Drenthe was unhappy with the way he was treated at Real and how Mourinho, then Madrid coach, handled the situation at the time.
He recalled to The Wild Project podcast: "At first we were doing well but when I came back from Hércules (on-loan)... There were four players in the locker room who couldn't train with the team for nonsense."
Asked if he got on well with Mourinho as a person, Drenthe replied: "I don't know. I couldn't work with him anymore. At first everything was fine, we went to pre-season in Los Angeles and Marcelo and I played together. Then Marcelo got injured and I had to play the whole pre-season, everything went well. I don't know why they signed (Fabio) Coentrão because he told me that if I kept training and playing like that I wouldn't have to worry."
Unfortunately, it didn't take long for everything to go wrong: "Then, in the last three days, (GM Jorge) Valdano came to me to tell me that it would be better if I went on loan. It wasn't the coach, it was Valdano. I asked the boss, but he didn't have the b***s to tell me things. He told me that it was the big boys, Valdano and all that, that he had nothing to do with it."