It finished as it started, with a new coach like Xabi Alonso apparently totally out of sync with the grand old institution of Real Madrid around him.
While many around the club were all too keen to point to Kylian Mbappe allegedly stopping his teammates giving Barcelona a Super Cup guard of honour, as appeared to have been suggested, some went back much further. They went back to Alonso’s first assignment, and a fixture against Al Hilal at the Club World Cup.
Although Florentino Perez actively wanted the club to constantly proclaim the historic significance of this new competition, in keeping with his own ambitions for modern football, Alonso couldn’t really hide the fact that he didn’t attribute any sporting importance to it. Sources maintain this immediately created an issue for Perez with his vaunted new appointment. There was barely any public support for Alonso after that, and not even a mention in the president’s annual Christmas message.
That’s quite a bookend to a brief coaching tenure, that only symbolises the way every Madrid coach always gets squeezed out by the stars and the president. The saying at the Bernabeu – that has actually been articulated to executives of other major clubs – is that the coach barely matters.
Duly, there was so much you could wrap into these two moments as reflective of that stance as well as Alonso’s time. There was another defeat to Barcelona, this time 3-2. There was the way off-pitch events overshadowed actual performance. There were the apparent priorities of the club at the Club World Cup. There was finally the symbolism of the Madrid stars apparently just doing their own thing. The coach couldn’t get them into shape.
There are a lot of parables here for the modern game, and how Madrid almost always take everything to extremes.
They are, after all, the third Super League club to dispense with their head coach in the 12 days of 2026 so far. The grand difference this time, however, was that the very appointment of Alonso was supposed to herald a new direction.
Conscious of the way the game is evolving, Madrid supposedly wanted to move away from individual stars and toward a more system-driven game – even if a key point was that it absolutely wasn’t going to be Barcelona’s positional system.
Alonso offered a perfect solution there, since he represents a “third way” in the sport’s evolving tactics, and is also a club legend.
What does it say about Madrid’s capacity for evolution if their old institutional resistance to all of this comes to bear after a few months, and a few mishaps? How can you ever move on if you show no patience whatsoever?
“It’s Madrid,” one figure with knowledge of the dressing room laughed in the moments after the customary “comunicado oficial’. “You lose, you’re gone.”
Some things don’t change.
Many of the same sources would nevertheless insist that this wasn’t actually about Madrid’s institutional resistance at all. It was about Alonso himself, and Alonso alone.
One dressing room insider puts it blankly: “Nobody liked him.” While that is a view certainly expressed with considerable strength from one side of the dressing room, it is certainly true that Alonso struggled to click with the team from the off. His ideas weren’t setting in.
He is said to have “lost the dressing room” very early on; as if not suited to certain personalities. But, typically in such a dressing room, that also worked both ways. Alonso was seen as significantly deviating from his own ideology, but then this was also criticised as not showing courage of conviction; as not “pissing with your own”, as was genuinely once said by Pep Guardiola. Other sources point to how Alonso was brought in on the expectation he would have Martin Zubimendi – or, at least, a Martin Zubimendi-style player – to anchor the entire team. He had nothing close, ensuring there was a “disconnect” between team and idea from the off.
It is because of that there’s a belief that Alonso started to lean on more of the younger players – like Franco Mastantuono, like Arda Guler, like Gonzalo Garcia – because they are easier to mould. The problem at Madrid is that such selections amount to political statements, especially when stars are expressly signed for commercial ambitions.
Vinicius Junior is the player most highlighted as being caught in the middle of all that, which is why his supreme goal in the Super Cup was all the more significant.
The Bernabeu hierarchy have been concerned with how, for all Alonso’s tactical pretensions, the team has had two modes. That is either sit with five at the back in a way Madrid never should, or step out into a shapeless mess that is almost completely dependent on Thibaut Courtois stopping goals at one end and Mbappe scoring at the other – with players like Vinicius then just linking it together with some running.
The nadir of this was the home defeat to Manchester City, after which Alonso is said to have essentially been on borrowed time.
There have also been echoes of Enzo Maresca’s Chelsea in how much of the reporting in Spain has made mention of the physical conditioning and how many injuries they’ve suffered.
Through all of this, Madrid also just take all of the big recent football themes to extremes, and with their own distinctive Galactico flourish. This is just another case of the tension between the authority of the head coach and the workings of the executive, even if this executive has a lot of its own long institutional idiosyncrasies rather than the more modern trappings of other clubs; of lesser clubs.
It is also those very idiosyncrasies, however, that mean this might not matter too much for Alonso’s medium-term career.
He won’t be viewed like Ruben Amorim. Other executives will be looking at what he did at Bayer Leverkusen rather than the same old story at the Bernabeu. One prominent figure at a major club describes him as “still at the level of Arne Slot or Mikel Arteta – someone who can be elite”.
Put short, another major name has entered the manager market, ahead of a six-month spell when a lot of big clubs are going to be looking. Manchester United have mentioned him before. And what of Slot?
This changes the manager market, precisely because Madrid themselves don’t change at all.
