- 2 hours ago
Xabi Alonso managed just 34 games as Real Madrid manager, before being sacked after defeat in the Copa Del Ray's Clasico final. But with talk of his high-pressing, high-intensity, system "not working" at Real Madrid, Adam Clery looks at the team's style of play to show why that's not a fair assessment at all.
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00:00Right, hello everybody, welcome to the Adam Cleary Football Channel, and yes, alright, it has been a week, but I
00:06still think that Xavi Alonso's failure at Real Madrid is maybe one of the most interesting things we could talk
00:14about on this channel.
00:15And that's because it's being looked at as simultaneously this, like, deeply political bin fire that he failed to navigate
00:22as a manager, but also just the sort of conflict that arises when a manager wants to play a deeply
00:30detailed tactical system with a bunch of players who will not do the hard work for the collective at the
00:36expense of their own game.
00:38But, like, if you watched them last season, it was really obvious that Alonso understood the scale of the task
00:45at hand in modernising this club on the pitch, and he was routinely finding quite ingenious ways to do that,
00:52whilst also largely putting results together at the same time.
00:56Like, this here is Arda Gula, who is such an exciting prospect in attacking midfield and across the entire forward
01:03line that he's often referred to as Turkish Messi, but he's here in the fullback area, having started in central
01:11midfield as a tempo-setting, deep creative force, and then moved out to the Tony Cruz position.
01:17This is Trent Alexander-Arnold, who either inverts into the middle or stays deep on the right, stretching in opposition's
01:24defence in the forward line of the attack.
01:27This is an honest-to-God proper back three, which, of course, was never going to work at Real Madrid,
01:32so Alonso was never going to try that, working at Real Madrid because Alonso tried that.
01:39And this, best of all, is a team full of superstars who would never be able to press as a
01:46coordinated unit, absolutely suffocating the life out of Barcelona, forcing them to abandon their build-up and just kick long.
01:55So the question is, what is it that really went wrong for Alonso on the pitch at Real Madrid?
02:01And in case it's not immediately obvious already, that answer is quite complicated.
02:10All right, so long-term viewers to the channel will be expecting me now to go and show you some
02:16sort of XI, either a specific one or an average one over the season, but alas, we cannot do that
02:22here.
02:22And that is because, in his time at the club, Alonso did not name an unchanged XI in the league
02:29so much as once.
02:31In fact, Mark Carey at The Athletic, who is like the Michael Jordan of this stuff, and I'm going to
02:38have to try extremely hard not to just rip off here, worked out that the number of changes basically equated
02:44to like three between every single game.
02:48And while a lot of that was down to injury, yes, it also wasn't.
02:53And that is because the second Alonso gets this job, he goes to the club and he says, hey, you
02:59know, great squad, love what you've done with the place, but I'm just, I'm going to need you to stop
03:04Martin Zubomendi from joining Arsenal.
03:07Because he's like an experienced midfielder who can control games in the middle of the pitch, and that's sort of
03:12like the one thing we haven't got.
03:14And the club turned to him and they go, wow, that's a great idea, love that enthusiasm, but just small
03:21change, can we instead interest you in spending 150 million quid on a young flying left back, an even younger
03:30centre back, an even younger forward, and Trent Alexander-Arnold?
03:35And while that's obviously not what he really wanted, you can at least move Trent Alexander-Arnold into the middle
03:42of the pitch, so Alonso decides to just go with it and test all this out in the nice, relaxing
03:48pre-season tour that the club has coming up.
03:51Or, to use its full title, the Federation Internationale de Football Association Club World Cup Championship 2025.
03:59And this, thus, is Trent Alexander-Arnold's heat map from that tournament, and you may remember watching it, it wasn't
04:06great, he was barely involved in his opponent's half, he sort of drifts into the middle to get involved every
04:11now and then, and Madrid certainly did not control their matches.
04:15In fact, the major things you will have learned are that, A, if you're going to move him centrally, then
04:20he's much better around the box, as evidenced by this brilliant assist he gets against Dortmund,
04:25and, B, if you are going to move him centrally, then teams will have a flippin' field day attacking the
04:33space in behind where he has moved from, and he's never been great at recovering those situations.
04:40So, and I really do need to stop saying thus, but thus, you update that heat map to his La
04:45Liga games instead, and there you are, way less emphasis in his own half, and centrally, way more emphasis in
04:53the opposition's half around the box.
04:54Alonso solves that problem, it's just not the problem he wanted to solve.
05:00And, of course, he then gets injured, misses a massive chunk of the season, and you're effectively back to square
05:05one anyway.
05:06But his next solution is the thing that has really, really worked for Real Madrid, and that was the reinvention
05:12of Arda Gula.
05:14And we did already mention him previously, but you look at his heat map from last season, and that is
05:19a right-sided attacker.
05:21Yes, he's occasionally needed in his own half, who isn't, but that is the movements of a man impacting the
05:27game in his favoured area of the pitch, and almost all of them are attacking contributions.
05:33But Alonso has now effectively reinvented him as a more chaotic Luka Modric.
05:37He's up to the very top percentage in La Liga for the total number of touches in a game, so
05:42he's seeing so much more of the ball now.
05:46And if we update his heat map to this season, you will see there's way less of an emphasis on
05:50attacking this favoured right-hand half space,
05:52and instead, a massive spread all the way across the pitch, including these very deep full-back areas where it's
06:00easy to get on the ball.
06:01That's basically the Toni Kroos move, where instead of dropping between the centre-backs, where an aggressive number 10 will
06:07chase you,
06:08you just float wider to get better passing angles, and make all the wide attackers start to wonder whose responsibility
06:15that is.
06:16They played Valencia not long after he made this change, and Gula gets a really, really good assist in this
06:22game.
06:22You can see him, earlier on, picking the ball up way deeper than he usually does, drifting out to the
06:28left as well, to the right.
06:29He is helping set the tempo, he is helping keep the ball, he is making sure they are dominating this
06:34game.
06:34But, later on, he uses that deeper starting position to make a really late run from there that absolutely nobody
06:43picks up.
06:44Like, honestly, re-profiling him as more of a playmaker who's able to get time and space in multiple phases
06:50of the game is just, it's brilliant.
06:53Like, if you've not seen his pass for the goal they score against Monaco, then take a minute, get the
06:59kettle on, remove the trousers, whatever it is you like, and enjoy that.
07:04It is the vision and the execution of a top, top-level midfielder, and in the long term,
07:11as well as both the medium and literally right now, he's going to excel there.
07:16So, look, you've got solutions, you've got adaptations, you've got all the hallmarks of a really top, top coach, right?
07:24But what you kept hearing about Alonso at Madrid was like, okay, yeah, this is all well and good,
07:29but the problem is that he wants them to work too hard off the ball,
07:35and you simply cannot impose so much of that structured nerd stuff on a squad that is just full of
07:42top shaggers.
07:44And that is obviously true, right? Except he did.
07:49In, frankly, stunningly quick time, Alonso turned them into a simply monstrous team off the ball,
07:57topping the league for the total number of pressing sequences, of tackles won in the final third,
08:03high turnovers and shots on goal that come directly from them.
08:08And the thing is, obviously you could only do that when you haven't got the ball,
08:13and Madrid average nearly 60% possession this season.
08:18So, like, not only are they working harder at this than all but one team,
08:22but they're doing so with less minutes to actually do it than 18 other teams in the division.
08:28And do you want to know what those numbers were last season before Alonso got this job, yeah?
08:37Well, I can't tell you, because they've just killed FB Ref,
08:42and thus we've lost 10 years of open-source football data.
08:45But they weren't as high as that, let me tell you.
08:49You take the Valencia game here, right?
08:50Bellingham comes all the way from too far ahead of the play to get back in and win the ball.
08:56But he can only do that because Camavinga, Tushimeni and Brian Diaz
09:00all close ranks in the middle of the pitch to stop any central progression.
09:05And that is a level of coordinated, really hard off-the-ball work
09:11that they just got constantly accused of not wanting to do this season.
09:16But if you go back, it was there. It was there plenty.
09:19And you will note that while Mbappe does react well to the chance developing,
09:24neither him nor Vinicius were overly active at any stage here.
09:30However, to be completely fair, Alonso wasn't really asking that of those two.
09:35They were sort of okay with being pretty static while everyone else did a lot of the running.
09:41But the thing is, it looks really good in moments like this,
09:44but this is ultimately where it started to go wrong for Alonso.
09:49This right here is the Clasico.
09:51Barcelona had nearly 70% of the ball,
09:54but Madrid had twice as many efforts on goal,
09:57and a staggering 3.6 xG to Barcelona's one.
10:01And were it not for Mbappe's missed penalty, this could have been an absolute drubbing,
10:06but heading into the last half hour, it was still somehow in the balance.
10:10And obviously, with this possession stat, you could be forgiven,
10:14I'm very forgiving, for thinking Madrid were incredibly passive in this game,
10:18and Barcelona dominated them.
10:20But that is not the case.
10:22Madrid absolutely pressed the life out of them at the start of that game.
10:27You can see here, this is aggressive.
10:29It's man-to-man, it's everything he apparently could not do with this squad,
10:34and Barcelona cannot play out from the back and have to kick it long.
10:39And in that first half, it worked amazingly.
10:42But this, this is in the second half.
10:45Madrid squeezed them high up,
10:47but now Barcelona play through this man-to-man idea like it's a rack of empty tracksuits.
10:53They break down the right-hand side and end up with a 3v2 on the edge of the box,
10:58and I think, conservatively, you should be scoring in this situation
11:05approximately 1,000 times out of 1,000.
11:09But for some reason, Firmin Lopez decides he's never really rated Rashford or Yamal
11:14and just hammers it at the goalkeeper instead.
11:16So seeing this, Alonso, smartly, decides to tighten things up a bit.
11:21And just to be totally clear, if you go back to the start of this move,
11:24it is not Vinicius Jr.'s fault that they get played through.
11:28It's not his man that escapes the press,
11:30but it's plainly obvious that if you're worried about getting done like this,
11:34you do not need two players that high up in that position.
11:39So he gives Rodrigo a nudge, subs Vinny off,
11:42and to be very gentle with my wording here, right,
11:46Vinicius Jr. goes absolutely fucking spare.
11:54It is gloriously captured, quite frankly, by the Spanish producers.
11:58I mean, look at this depth of field,
11:59and that is more or less the moment that Alonso ultimately lost his job.
12:06Which is mad, considering that not only was it back in October,
12:09but more importantly, it worked.
12:12And even just a quick comparison of their respective heat maps from this game,
12:17like this is Vinicius Jr.'s, yep, great, that's what you'd expect.
12:20And this is Rodrigo's, far more concerned with what's going on in the zone half
12:24than higher up, right?
12:27It was a brilliant idea.
12:28Barcelona had just had a raft of chances,
12:31but from the 72nd minute when this change was made,
12:34they only had two, one of which was fully 50 yards from goal.
12:39And to be fair to the guy, Vinicius did issue a public apology
12:44for the way he went on here.
12:46He apologised to his teammates,
12:49and to the club,
12:51and to all the fans,
12:52and to the president,
12:54and that's it.
12:56Which is basically the footballing equivalent of that bit in The Simpsons,
12:59where Mr Burns sends the nice thank you card for all the chocolates,
13:02and Lisa has to drop the,
13:04Dad, your name isn't on this.
13:06And yes, if you read my newsletter, I have already done that joke this week.
13:10Thanks for noticing.
13:11And this moment is ultimately why he's lost his job.
13:14Not because his tactics didn't work,
13:16or because he couldn't get Madrid to play his style of football,
13:19but because managing a tactical system like this
13:23is nigh on impossible if this is how your big players react to getting subbed.
13:28Madrid conceded some really bad goals this season
13:31when teams played over or through them with surprising ease.
13:35And that does happen to every team that presses aggressively
13:39when either the legs start to go or they stop concentrating.
13:43So Alonso's problem is that as a result of both injury and ego,
13:48he could not rotate this team the way he would need to,
13:52either between games or just in them.
13:54So it's sort of like a no-win scenario,
13:57aside from the fact that,
13:59barring this little blip in form here,
14:01they were winning like almost every single game.
14:05It's maybe one of the stupidest sackings I've ever seen.
14:09And if I was on a slot,
14:11it would have made me extremely anxious.
14:14So yes, that is why it did not work for Alonso at Real Madrid.
14:18Now, I should point out,
14:19this video was selected for us by our channel members.
14:23It was their idea and then they voted on it.
14:25So if you would like to tell us what videos we have to make here on this YouTube channel,
14:30you can become a member down below and click that
14:33and then you will have that power also.
14:35But I don't know, therefore, who's going to watch this necessarily,
14:39but I would suspect there's a rather large number of you coming here from Madrid.
14:44This is the first time we've ever done a proper,
14:46he's gone now, Real Madrid video.
14:49So this is very interesting to me.
14:51What are your thoughts on this?
14:53Was he popular in Madrid?
14:54Are you annoyed at the club?
14:55Was he a bad fit?
14:56Do you support the players?
14:58All thoughts, feelings.
14:59I don't know how to say any of this in Spanish,
15:00but it's welcome down below and I will be reading it.
15:03You can get me across all the social medias at Adam Cleary,
15:05C-L-E-R-Y.
15:06I've already told you to become a member.
15:07Why not buy a shirt?
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15:09Look, there's a picture.
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15:13Subscribe to the channel if you haven't already.
15:14We're like, there's close to 200,000 subs
15:16and it's driving me absolutely mad.
15:18And until next time, that has been your lot.
15:22I hope you enjoyed it.
15:23Please wipe your mouth.
15:24I will see you soon.
15:26Adios.
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