Can Xabi Alonso reinvent Real Madrid? Part One

We're into genuinely new territory here

Hi, everyone. This article on Xabi Alonso and Real Madrid gradually became so massive that I realised it needed to be split into two parts. Here’s part one, on the cultural implications for Madrid as an institution. Part two will look at a more granular view of the players and tactics.

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“Tony Blair and New Labour. We forced our opponents to change their minds.”

— Margaret Thatcher, asked of her greatest achievement

Xabi Alonso is both exactly the man you’d expect Real Madrid to hire in this moment and a pretty radical departure.

On the one hand, he knows the institution and Florentino Pérez personally. That’s half the battle at Real Madrid. You can’t walk in and expect things to function the way they do anywhere else, and Xabi Alonso will be well aware of this. Madrid haven’t employed a manager without previous experience of the club in some capacity since Carlo Ancelotti’s first spell in charge a decade ago, and that’s clearly a deliberate choice. Zinedine Zidane had great success in the dugout in no small part because he’d seen the galactico culture up close and had an internal critique of it. He was able to add a modicum of structure and discipline to Real Madrid without upsetting people or changing the essence of how the club works. Ancelotti, ever the deft touch, returned for his second spell with a much better sense of how to keep everyone at this club happy. Pérez has lost interest in dealing with outsiders, and for good reason.

But at the same time, Alonso has always been an outsider.

Have you ever been to the Bernabéu stadium tour?

In the most positive sense possible, it feels like being indoctrinated into a cult.

You get shown around an endless parade of trophies and success stories, with “Hala Madrid ...y nada más” playing on the speakers, all to create a simple message: this club is the pinnacle. It doesn’t matter what any other football club ever achieves. It doesn’t matter if they have a few nice players. All of them are beneath Real Madrid. All of them are ultimately side-quests in the main story of football: Hala Madrid… y nada más. Let’s go Madrid… and nothing more. This club is the only one that matters.

If you look at the trophy cabinet, that seems to be the case, but it hasn’t always been plain sailing. Madrid won the first five editions of the European Cup (now the Champions League) in a row, picked up another in 1966, but then had to wait over 30 years to finally lift the trophy again in 1998. In that time, the only side from La Liga to win the competition were Johan Cruyff’s Barcelona, in a style that seemed to reinvent football. Madrid finally won the Champions League again in 1998 and 2000, but from there the club would get redefined. Florentino was coming.

I don’t really need to tell you about Pérez’ approach here. He wanted to sign the best player in the world every summer, which first meant stealing Luís Figo from Barcelona, followed by Zidane then Ronaldo Nazário. That approach successfully delivered the ninth European Cup, La Novena, before the whole strategy kind of ate itself and the club went on a barren spell that saw Pérez resign from embarrassment then return to fix a huge gulf with Barcelona.

By his second spell in 2009, Barça were playing arguably the best football any of us had ever seen under Pep Guardiola’s more holistic style taking Cruyffian principles to new heights. Pérez was going to close the gap by doing the exact opposite. Madrid broke the bank on Cristiano Ronaldo, inarguably the best player in the world not named Lionel Messi, along with exciting young striker Karim Benzema and 2007 Ballon d’Or winner Kaká (look, they can’t all be winners). There was one small concession, though, to the dominant trends coming out of Barcelona and taking over Spanish football. They would also add a central midfielder seen to embody the Spanish passing game. He’d be Madrid’s answer to Barça’s endless possession game. They were signing Xabi Alonso.

It didn’t really work out that way. Madrid hired José Mourinho a year later and really did mould themselves into the anti-Barça. Mourinho’s team did play good football at times, outscoring Barcelona for two consecutive league seasons, but they tended to attack in fast transitions. In bigger games, they would often defend deep. I don’t think it was a bad approach at all, and I’d argue it produced better football than most of what came after, but it had very little in common with Barcelona’s approach. It was the same model of play that Mourinho’s Porto, Chelsea and Inter sides embraced.

Guardiola’s football has always been, above all else, proactive. He makes a lot of tweaks based on the opponent, but his teams always seek to assert themselves on the game. They want to control both the ball and the space to force the opponent to play their game. Mourinho’s football, on the other hand, often relies on waiting for the opposition errors in order to ruthlessly exploit them. It is a reactive approach to achieve a reactionary outlook. People badly misuse that word in football, but Mourinho’s Madrid had a single project: to oppose the radical new ideas of Barcelona’s progressive game. That was pretty much it.

When the Mourinho project collapsed and it was time for Madrid to embrace a different style of football, they very much did not go for a proactive coach trying to assert control over the game. They hired Carlo Ancelotti, Mr. Laissez-faire. Ancelotti has overwhelmingly played attacking football, though the shape that takes has varied over the years. At Milan in the 2000s, he favoured a passing game crammed with playmakers. At Madrid, he pretty quickly realised an attack of Ángel Di María, Gareth Bale, Ronaldo and Benzema was suited to fast counters. They were able to keep the balance and control needed at the top level because Alonso and Luka Modrić were pulling the strings in midfield. The balance was spot on.

Then Alonso asked to leave. No one is supposed to choose to leave Real Madrid, but he did so for one reason: Guardiola. In his own evolution, he wanted to see the master up close. He wanted to add those ideas to his eventual coaching repertoire. He wanted the one thing Madrid couldn’t give him.

From there, Madrid spent the vast majority of the next decade-and-change under Zidane and Ancelotti. Zidane is not quite so relaxed as Ancelotti. It’s clear that he felt Real Madrid lacked discipline during his playing years, and his coaching project tried to give the club more of the order he felt at Juventus, on and off the pitch. But Zidane never developed clear patterns of play. His side won the Champions League three times in a row with an incredibly consistent core of players, but this was really their team. He had a group of assembled superstars and looked to allow them to play their football on their terms. Much like Ancelotti, it’s hard to guess how Zidane would coach another side of different players.

When Zidane stepped down and Ancelotti returned these past few years, he had a particularly difficult coaching job. He was able to win the Champions League in his first season back in charge, through a blend of promising younger players and veterans a little past their best. Of the team to beat Liverpool in the 2022 final, five players (Dani Carvajal, Casemiro, Modrić, Toni Kroos and Benzema) had featured in Zidane’s trilogy of wins, while David Alaba won the trophy twice at Bayern. But that balance would shift. When they reached the final again two years later, Benzema and Casemiro had both left the club, while Modrić was no longer considered a starter. The front three of Jude Bellingham, Vinícius Júnior and Rodrygo had an average age of 23 and not a single recognised striker. This was a fresher, more vibrant, less experienced side. The result was the same.

“Some teams are a bit more structured in terms of the passing styles and the patterns of play”, Bellingham explained after beating Manchester City en route to the trophy, “and it’s really interesting to watch, and it’s definitely difficult to play against. But I think one of our biggest strengths is that we’re so off the cuff”.

Bellingham was speaking a pretty obvious truth. All of football had moved in one direction since 2008. All of football had become like Barcelona. Madrid were doing the opposite.

Since Guardiola took over at the Camp Nou, Barcelona have just three Champions League wins to Real Madrid’s five. But Barça had something else, something that can’t be measured in silverware: cool. Everyone in the world watched Guardiola’s team of locally trained talents playing a radically new style of football and wanted to copy it. Barça were football’s number one influencers. The Barça way was incredibly fashionable, and thus everyone started wearing cheap knock-offs.

Barça were iterating on Cruyff’s methods, and the Dutchman very much had this same experience in his playing career. Cruyff was the star player and icon of the Netherlands side managed by Rinus Michels that lost the 1974 World Cup final to West Germany. But where the national team that would officially become just “Germany” got to lift the trophy for a second time, the Dutch were able to inspire the world. We talk about Total Football and its principles to this day. I could not name a single tactical idea distinct to the 1974 West Germany side.

Cruyff, according to Simon Kuper in his book Barça, “eventually rationalised the defeat as a moral victory. This was a new category for a man who cheated at dominos and Monopoly to beat his kids, but the notion of moral victory would mark his thinking for ever after. He came to argue that the Dutch had ‘really’ won the World Cup because they played beautiful football that people remembered. ‘Imagine – that defeat made us more famous than a victory could have.’”

Even if it came from a place of vanity, Cruyff was right. Everyone loved and embraced the Dutch methods. By the 2010s, even Germany had fully embraced their own take on total football when they won the World Cup for a fourth time. Cruyff and the Netherlands changed football more than any German side ever has. Essentially no one rejects those methods at this point.

I think Cruyff’s mentality rubbed off on Barcelona here. “Mourinho is a great coach”, Xavi Hernández once claimed, “but he will not enter the history of football. To go down in history you must do different things, and he does not bring new things to the game”. The Barça identity was not simply about winning, but doing so in a way that meant something. As an institution with deep roots in outsider Catalan culture and identity, embracing Cruyff’s “moral victory” made perfect sense for the més que un club philosophy. And again, it was entirely correct. Everyone from the biggest clubs in Europe to dads coaching their kids’ teams tried to copy positional play, what became a shorthand for Barça’s interpretation of total football (don’t @ me, tacticos). I see people online complaining that Guardiola “ruined” football, but if he did, it’s only because his methods became so commonplace.

Alonso specifically left Madrid to study Guardiola’s methods. “I was so curious to find out his secrets”, he said years after the fact. He had obviously worked with renowned coaches before, having won the Champions League with Ancelotti and Rafa Benítez along with La Liga under Mourinho, but those three were a different sort of manager. None of them have an overarching philosophy of structurally controlling games with the ball. None of them are tactical teachers with protégés. Guardiola has teachable ideas about football he can and has passed on to others. We can see that in Alonso.

It’s not exactly the same. He’s certainly found a new spin on positional play (check out The Purist’s excellent video for more). But it’s rooted in the idea of having structure and plans in possession that get drilled on the training ground. That, in Spanish football, is a distinctly Barça way of doing things. This is why it’s a risk to hire Alonso. If he fails, it will be because he could not shift the culture of Madrid, be it at boardroom level or from the players refusing to adapt. I don’t think this is a slam dunk appointment. I can easily imagine the bigger stars of this team refusing to gel with a more structured approach. It could end in tears.

But if it works, it will reshape Madrid in a new direction. To keep on top, to keep winning the biggest trophies, Real Madrid have decided they must become more like Barcelona. If nothing else, some in Catalonia should celebrate the moral victory.

In part two, we will look at how Alonso might use this specific Madrid squad. Stay tuned for that.