Why writing off Xabi never sat right

I don’t mind a bit of debate about managers. In fact, it’s half the fun. But the outright opposition to Xabi Alonso, especially when it’s dressed up as “he failed miserably”, never quite sits right with me. Doubts are fair. Dismissal is different.

The Real Madrid bit is usually where it gets lazy. People will say he didn’t make it work there, therefore he can’t handle a big job. But if your argument ignores that his win percentage was extremely high, then what are we actually doing? It starts to sound like the verdict was decided before the evidence turned up.

Culture matters more than the tactics board

There’s also a bigger point here that gets glossed over: you can’t “coach” your way out of a broken dressing-room culture if the club doesn’t want to fix it. If you’ve got players who won’t buy into hard work, basic respect, or the manager’s vision, and the hierarchy either shrugs or quietly enables it, then the manager’s ceiling is obvious.

That’s not an excuse for everything, but it is reality. Coaches aren’t magicians. They need the club pulling in the same direction, and if it’s a place where behaviour becomes the story as often as the football, it’s hard to pin it all on the fella on the touchline.

Leverkusen: judge the scale of the job

Then you get to his Leverkusen work, and this is where I struggle to understand any attempt to downplay it. You can argue about leagues, budgets, squads, all that. But anyone with eyes can see the scale of what he did there.

The easiest way to describe it for an English football brain is the comparison: it’s like someone walking into Spurs and winning the Premier League and FA Cup unbeaten all season, then only coming up short in a European final. That’s not “a good run”. That’s a proper statement.

Healthy scepticism, not entrenched bias

None of this is to say Liverpool should appoint anyone on sentiment. We’ve just lived through years where standards were sky-high, and now Arne Slot has his own job to do and his own way to do it. But if we’re talking about Alonso in any context, let’s at least be honest about what he’s shown.

You can question fit, timing, personality, whether he’d fancy it, whatever you like. Just don’t pretend the CV reads like a flop. It doesn’t. It reads like a coach who’s already dealt with big expectations, and then gone and delivered something genuinely rare somewhere else.

Written by Changingofthegvardiol: 28 January 2026