Xabi Alonso, a strategist who learned from the best

A renowned strategist during his career as a player, where he was trained by some of the best coaches on the planet, the Basque from San Sebastián Xabi Alonso managed to put the finishing touch on his first great adventure in command of a team, winning the title of German champion with the Bayer Leverkusen.

On May 20, 2017, Xabi Alonso played for the last time, at the age of 35. It was during the 34th round of the Bundesliga in the colors of Bayern Munich and celebrating the new title of German champion at the Allianz Arena, in front of 75 thousand spectators.

The Basque certainly did not imagine that seven years later he would be the one to put an end to the Bavarian team’s eleven-year hegemony in the national championships (2013-2023).

One thing is certain: when he arrived at Bayern in 2014, he wanted to take advantage of his last years of work to get in touch with Pep Guardiola and think about his future as a coach.

“I tried to be curious about the work of a coach, not just playing. I tried to be close to them. I was already wondering where I would be years later,” Alonso confessed in December, in an interview with several media outlets, including AFP.

Your father as an inspiration

European champion (2008 and 2012) and world champion (2010) with Spain, Xabi Alonso also won the Champions League with Liverpool (2005) and Real Madrid (2014), in addition to the national championships in Spain and Germany.

Born in Tolosa, a few kilometers from San Sebastián, he had a career as a player, always in contact with great coaches.

Before arriving in Bavaria, in his last season at Real Madrid he was led by Carlo Ancelotti, with whom he would meet again in Munich in his last season as a player.

But he says his first source of inspiration as a coach is his father, Periko, a former Spanish national team player in the early 1980s (with 20 appearances for La Furia). As a child, Xabi would watch him prepare for games when he was in charge of Real Sociedad’s reserve team in the early 1990s.

It was precisely at the San Sebastián club that Xabi took his first steps on the bench, also in the second team, after having coached Real Madrid’s youth teams.
“Xabi Alonso has always been a strategist, on the pitch he was always in the center. At that time he had that vision. He also knew how his teammates and opponents reacted,” his former teammate at Bayern de France recalled in a recent interview with AFP. Munich, Philipp Lahm, who hung up his boots at the same time as him.

A part of “intuition”

Without wanting to skip steps too quickly, Xabi Alonso then studied the offers presented to him and finally opted for Leverkusen, who at that moment occupied the bottom of the Bundesliga table at the start of the 2022-2023 season, using a little “intuition” .

Taking advantage of what he had learned during his time in Bavaria, from his first speech he made an effort to speak German, as Guardiola did when he arrived at Bayern.

With remarkable calmness in front of the press, he sometimes lets his nervousness show in the technical area at the edge of the pitch, to give instructions and let loose in celebrations, as on the occasions when his team scored crucial goals in the last moments this season. He himself admitted that he misses being on the field.

“I shouldn’t say that, but yes. I miss it when I prepare for games and when I’m on the sidelines of the field”, says the man who declares himself “Basque, totally Basque, now with a lot of Germanic influence”.

In favor of giving his players freedom on the field, Alonso considers that he is not “a fundamentalist who asks them to play in one way or who says that this is the only way to play”, taking inspiration from the ‘master’ Ancelotti in terms of human management.

Following in the footsteps that mark his character as a strategist, he announced at the end of March that he will remain at Leverkusen next season. Instead of replacing Jurgen Klopp at Liverpool, Alonso will try to match in the Bundesliga what the German coach achieved in 2011 and 2012, when in charge of Dortmund he won two German championship titles against the almighty Bayern Munich.