Xabi Alonso won't have to wait long for his next job

Xabi Alonso appears to be on a funeral march this Wednesday evening. Following Real Madrid’s 2-0 defeat to Celta Vigo on the weekend, just about every paper in Spain is reporting that Madrid’s patience with him is wearing thin, and his team will need to deliver an excellent performance against Manchester City in the Champions League to save his job.

On the surface, Real Madrid still look like Real Madrid. They’re trailing Barcelona in the La Liga title race, but they’re in 2nd place and their xG differential is virtually identical to their rivals. They’ve only lost once in Champions League, by one goal away to Liverpool. Their attacking radar looks like this:

If you are not a week in, week out follower of Real Madrid, talk of sacking Alonso just a few months after hiring him probably feels like a rather extreme overreaction to one bad result. But there’s been some pretty obvious discontent among the superstars in the dressing room for a while. Apparently they don’t really love being told that they need to show up for work on time, and that they shouldn’t bring their entourages to work.

Aurelien Tchouameni, while trying to shift blame for the Celta loss away from Alonso and onto the players, probably failed doing so. Generally, it does not help the case of an embattled manager when players admit that they are not giving maximum effort. Now, instead of getting criticized for being a hardass, Alonso is catching flak from pundits for giving lazy players too many days off.

Unlike other management jobs that are a bit about tactics, a bit about training, and a bit about people management, the Real Madrid manager job is something like 90% people management. Your favorite chalkboard genius that you read about on TFA or Spielverlagerung would get laughed off the Madrid training ground in less than a week, and players would immediately start freelancing.

In Alonso, the Real Madrid brass thought they had the right balance between gravitas and modern tactician. He’d won big trophies as a Madrid and Spain player, sharing the dressing room with the likes of Cristiano Ronaldo and Sergio Ramos, but he’d also crafted a team stronger than the sum of its parts as Bayer Leverkusen manager.

The results have been, in the immortal words of Gennaro Gattuso, sometimes maybe good, sometimes maybe shit. While Kylian Mbappe has 16 La Liga goals, things really aren’t working when he’s not firing. And Alonso has to battle the same problem as his predecessor: Mbappe and Vinicius Jr. want to occupy the same space, the team ends up extremely left-leaning, and that makes them easier to defend than they should be given their immense talent.

Mbappe is battling a minor injury ahead of the City game, by the way. He might have to sit out in favor of Endrick, who’s only played 11 minutes this season and already has a planned loan to Lyon lined up for January. While this might open up some space for Vini, I’d hardly call having to bench the most talented striker in the world a “blessing in disguise” or anything like that. You’d always rather have Kylian Mbappe.

If Alonso gets canned for losing to a top opponent without his best player available — while 2nd in La Liga and still in good position to make top 8 of this Champions League stage — it’ll look quite unfair. But Madrid is a vibes job where the manager is tasked with keeping the star players happy and motivated, because ultimately, star players are what wins top level football matches.

To use a cooking analogy — probably because I haven’t eaten breakfast yet — players are the main protein and tactics are the seasoning. Yes, you need to season properly to make cooking truly great, but seasoning can’t do anything for a steak that’s cooked to the consistency of shoe leather. We love doing detailed dives into stats and tactics at this newsletter, but all that stuff stops mattering when players a) straight up aren’t any good, which clearly is not Madrid’s problem, or b) aren’t playing for the manager anymore, which might be.

The stats take on Real Madrid is that they’ve been pretty good for a team adjusting to a new, young manager, and should obviously not fire him for being 2nd in La Liga and decent but not great in Champions League. A 0.82 xG differential per 90 is good, that guy should get more time. I am still high on the future of Xabi Alonso, football manager.

In another environment — like one where players are fighting to get to the mountaintop instead of having already reached it — Alonso’s disciplinarian schtick and detailed pressing systems won’t piss people off. His CV as a player seemed to make him the perfect fit for Real Madrid, but he clearly was not ready to come into a dressing room where players who already had Champions League winners medals did not care to be disciplined. And so, despite delivering some decent results, it’s only going to take a couple of bad ones for him to get shown the door.

I don’t think he’ll have to wait very long for a new job.

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