Xabi Alonso: Real Madrid, Bayern Munich or Liverpool’s next manager…?
Andrew Walker 
Bayer Leverkusen’s rise to the summit of the Bundesliga has seen Xabi Alonso become one of the most talked-about young managers in European football.
The 41-year-old former Liverpool, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich and Spain midfielder only took over at the BayArena in October last year but has lifted them from second-bottom of Germany’s 18-team top flight to what looks like being a serious title challenge this season.
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In a recent edition of The Athletic Football Podcast, host Ayo Akinwolere asked The Athletic’s Raphael Honigstein and Thom Harris to explain what it is that has made Alonso so successful so quickly, and why so many of Europe’s biggest clubs will soon want him as their next manager.
Read the best bits below, or listen to the episode add-free and in full on The Athletic app.
Ayo Akinwolere: Xabi Alonso has been at Bayer Leverkusen for 13 months, Rapha, and they have gone from a relegation scrap to top of the Bundesliga. It’s been an impressive start, right?
Raphael Honigstein: Very impressive. For Alonso, Leverkusen was a wise choice because although they looked like they were heading for relegation last season, the team’s quality was such that a bounce-back was probably inevitable whoever the new manager was, let alone one who’s so good at coaching and at motivating players. I was lucky enough to see training last year. He is out on the pitch. He talks a lot. He will play the opening ball out to show people where they need to run. His touch is still better than anyone else’s and he’s won it all (as a player). So he’s got that rare combination of real strong tactical and technical fundamentals as a coach, but also the playing background that players just look up to.
Ping. 😮💨#Bayer04 #Werkself | @XabiAlonso
— Bayer 04 Leverkusen (@bayer04_en) October 16, 2023
Akinwolere: Can you give us a sense of how he got the job at Leverkusen?
Honigstein: He was already a hot property, even though he was only at Real Sociedad B, because of his stature as a player — there was even talk that Bayern might take a look at him. Leverkusen have a Spanish CEO in Fernando Carro and I’m sure that would have been part of the connection. But he was already on the radar for a lot of fairly big clubs, even though he lacked that experience because of all the insight he’s been able to absorb over the years.
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Having worked with Pep Guardiola, with Rafa Benitez, with Jose Mourinho, with Carlo Ancelotti, and also having a reputation within the game as somebody who is going to be an up-and-coming coach, everyone felt, ‘This guy is going to make it’. And a lot of innovative clubs who were looking for the next big thing were interested in him. But Leverkusen was an excellent choice.
Thom Harris: Looking at his performance at Real Sociedad B, he did actually get them relegated (to Spain’s third tier) but before that he had got them promoted to the Segunda Division, the second division of Spanish football, for the first time in 60 years. That squad had an average age of 21.4 — a very young squad in a league with some big clubs in it. He got them playing really good, possession-based football. Fearless.
I think they had 70 per cent possession (in games) on numerous occasions. So even though it ultimately didn’t end the way he would have liked it to, with him keeping them in the second division, the fact that he got them there and got them playing the way he wanted them to play shows his personality and his identity as a coach were really strong.
Akinwolere: I wonder if there’s anything in his DNA as a coach from rubbing shoulders with some of the best managers in the world…
Harris: Guardiola is the one you can see instantly. You see that in Leverkusen’s brand of possession football but also in the way that, out of possession, they play a kind of rigid positional football. They’re playing such a high line this season in comparison to what they were in previous seasons, pressing right up the pitch. When they lose the ball, they’re in a position where they can pounce almost straight away and win it back in dangerous areas. And the data suggests that they’re about five meters higher up the pitch.
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They’re winning the ball in the attacking third a lot more than they were before. And that is very much a Guardiola thing, controlling the ball and controlling the game while having the ball. But when you’re not on the ball, getting in a good shape to make sure that you can’t be hit on the counter-attack. You wonder whether we might start to see that Mourinho-type ability to cling on in games, which might come in handy as this title challenge continues. And Ancelotti has been very good at creating chaos by positioning players around Vinicius Junior to get the best out of him. We might see that with Florian Wirtz at Leverkusen, or we might see that with (Alex) Grimaldo on the left. It will be interesting to see how it all develops.
Akinwolere: Do we have any insight into how he deals with individual players? How does he get the best out of them? How important is his standing as a player who has won everything?
Honigstein: That’s a big part of it and it shouldn’t be underestimated. You can convince players through the strength of your tactical ideas but the fact he’s speaking to you from a position of having won everything and having been exposed to all these different ideas and having distilled his own principles from that, I think is hugely impressive in the first place.
But people at the club have told me that he’s very, very strict, will not tolerate players not being at 100 per cent in training, punctuality, all the things you’d expect somebody who’s won so many trophies to demand of his players. For a club that has sometimes been a bit of a comfort zone for players, it was very important to have somebody in who’s really instilled that sense of, ‘No, we have to win now’ and drive that home through his own behaviour.
He’s been very infectious around the place, although when he speaks to the staff they’re not always exactly blown away by the rhetoric, but they believe in him and what he’s telling them. He’s saying, ‘If we do this and that, we’re going to win’. And they are winning, so the mood is incredible.
Akinwolere: If you’re going to be a top, top coach, do you need to have more charisma?
Honigstein: Being able to speak regularly in front of 23, 25 young men, and a third of them would be unhappy for one reason or another, I think you have to have charisma. You don’t have to be an incredible orator, but you do need to have charisma, and he does. Maybe he just considered speaking in front of the staff as less of a priority for him, which is probably understandable.
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But I think coaching comes down to helping players perform. And you can do that either through being brilliant in terms of how you empathise with them or how you relate to them on an emotional level, or by offering more pragmatic, technical help: ‘If you do this, you’ll be better… Go there, do this, play the ball here, position yourself there’. If you can combine all these things, then you’ve got the making of a superstar coach.
Last season, when they got knocked out by Roma in the semi-final of the Europa League, I wrote that it almost didn’t matter that he didn’t win a trophy in that first year, because you could see that Alonso is going to be a superstar and this season is just the continuation of that.
Harris: There was a really good article on The Athletic by Liam Tharme, looking at why so many holding midfielders are going on to become managers. There was a study saying around 42 per cent of former players who are managers were midfielders. If you want somebody to tell you where to go and what to do and how to improve your game, holding midfielder is a place where you can see the game happening around you. You’ve got more of an understanding of it.
Guardiola has spoken about it in the past saying, when you’re a striker, you’re mostly thinking about scoring, but when you’re a midfielder, you’ve got to know what’s happening across the entire pitch, where to position yourself. There aren’t many better people to listen to in that regard than Alonso.
Akinwolere: What about what could come further down the line for Alonso? There were conversations about other clubs over the summer, but he stuck with Leverkusen. But are Leverkusen thinking, ‘We know it’s not going to last forever’?
Honigstein: They’re very realistic. They understand that a budding superstar coach is not going to devote the best part of 10 years to continuing at Leverkusen. He’s going to be ambitious. He wants to win titles, he wants to win the Champions League, and that’s going to be so much harder at Leverkusen. Ultimately, you want to work with the best players and you want to work in the biggest club possible, and also making the best money possible as a coach, even though I think that’s probably less of a factor for Alonso after 20 years at the highest level as a player.
Leverkusen understand that if Real Madrid or Bayern Munich or a club of that size come in, he’ll find it very hard to turn them down. Whether there’s an explicit release clause to allow for that possibility is something that is not clear. Leverkusen have not really commented, but they will not keep a coach against his will.
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They will try to get the best compensation because I think increasingly clubs are realising the value of a manager of that quality. Because it’s not just a sporting success, it’s also the value of the players, every player who works, and the manager that improves players, their value goes up and there is no other way in football to increase your bottom line as quickly as having a coach that improves your players and takes a €10million player and makes him into a €50m player within the space of a year or two.
You cannot generate the income any other way organically, unless you have somebody signing a cheque in Dubai or Abu Dhabi, so they understand that they will want to get paid. But if the offer comes in from, say, Real Madrid in the summer, which might well happen, then Leverkusen won’t stand in his way.
Akinwolere: But what about the possibility of Alonso going back to Liverpool, Thom? Would that be a good fit?
Harris: I think out of the two, Real Madrid would be my choice. Just because Liverpool are such a transitional team under Jurgen Klopp, they like to play on the counter-attack. They like to play a kind of ‘heavy metal football’, as he so often calls it. That would need a bit more of a transition if Alonso was to go there. But both are amazing options. He’s got legacies at both clubs and it doesn’t really matter if this is his first big, big club at very the top of the game because he commands that respect. Even if he’s managing players like Jude Bellingham, you know they will still look up to him because he’s Xabi Alonso. He’s done it all. And he’s clearly still got that kind of technical ability, as Raph was saying, so he can show the players what he wants in training. They’ll all respect that. That combined with the intelligence he clearly has and the identity and the legacy he has in the game, I think he’ll be able to go anywhere he wants.
(Top photo: Ina Fassbender/AFP via Getty Images)
