Xabi Alonso takes charge of Real Madrid for the first time at the 2025 FIFA Club World Cup. His system of structured freedom could set the club up for another decade of dominance.
Xabi Alonso’s playing career was a lesson in elegant timing.
He had an uncanny knack for showing up exactly where the footballing zeitgeist was about to happen. There was Liverpool’s ‘Miracle of Istanbul’. Then on to Real Madrid, just in time for the Lisbon final that kickstarted a decade-long dominance of the Champions League. And finally, Bayern Munich, arriving right as Pep Guardiola began to turn the Bundesliga into Europe’s de-facto innovation centre for football tactics.
From San Sebastián to Liverpool to Madrid to Munich, he moved with an effortlessness that is hard to replicate, collecting trophies like passport stamps and always moving up, or sideways but never down. It felt like, in a sense, the footballing equivalent of the Instagram travel influencer who’s somehow always at the perfect sunset.
Even his retirement was the kind of statement that makes you wonder just how one person could be so innately suave: “Lived it, loved it. Farewell beautiful game.”
Straight-forward, and yet cinematic in its simplicity.
So, of course he’d find himself at Real Madrid right at the moment when timing matters most. The club have been coasting through a post-Galácticos afterparty with Carlo Ancelotti as the low-key party host. The Italian kept the trophies rolling in without ever creating a unified philosophy of football or consistent cohesion on the field.
To suggest that Ancelotti was nothing more than a manager of vibes is both wrong and massively insulting. He won 15 trophies across two spells with the club and left this summer as one of the most successful managers in the history of the game.
But it’s also true to say that you don’t last that long at Real Madrid without having an ability to toe the line. Ancelotti’s gift has always been reading the room.
Madrid is a place that never quite knows what it wants. The drill sergeants with laminated tactical notebooks on one end to ex-players in suits promising good vibes and historical continuity on the other. The last time the club flirted with the former, back when Antonio Conte was being linked to the manager’s job in November 2020, Sergio Ramos threw cold water on the idea quicker than you could say tactical periodisation with his “you don’t impose respect, you have to earn it” comment. “In the end, knowing how to manage the dressing room is more important than what the manager knows,” Ramos said.
Conte didn’t get the job, of course.
For all of Madrid’s success, it’s the line they have never been able to walk consistently; too much structure and the place collapses into revolt, but too little and you’re left with vibes and the questionable strategy of impossible comebacks. Zinedine Zidane and Santiago Solari were more ambassadors than tacticians or managers by vocation. Julen Lopetegui and Rafa Benítez the exact opposite.
Alonso is different. He’s got the credentials with trophies, experience and a crystal clear tactical vision. At Real Sociedad B and Bayer Leverkusen, he’s proved he can build a team with an identity. But he’s also got the respect.
“You can tell he was a player because he understands them and gives them confidence,” Alejandro Grimaldo told Mundo Maldini. “But he also likes discipline. It’s sometimes hard to transmit your ideas to the players but he does it really well so that everyone knows what to do. They do it with confidence along with a little bit of freedom so they can enjoy themselves.”
Alonso’s appointment as the manager of Real Madrid is an admission from the higher-ups at the club that the vibes era is over. The age of reactive tactics is gone and it’s time to create a sustainable style of football.
Xabi Alonso’s Real Madrid Mandate
The first order of business on Alonso’s agenda will be to fix Madrid’s defensive problem. Madrid, for all their mystique, spent last season defending like a team allergic to structure.
Of the 24 teams to make the knockout stages of the Champions League, Madrid ranked 21st for high turnovers with just 6.2 per game. They averaged 1.95 expected goals on target against – only Brest and Feyenoord were worse.
Despite finishing within touching distance of Barcelona in La Liga, the data tells a different story. Madrid didn’t beat Barcelona once across four games. They conceded 16, scored 7, and posted a -4.3 xG difference in those games. If it wasn’t for the fanfare, you would hardly think it was a rivalry at all.
In the first leg against Arsenal in the Champions League knockouts, Madrid recorded just 36 high-intensity pressures in the final third — the joint-lowest of the entire knockout stage across 45 matches, tied with Arsenal’s own effort against Paris Saint-Germain.
Enter Alonso. His system, heavily associated with a back three, will solve multiple issues for Real Madrid with and without the ball.
Robbie Dunne / Data JournalistThere are more angles in build-up, better coverage in wide areas. As Martin Rafelt of Spielverlagerung tells Opta Analyst, it gives teams “an additional build-up angle and prevents too early passes to the wing areas where you can get isolated more easily.”
It also allows Madrid to shift the defensive burden. Instead of asking wide attackers to defend like wing-backs, you use actual wing-backs and wide centre-backs to close those spaces.
Last season, Madrid played with two centre-backs in 97% of their matches and cycled through 11 different pairings. Now, with Dani Carvajal coming back from injury and new signing Dean Huijsen as possible wide centre-backs, Alonso has the raw materials to draw up something more permanent. There will be growing pains, it’s not just a tactical switch you flip.
But the reward is control, which is a keyword for Alonso. Flood the middle, keep distances tight, give players the freedom to rotate within a defined structure. It’s also energy conservation.
“It’s the best balance between controlling counter-attacks and getting numbers forward, which is the main reason that the majority of teams – even those who nominally apply a back-four – use three at the back in build-up,” Rafelt says.
No more energy-sapping solo missions. No more chasing shadows. No more improvised superhero pressing. The system is built around a kind of structured freedom.
Recreating Xhaka In The Aggregate
There’s one common thread in every formation Alonso deploys, no matter how the lineup looks on paper: a double pivot. Even when the shape shifts and players are granted that elusive “bit of freedom”, the pivot stays. Sometimes it’s explicitly defined with two midfielders stationed deep. Other times it’s manufactured, pulling a wing-back into midfield to balance the structure.
Which is likely where Trent Alexander-Arnold comes in. At right wing-back, he’s not just hugging the touchline, he’s a shuttler, a part-time midfielder, a creator operating from deeper zones. If you want a preview, just rewind to how Alonso used Grimaldo at Leverkusen. “He can play in a back four like a full back,” Xabi said. “But sometimes he’s a winger, sometimes he’s a midfielder.”
But there’s one thing tactics can’t solve. Real Madrid no longer have Toni Kroos. The German didn’t just control games, he defined the pace of them.
Granit Xhaka filled that role for Alonso at Leverkusen. Xhaka’s 102.3 passes per 90 in 2023-24 was the fourth-highest among any player in the top five leagues (minimum 1,000 minutes) in the last five years. Kroos’ best season (2022-23, the year he retired) topped out at 97.8.
Right now, Madrid don’t have anyone like that except maybe Dani Ceballos, who has the technical profile but not the trust yet. Instead, the solution might come not through recruitment, but transformation.
Alonso didn’t sign a metronomic passer at Leverkusen, he turned Xhaka into one. Before 2023-24, Xhaka hadn’t averaged more than 80 passes per 90 since 2018-19. Under Xabi, that number jumped to over 100. His defensive and attacking numbers dropped but his progression and possession stats surged. He didn’t become a better midfielder, he became an entirely different one.
So don’t be surprised if Alonso tries the same magic trick at Madrid. Eduardo Camavinga, Aurélien Tchouaméni, maybe even Arda Güler could be shaped into the role, or together form a collective solution. Xhaka’s control didn’t come from dribbling or magic passes. It came from setting the tempo, positioning, being a constant outlet and having constant options from his teammates. Alonso just needs someone to sit at the base of midfield and quietly hold things together.
The system makes the job easier too. “For other players this system is quite easy to play,” says Rafelt, “because you can always just lay off balls to the centre-backs and choose how much risk and movement you want to implement.” It’s a system that protects its passers. Camavinga, in particular, looks like he could be a ready-made fit.
A 3-1-4-2 isn’t out of the question. Federico Valverde and Jude Bellingham as high-energy eights, Vinícius Júnior and Kylian Mbappé up front, Alexander-Arnold drifting inside, balancing risk and reward while Camavinga or Tchouaméni mind the ball, keeping up the cadence.
Madrid have always had brilliance. They’ve always had power and pace. Now, under Alonso, they will have structure too and that will free the best players up to do what they do best.
Madrid’s Attack Gonna Attack
In fact, a lot has been said about Real Madrid’s absurdly talented attack. On paper, the team look unstoppable, like a fantasy football team picked with goals in mind but not chemistry. Fitting them all together often feels like a zero-sum game. If Mbappé gets to drift out to the left, Vinícius is either marginalised or shunted inward into a role that doesn’t suit him. If Vinícius stays wide and high and Mbappé remains stagnant in the middle, Bellingham’s space to crash into the box disappears.
If Bellingham then drops deeper to make an impact, you’re left with one of the world’s best box-arriving midfielders doing defensive work instead of scoring goals. This season, Bellingham’s attacking output dropped significantly from his debut campaign as he worked to make up for the lack of defensive effort elsewhere. He made 639 high intensity pressures in the Champions League this term, over 100 more than Vinícius, who is second on the list and over 300 more than Mbappé (320).
The bet Real Madrid are making on Alonso is that his system will fix the defence, assert control, and the rest will take care of itself. If Madrid can dominate central areas, compress the pitch, and keep the game on their terms, the attack doesn’t need perfect geometry. Their superstars just need the ball, in the right areas, often enough.
We’re going to see moving pieces in this system. Alexander-Arnold toggling between wide creator, support runner and auxiliary pivot. Bellingham dropping into midfield, ghosting into the box when the moment’s right. Vinícius and Mbappé swapping zones, drifting, pulling defenders into impossible decisions. It will look chaotic. It may feel chaotic.
But with Alonso on the sideline, it won’t be chaotic.
Alonso’s peak as a footballer lasted almost a decade. Four years into his senior managerial career and he has reached the summit, and what a job he has picked for Act III. There are no soft launches at Real Madrid. Between the politics of the boardroom, the thermonuclear egos of the dressing room, and the expectations of a fanbase that assumes trophies are a birthright, there’s zero margin for error.
But if he can get it right, we might be looking at a new world order in football. Real Madrid’s mystique along with a perfectly-aligned ideology. Another zeitgeist and Alonso will be at the centre of it all.
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Xabi Alonso Takes Charge: The Re-Building of Real Madrid Begins Opta Analyst.
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