In football, being a coach from Gipuzkoa is like being a Brazilian player. You start with a genetic, or climatic, or cultural advantage. Or maybe it’s something they put in your water, or in your food. As Ferran Adrià once told me, in the West there is no better place to eat than Sant Sebastià.
Not for the first time I mention Mikel Arteta, Unai Emery and Andoni Iraola as examples, all succeeding in their own way in the Premier League. But today I focus on Xabi Alonso, the meteor who has become, thanks to his exploits in Germany, the most desired young coach in the world.
After only 18 months of experience at the top level, in charge of Bayer Leverkusen, he is already ringing for the biggest teams in football: Real Madrid, Liverpool, Bayern Munich, Manchester United or (you can dream) the Barcelona
Have you seen what Alonso has done in the aspirin club? He arrived there in October 2022 with the penultimate team in the Bundesliga and finished in sixth place. This season, Leverkusen have not lost a single game of the 34 they have played in three competitions and not only have they broken the hegemony of Bayern Munich in the Bundelisga (they have been champions for the last eleven seasons), they are on their way to shattering the.
Alonso’s team, first in the table, today has a ten-point advantage over Bayern, who won 3-0 three weeks ago. Barring an earthquake or a pandemic or a nuclear war, Leverkusen will win the first German championship in its 120-year history in a matter of weeks. Of all the players I have seen in the 21st century, few have won more trophies (everyone, basically), but there is none of whom I was more certain would end up as a coach. First, although not in order of importance, because I met Alonso when he was playing for Real Madrid, a few months before Spain won the 2010 World Cup.
Unbelievably, since there is nothing more desperate in journalism than trying to interview a top footballer, he asked me for the appointment. He invited me to lunch in a restaurant in Madrid. Because? To scold me for the wafers I was throwing at his coach, José Mourinho? No. To talk about a book I had written about Nelson Mandela.
I discovered that I had learned lessons about the figure of Mandela that had not even occurred to me. Lessons on leadership. What I came to understand over the following years was that analyzing Mandela had been just another phase in a learning course he had embarked on as a player to prepare for the stage in his professional life by which, like Pep Guardiola, he may end up being more remembered.
It was precisely his decision in 2014 to leave Real Madrid for Guardiola’s Bayern Munich that dispelled any doubts that he envisioned a future as a coach. He had obtained his university degree with Mourinho, his master’s degree with Carlo Ancelotti and now wanted to seek his doctorate with Professor Pep.
In an interview for English television in 2016, when he was still playing for Bayern, Alonso was asked what he had learned from Mourinho and Guardiola. It was like an oral exam, the answers all perfect, about the requirements to train at the highest level. He mentioned motivation, ambition, attention to detail, clarity in communication with the players, and, first of all, authority, the ability to convey at all times who is “the boss”. What Alonso defined as “charisma”.
Charisma comes from having immense self-confidence. It is a gift rather than an acquisition – something that cannot be learned – and Alonso has it. As was seen, for example, in the court battle he had for ten years with the Treasury and which he finally won, always convinced of his integrity.
What will be the next step? I’m betting on Liverpool, whose coach, Jürgen Klopp, is leaving in the summer, and he’s already talking wonders about him. I know, as does anyone who knows Alonso, that as a player at Anfield from 2004 to 2009 he forged a special connection with the most magical of clubs in the world’s best League. Liverpool fans don’t mourn Klopp’s departure so much because they trust in the arrival of the Guipuzcoan, who they have never stopped loving. Only Real Madrid will be able to disappoint them.
