Real Madrid: That's just the way it is
Some things will never change ... unless Xabi Alonso can do something nobody else has managed to do
Like A Newsletter will continue to look at Arsenal consistently, but I’ve also thought about sharing some of my thoughts on other teams/players/matches here from time to time. So why not start with what might be the most interesting story of the upcoming season: how is Xabi Alonso going to change Real Madrid? ahead of Real Madrid, perhaps the most interesting team to look out for this summer and beyond?
After it was clear he would leave Paris Saint-Germain in the summer of 2018, but before it was clear he would become head coach at Arsenal, Unai Emery spoke to Marti Perarnau about his experience in the French capital.
One quote in particular from that interview has stuck with me ever since.
“One day, Jorge Valdano made me think by saying the following: 'In Barcelona, the leader is Lionel Messi. At Real, it is Florentino Pérez. At Atlético Madrid, it is Diego Simeone.’ A player, a president and a coach -- a different kind of leader each time. I know when I am the main person responsible and when I am not. It is something a coach has to live with and internalise: in every club, you have to know what your role is in relation to the rest of the group.”
Florentino Pérez has a singular vision: the biggest and best brand in the sporting world. This vision requires the biggest names, the best players, and, crucially, constant success.
The Harlem Globe Trotters meet the late 1990s New York Yankees and the early 2000s LA Lakers. That’s what Florentino Pérez’s Real Madrid is supposed to be.
And one thing that has never been central to any of it is any sort of grander footballing philosophy, like the organised possession play traditionally associated with Barcelona, or the ‘heavy metal football’ that Jürgen Klopp made his own personal brand that he took with him from Mainz to Dortmund and then Liverpool. No, being Real Madrid is about glory. It’s about being the biggest, best, the most successful, and not giving a damn about what makes you those things, as long as you are them.
So is it possible for a coach to ever truly change Real Madrid? To build their own version of a Real Madrid team? One that marries the more intricate details of the modern game — the details that bring more sustained success nowadays — with the president’s own vision and the big names he holds so dear?
That’s the challenge for Xabi Alonso. Either he will have to bend Real Madrid to his will, or he will end up bending under the sheer weight of everything that is Real Madrid.
It’s not quite like it was at Bayer Leverkusen.
In his only foray into the senior game as a head coach to date, Xabi Alonso arrived at Leverkusen and, thanks to his reputation as a player, was immediately everything to everyone at the club. It was the perfect first job: the perfect fit, the perfect size, the perfect platform.
The Spaniard arrived at a struggling club: Leverkusen, with a team that had finished third the previous season, were 17th in the 18-team Bundesliga after eight matches and had suffered a humiliating cup exit to boot.
He arrived at a club that doesn’t attract mammoth crowds or media attention.
He arrived at a club with an incredibly competent sporting department willing to give him time to get things right and work with him on his favoured targets when the transfer window opened. Not only did they do that, but they landed absolutely everyone they went for during his first two windows. That doesn’t happen very often.
He arrived at a club he was bigger than. A club that felt honoured to be hosting him and wouldn’t say no. Have at it, Xabi. Carte Blanche!
He arrived at a club whose players — those in situ, as well as those who jumped aboard — were in awe. Jonas Hofmann signed in the summer of 2023 and later said he was starstruck when Alonso FaceTimed him to talk about his plans.
With all that combined, Alonso could build whatever he wanted and was not under pressure to immediately deliver win after win. That being the case, he initially prioritised recapturing stability, fielding teams with three central defenders, focusing on the basics: a more compact shape would mean more defensive stability. “That helped us enormously,” defender Jonathan Tah told 11Freunde in the summer of 2023. There had been an expectation that Alonso would want to turn Leverkusen into a patient, Spanish-style, possession-based team overnight but he should much more pragmatism. You can’t build a house on shaky foundations.
With the back five in place, Alonso’s Leverkusen won 13 of their remaining 26 league games, having won one of their first eight, and the club set about building a team that could compete the following season.
Yep, compete. For the title. Already. Alonso demanded his team work hard and work smart, so Leverkusen recruited players who did both.
The back three had worked, so he stuck to it. It had especially worked for right wing-back Jeremie Frimpong. But Alonso wanted more possession, more technical quality, more control. So Alejandro Grimaldo was signed to play on the other flank — essentially a playmaker from left-back — and Granit Xhaka was signed to play a quarter-back-esque role with his aggressive and incisive passing in midfield. As a midfielder who has always struggled covering loads of ground, having three central defenders behind him suited him perfectly.
Germany’s biggest football magazine, 11Freunde, ran a cover story on Leverkusen ahead of the 2023/24 season.
The best coach in the league: How Xabi Alonso’s can turn Bayer 04 into champions
Prophetic as it turned out to be, that was a hell of a claim to have been making when he was less than a year into the job. But you read the article and it’s not hard to see why.
Sporting director Simon Rolfes talks about how impressed he was by Alonso’s attention to detail. CEO Fernando Carro boasts that the club secured their first choice target in every single position — Xhaka, Grimaldo, Hofmann, Boniface — in the summer transfer window. The blueprint was drawn up in 2022/23 and the team was perfected that summer. Hofmann’s role was to play between the lines alongside Florian Wirtz, with Boniface leading the line. the entire team had been thought out and put together and everything came off perfectly.
A ball hadn’t even been kicked in 2023/24 when that magazine went to print. Leverkusen would go on to win the double and lose one match — the Europa League final — all season.
Alonso comes across as detail-oriented, yes, but also uncompromising.
Those aren’t necessarily terms you’d associate with Real Madrid’s approach to the game.
“We want competition in the team,” he is quoted as saying in that 11Freunde article. “Every player has to earn their place in the lineup. Everyone must give everything.”
They aren’t necessarily demands you’d expect Real Madrid’s stars to happily accept. And it’s certainly not in keeping with the sort of approach that has brought Real Madrid success in recent times, with Zinedine Zidane and Carlo Ancelotti mostly tasked with keeping dressing rooms happy and making sure the team isn’t too unbalanced.
The players, at least the big names, have not shown too much willingness compromise and work for the team. They haven’t paid attention to the details. Their talent is what has taken them this far, so their talent is what they lean on to win them games, defensively they mostly bunker in and hope for the best (and lean on the talents of their defenders and goalkeeper) before allowing the talent further upfield to win games when the ball reaches them.
Places in the lineup aren’t really earned. After all, who is going to leave Jude Bellingham or Kylian Mbappé on the bench? And if you do leave them on the bench, they aren’t the only ones you’ll have to answer to, because Florentino Pérez will probably not love the fact the sparkling brand of Real Madrid is not making the most out of its biggest assets.
Do you want to tell Pérez you’ve dropped Mbappé because it’s not working with him, Vinícius Júnior and Bellingham all in the same team? His answer is likely to be: make it work, or we’ll find someone else who will. The biggest names are at Real Madrid so the world can see that the biggest names play for Real Madrid. Don’t hide them, don’t upset them. Make it work.
Nobody at the Real Madrid has to make as many compromises as the manager. Alonso has a great legacy in the Spanish capital — there’s been no shortage of ‘homecoming’ talk from all parties — and a playing career that will impress even the most decorated players already at Madrid. But it will not inspire awe from fellow World Cup and Champions League winners, players who, to a man, have Ballon d’Or aspirations. Alonso will not be able to get his way because he’s Xabi Alonso: he will have to convince players to embrace change.
These players like to play football because it’s fun and they’re good at it, but their interest and their output wane when the other team has the ball. That’s the potential issue you run into when you have, not exactly an entire XI, but as close as it gets to a team full of fantasy names.
When you think of all-star teams, my mind immediately goes to American sports and, specifically, basketball at the highest level. Here’s a sport where, with small-sided teams, you get real accumulations of superstars.
And it can work. Miami Heat’s The Big Three (LeBron James, Dwayne Wade, Chris Bosh) won back-to-back championships (and reached the Finals four years in a row) after a few teething issues and a humbling Finals defeat made them reassess their roles and recommit to making it work for the team, not for themselves.
But it doesn’t always go right.
Pretty much anyone with an interest in sport will have heard of the USA Dream Team of 1992, but the Nightmare Team of 2004 shouldn’t be forgotten either.
Some big names were missing for various reasons but the USA obviously still arrived at the 2004 Olympic Games with a group of NBA players whose talent enormously outstripped that of any other competing nation.
But depending on who you ask, there was no …
No thought given to how the team will actually mesh on the court? Sounds like Real Madrid.
Not enough structure or discipline? Sounds like Real Madrid.
Not enough “letting us play”? Sounds like something a lot of Real Madrid players might feel if you tried to impose structure and discipline.
You get the impression two-time NBA All-Star Stephen Marbury, who said that last part, would maybe enjoy playing under Zinedine Zidane and Carlo Ancelotti more than he’d like to play for Xabi Alonso.
Or at least it seems, because the reporting suggests Alonso is going to try to implement more structure, more discipline.
Some things will naturally be different to his time at Leverkusen. He’s expected to use a back four because it better suits this set of players; after all, it’s all about platforming their talent, not sticking dogmatically to particular shape. But whatever the system, there will still be a way of playing and Alonso will be keen to introduce his own ideas to create a Real Madrid that presses higher and is more capable of suffocating opponents the way the best teams do.
According to Cadena SER this week, he has already set about telling his players exactly what is expected of them. He’s attributed as saying:
“Those who do not run and those who do not make an effort will not play.”
“It’s not going to be enough to just stay waiting for them to give you the ball so you can score. You’re going to have to run for every ball.”
According to AS, he does not want Madrid to sit in a deep block as they often have in recent seasons. He wants them to play aggressively against the ball. He wants the team to be compact and press as a unit. But units like that don’t work at the highest level if just one of the parts isn’t fully keyed into the task.
When taking over an ailing Barcelona in 2008, Pep Guardiola demanded his team would never be outworked by their opposition. Guardiola believed his players were more talented than anyone they would come up against, so would only lose games if they were outworked. The mantra was essentially: as hard as the opposition first, then the talent gap will be able to show itself and decide the game. He was right. But it only worked because the players bought in.
Nobody can match Real Madrid’s talent but how that talent meshes together, and the work talented individuals are willing to do that isn’t necessarily fun, is going to be the key.
When Alonso set about the task in Germany, he had a blank canvas to make his own. He had players who would hang on his every word, for he had had a career they could only dream of. He was set targets that could be, and were, outdone. Those things do not and will not exist at the Bernabéu.
To change the way Real Madrid fundamentally play requires a fundamental change at Real Madrid. The culture of having superstar players who don’t have to work as hard or as smart as their team-mates has to change.
We usually talk about that sort culture change coming from underperforming clubs who need to cut the deadwood loose but Real Madrid don’t have deadwood, they have stars. Those players have been treated like stars, they are encouraged to create superstar-like brands (#Trent) and they are paid superstar salaries.
But they can’t be indulged if Alonso is to succeed. Ultimately, the players are the ones on the pitch and any change has to come from them. Convincing them to change will be Alonso’s biggest challenge at the world’s most challenging club, it will ultimately be what defines his reign. If Real Madrid are to play his football and win, they will need Mbappé, Vini Jr., Bellingham and all the rest to play for the whole, even when it means sacrificing glory on an individual basis.