In football, being a Guipuzcoan coach is like being a Brazilian player. Parts with 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 San Sebastián.
Not for the first time I cite Mikel Arteta, Unai Emery and Andoni Iraola as examples, all succeeding in the Premier League in their own way. But today I focus on Xabi Alonso, the meteorite whose exploits in Germany have made him the most desired young coach in the world.
After only 18 months of experience at the first level, in charge of Bayer Leverkusen, he is already dreaming for the biggest teams in football: Real Madrid, Liverpool, Bayern Munich, Manchester United or (dreaming is free) Barcelona.
Have you seen what Alonso has done in the aspirin club? He arrived in October 2022 with the penultimate team in the Bundesliga and finished in sixth place. This season Leverkusen has not lost a single game of the 34 it has played in three competitions and has not only broken Bayern Munich’s hegemony in the Bundelisga (it has been champion for the last eleven seasons), it is on its way to destroying it.
Alonso’s team, first in the table, is ten points ahead of Bayern today, whom they beat 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 (basically all of them) but there was none of whom I was more certain would end up being a coach. First, although not in order of importance, because I met Alonso when he played for Real Madrid, a few months after Spain won the 2010 World Cup.
Incredibly, since there is nothing more exasperating in journalism than trying to interview a top soccer player, he asked me for the appointment. He invited me to eat at a Madrid restaurant. So that? To scold me for the insults he gave to 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 next few years was that analyzing Mandela had been just one more phase in a learning course that he embarked on as a player to prepare for the stage in his professional life through which, like Pep Guardiola, Maybe it will end up being more remembered,
It was, precisely, his decision in 2014 to leave Real Madrid for Guardiola’s Bayern that ended any doubt that he contemplated a future as a coach. He had obtained the university degree with Mourinho, the master’s degree with Carlo Ancelotti and now he was going for the doctorate with Professor Pep.
In an interview for English television in 2016, when he was still playing for Bayern, Alonso was questioned about what he had learned from Mourinho and Guardiola. It was like an oral exam, the answers were all perfect, about the requirements to train at the highest level. He mentioned motivation, ambition, attention to detail, clarity in communication with players, and, first of all, authority, the ability to convey at all times who “the boss” is. What Alonso defined as “charisma.”
Charisma comes from having tremendous self-confidence. It is a gift more than an acquisition – something that cannot be learned – and Alonso has it. As was seen, for example, in the judicial battle that he had for ten years with the Treasury and that finally, always convinced of the integrity of his person, he won.
What will be your next step? I’m betting on Liverpool, whose coach Jürgen Klopp is leaving in the summer, and is already speaking highly of 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 best league in the world. Liverpool fans do not mourn Klopp’s departure so much because they trust in the arrival of the Gipuzkoan, whom they never stopped loving. Only Real Madrid can disappoint them.
