a strong performance now can alter Mourinho’s thinking for the opening weeks of La Liga.

The manager, for his part, will be less interested in the scoreline than in habits: how his back line copes without its usual anchors, how quickly the ball moves through midfield without its English conductor, how the front line presses and combines without its French superstar.

Deportivo, meanwhile, could not have scripted a better dress rehearsal for their own return to the elite. A home date against Real Madrid, even a depleted version, is a chance to measure intensity, structure and belief against the standard they will face all season.

Madrid’s objective is different. This is about survival of the fittest and survival of ideas. The names missing from the team sheet underline the risks of building a season around a cluster of global stars. The response in La Coruña will show whether the supporting cast is ready to carry the weight when those stars are not there.

With Barcelona looming on the horizon and the margin for error in a title race usually measured in single digits, Mourinho cannot afford many false starts. The question now is simple: in the absence of half a team of headline acts, who steps into the spotlight and convinces him they belong on opening day?