As Real Madrid kicked off at Barcelona on Sunday afternoon their coach-in-waiting, Xabi Alonso, was having his name sung by an adoring crowd in Leverkusen. Alonso had just completed the last home game of his remarkable 2½ seasons in charge of the German club.
A couple of hours later, Real’s latest free-transfer superstar signing, Trent Alexander-Arnold, was getting booed at Anfield by Liverpool fans who refused to conceal their disgust at his decision to leave them for the biggest club in the world.
The contrast between the gratitude of Leverkusen and the bitterness of Anfield might have been bewildering for Alexander-Arnold. He’s devoted 20 years of his life to Liverpool, Alonso only 2½ to Leverkusen. Why is Alonso getting presented with a “Xabi-Alonso-Allee” street sign in his honour while Liverpool fans demand the famous Trent mural be painted over?
The difference might be the Leverkusen fans felt Alonso couldn’t have done more for their club, while Liverpool fans think Alexander-Arnold is walking out on what should have been the second half of his life’s work.
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Both, however, might have been quietly pleased to see that the club they are about to join had just lost to Barcelona, ending any realistic hope of winning this season’s La Liga title. They’ll be joining a humbled Madrid in reset mode, with entitlement levels at the low point of the cycle.
No team had ever led 2-0 in the first half of a Classico and been losing at half-time, but that is what Real Madrid achieved on Sunday as 0-2 to Madrid became 4-2 to Barcelona in a riotous and ridiculous first half.
The last Classico, in the Copa del Rey final two weeks ago, had kicked off at 10pm local time and finished closer to 1am than midnight, as Jules Koundé‘s strike won it for Barcelona a couple of minutes before the end of extra time.
Sunday‘s edition was an afternoon game in brilliant sunshine that looked like a World Cup match and featured a World Cup version of Kylian Mbappé. He reprised his World Cup final feat of scoring a hat-trick and still finishing on the losing side: something that has never previously happened to any player in a Classico.
When Mbappé burst into the ocean of space behind the Barca offside trap to put Madrid 2-0 up after 14 minutes, it looked as though Barcelona’s heads were still scrambled from their painful Champions League defeat in Milan on Tuesday.
But Madrid’s appalling defending from a corner allowed Eric Garcia to head them quickly back into the game, before Lamine Yamal equalised with another curling far-post finish of almost absurd perfection.
Now it was Madrid’s heads that went. They might have stood up better to the corner had Antonio Rüdiger been on the field but their best central defender is serving a six-match ban for throwing an ice pack at the referee during the chaotic climax of the Copa del Rey final.
Rüdiger’s insane action felt like the culmination of a season of ever-increasing hysteria at Madrid, an establishment club that has become obsessed with the notion that all the institutions of football – La Liga, Uefa, the referees, the Spanish media – are conspiring against them.
The former Madrid coach Jorge Valdano suggested this week that this new culture of victimhood – “victimismo” – is a self-destructive indulgence. Embracing the delusion that dark forces are making it impossible for the club to succeed risks undermining the Madrid players’ collective commitment to being the best. These days, whenever Madrid lose it’s always somebody else’s fault. As Valdano points out, that’s just a little too convenient for the players.
The fact is, the current crop of players is substandard. Alexander-Arnold has often been criticised for weak defending but he would be the strongest defender of the group Madrid fielded yesterday against Barcelona. Stand-in captain Lucas Vasquez handed Barcelona their fourth goal in truly miserable fashion, clumsily losing the ball under pressure from Raphinha.
Carlo Ancelotti, the most successful coach in Madrid’s history, deserves better than to leave amid this shambles, but the chaos on the pitch reflects a widespread perception that the squad has lost discipline and hunger after too many years of Ancelotti’s light-touch management.
When faced with this situation in the past, Madrid have often appointed tough-guy managers to whip the squad back into shape: Jose Antonio Camacho, Fabio Capello and José Mourinho are 21st-century examples.
As one of the finest players of his generation and a winner of the World Cup, the Euros and the Champions League, Alonso has the star quality that always attracts Madrid, but as a coach he is very far from their usual type.
Ancelotti, and Madrid’s other recent multiple Champions League-winning coach, Zinédine Zidane, are the kind of coaches who believe the solutions on the field are ultimately the responsibility of the players.
Alonso is a tactical visionary who knows exactly what he wants to see his players doing out on the field. He has already achieved astonishing success teaching a medium-quality team to play near-unbeatable systems football.
He is actually more the type of manager who is successful at Barcelona.
The Ancelotti/Zidane player-driven approach has typically worked better at Madrid, whose brand identity is “we have the best players in the world”. The reality is the best players in the world often don’t respond well to busy coaches who try to tell them how to play football.
Is this group of Madrid players ready to submit to the kind of system-focused collectivism their forebears have invariably rejected as an insult to their honour?
Everything we know about Real Madrid suggests the answer is: probably not. But that they have made such a mess of this season might just make them a little more open to Alonso’s revolution.
