“II am Basque, totally Basque.” Xabi Alonso gets angry at the thought that he could be defined as something else, even if there is a concession. He understands exactly how much Germany has shaped his current path, which began almost a decade ago when he arrived in the south of the country to begin a three-year spell at Bayern Munich that would take him until his retirement. “But now with great German influence,” he adds.
The Bundesliga's best coach – and perhaps Europe's best – is calm, methodical and, although he must be aware of how extensively he is praised, he seems to pay little attention to it. If it feels like Alonso's production of The Coach is moving at a breakneck pace – at least partly thanks to the mesmerizing power of his Bayer Leverkusen football and their excellent results – the man himself gives little to no impression of being swept up in a frenzy.
First of all, Leverkusen just isn't that kind of place. A small, quiet city of about 160,000 inhabitants, built on the chemical industry and now synonymous with the pharmaceutical company Bayer. It's right in the shadow of its big, brash older brother, about twenty minutes south. Cologne is the most populous city in the North Rhine-Westphalia region and despite the fact that the club FC Köln languishes far behind Leverkusen in almost all sporting success statistics of the past 25 to 30 years, every hint of success is received with a fervent, almost manic feeling. answer.
Leverkusen, perennial qualifier for European competition and Champions League finalist in 2002, operates in a much more balanced way. You could say it's the perfect place to grow. A place to work, a place to be challenged, but not a place to scrutinize too closely, and not a place to be under unbearable pressure. The best of both worlds. It certainly suits Alonso so far. He arrived in October 2022 to find a side with European ambitions sitting second from bottom in the Bundesliga.
Thirteen months later he has led his team to the top. The club colloquially known as Neverkusen for its ability to fall at the final hurdle – most famously seeing the Bundesliga, DfB Pokal and Champions League slip from their grasp in the span of eleven days in May 2022 – has feeling that they are about to change their club. places under their very impressive 42-year-old coach, in his first senior top position. After thirteen games in the Bundesliga, Alonso's team is undefeated. They won all but two (against Bayern and Borussia Dortmund) and flourished in domestic and continental cups. Their swagger and style are unmistakable.
In the morning we get to spend 45 minutes with Alonso in a suite overlooking the BayArena field. He may be on the clock less than usual, having led a small-scale training session with a half-dozen players, with most of his squad having left town immediately after the 4-0 defeat of Union Berlin to join their respective international teams for the November games. Yet he is good-humored, relaxed and, above all, comfortable in his own skin.
Alonso is also grateful for the current situation, he is flying high and enjoying that his work is a bull's eye. The greatest satisfaction for him is not that he is now leading the league, but “that we have a clear idea of how we want to play. It's not about waiting to see what happens, but let's try to make this happen.” That wasn't always the case. It's now easy to say that Leverkusen was the perfect place for Alonso's development, but when he arrived in a cold autumn last year, with limited senior experience, he left Real Sociedad's B team and took on a team facing a relegation battle that looked like Because I didn't have the courage for it, it seemed far from a utopia.
There were hairy moments, not least a 5-1 win over Eintracht Frankfurt in his second game, but a change was soon visible. After a derby victory in Cologne last November, the middle of three successive wins that led them into the World Cup-induced early winter break, the club's sporting director Simon Rolfes told me that Alonso's ability to communicate his ideas from day one on his new acquisitions. one – quick, simple and clear – had absolutely blown him away.
“I had the impression that there was great potential,” says the coach. “I was not given the expectations we need to reach Europe. The (idea of the) moment was: we have to get better. We didn't know if that was 10th place, reaching Europe without any problems. I knew the team's potential. You get to know the players so you can build some trust and commitment with them. That is the manager's job. In the beginning the results were not the best, but I had the feeling that a large part of the group was determined to change things, especially in the defensive part. At that moment we had a lot of problems, we were not very solid and we paid a lot of attention to that, more than to our controlling style of possession.”
That came later. “Those were not the principles we started working with a year ago,” he continues. “We started with the basics and from there we became competitive, more than controlling.”
Understanding what you can and cannot control may be the key to Leverkusen's current success, but it's not something we ever thought Alonso the player would have to deal with. He could keep everything under control, the most balanced midfielder. A light moment during Bayern's 2016 US tour inadvertently underlined this, when he and teammate Arturo Vidal played a match against 40 children in New York City, on a field on the banks of the Hudson. At his most playful, he had a surgeon's eye when working with the ball. He always set the agenda, to the beat of his own drum.
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Still on the training pitch, Alonso moves the ball with the grace and accuracy of old. Is he still the best passer at the club? “Well,” he grins during a pause, “there are some good ones.” Even in the maelstrom of the coaching world, he is determined to do the same as he always has. With Carlo Ancelotti widely tipped to head to Brazil at the end of the season, intense speculation has suggested that Alonso could be on the scene as his replacement the next time Real Madrid tour the US, even if it is less it is likely that he will give children a masterclass in ball possession. or shooting hoops with Boogie Cousins the next time. Yet there is no unrest, no ambiguity – and no rush to leave Leverkusen, it seems.
“It depends on whether you want to be pressured into making other people's decisions,” he says, “or whether you want to make your own.” And so far I've been clear. I will make my own decisions if I think it is the right time for anything. So that will definitely happen.” That's the same thought process that led Alonso to Leverkusen in the first place. While he insists there is no grand plan for his coaching career, he was guided by “an idea that I didn't want to do too quickly. After that it is a bit of intuition, a connection with the right time in the right place.”
Another club in Germany's northwest, Borussia Mönchengladbach, had hoped to land Alonso in 2021, while Bayern have not been coy about their continued interest in him over the years. “I used to have other options,” he admits, “but I didn't see that clearly. That's why I didn't want to go anywhere where I wasn't convinced. I took this opportunity and am very happy that Leverkusen gave me the chance. Now that we're here, I'm honestly not mapping much.”
Leverkusen may usually play like they are in a hurry, but their coach is not. It's not that he's winning the race slowly and steadily, but Alonso's quiet confidence in his abilities means he knows he will reach the elite level – possibly during his time at Leverkusen, but also later. As with his death, it is just a matter of timing.