Since returning to Real Madrid, Jose Mourinho has been repeatedly asked variations of the same question. What are we to make of this Jose Mourinho. The 63-year-old Jose Mourinho. Is he really all that different from the Jose Mourinho who left Real Madrid more than a decade ago.“I’ve changed so much,” he claimed in a sit-down with El Chiringuito. All the paranoia. The not knowing who to trust. The corrosiveness. It’s apparently a thing of the past. “I am much more mature, less emotional and more controlled,” Mourinho insisted. When he walks the corridors of Valdebebas, he no longer sees enemies within.Enough time has elapsed for Mourinho to joke about it these days. He is not taking himself too seriously. The infamous Diego Torres book exposing how toxic his time at the club became. The mole. His fall-out with Iker Casillas. It’s material he now draws on in self deprecation.Take what happened last week when a member of the Madrid press pack relayed to him that “many of the people who work in the club say you’re much calmer and more relaxed than in your first spell.” A glint of mischief flashed in Mourinho’s eye. “There! You’ve already told me something important,” he smiled. “You talk to people who work here!” The Madrid press pack burst into laughter.Mourinho’s detractors continue to assert he has lost his edge when it comes to winning things. One thing the Portuguese has never lost, however, is his sense of humour. Mourinho has caught himself manically chuckling at Valdebebas this off-season.The joke, in a good way, is Kylian Mbappe.“He’s incredible,” Mourinho said. “He sometimes makes me laugh in training.” It isn’t because he is scrolling through the best Mbappe memes and singing “Kylian dic-ta-tor!” It’s “because,” in Mourinho’s words, “he’s just too good.” It’s perhaps why the Valdebebas mole talks of “a calmer, more relaxed” Mourinho.When was the last time Mourinho could count on a striker this immensely gifted?At Benfica last season, Vangelis Pavlidis scored 24 goals. He has, in recent memory, got the better of an England team featuring Mbappe’s team-mate Jude Bellingham, delivering, at Wembley, in a win Greeks won’t forget in a hurry.All the same, Mbappe “is” in Mourinho’s estimation “operating on a stratospheric level.”At Fenerbahce, Youssef En-Nesyri put away 20 goals. Edin Dzeko, now in his twilight, backed him up. And yet here’s the thing. Mourinho keeps repeating the same line: “Mbappe is incredible.”At Roma, Mourinho loaned Romelu Lukaku, his former player at Man United. He loved Paulo Dybala too. Whenever the Argentine played it was “another music”. Mourinho’s last trophy, the Conference League, came in a season in which Tammy Abraham found the net 27 times. “But Mbappe has made history.”(Maria Jimenez/Real Madrid via Getty Images)To find someone in the same rarefied air you probably have to go back to Mourinho’s time at Tottenham where he worked with Harry Kane.But that’s a long time ago now. Five years without a player of this class.