Real Madrid won two Champions League titles in Carlo Ancelotti’s second stint as manager, but despite cries from outside Spain that Madridistas are too harsh towards the legendary manager, there were very few regrets or disagreements among the fanbase at the club’s decision to part ways with Don Carlo.
The reality is that the squad became far too undisciplined, reliant on a few individual superstars, and increasingly fractured. Even those moments of individual brilliance from player like Vinicius Junior became fewer and further between, and nobody could bail Real out of four Clasico losses and a trophyless season.
Entering the picture is a former Real Madrid star in Xabi Alonso, who was a crucial anchor for the first Ancelotti-led side that brought the Champions League back to the Spanish capital after the passage of a decade.
Alonso lifted Bayer Leverkusen into the rarified air of invincibility, developing or enhancing both fine young talents and veterans alike. There is a lot of optimism that Alonso, who understands what it takes to win at the highest level at multiple great organizations, can change the culture in Madrid that had deteriorated concerningly during the 2024/25 season.
Even Zinedine Zidane didn’t do this enough
Those changes must be multitude, disciplinary and tactical. And according to reporting from Diario AS, Alonso is already enacting these vital changes for the Club World Cup, which is being used by Real Madrid as a trial period to get the club back to its best before the most important competitions of the 2025/26 season.
Alonso wants Real Madrid to press and run more. They were hilariously bad at pressing and lazy, outworked badly by many teams during the season, especially Arsenal in the Champions League.
After watching how important the pressing game is in the German league, Alonso wants to bring that tactic, as well as its emphasis on work rate and team chemistry, to Real Madrid, which is a change Madridistas were begging for even during the second Zinedine Zidane era at the Santiago Bernabeu.
In addition to pressing, Alonso wants Real Madrid to remain, like Hansi Flick’s Barcelona, on the attack and aggressive. He wants his team to be high up the pitch and seeking goals with the superstars like Jude Bellingham, Kylian Mbappe, and Vinicius Jr. instead of sitting back deep and letting the game come to them, as Ancelotti frequently did over the last three years.
Kylian Mbappe and Vinicius Junior will learn to love the changes
These two changes are not the only ones Alonso has to make to the team’s mentality and tactical play on the pitch, but they are probably the most important fundamental coaching decisions that, yes, any actual top coach should be making.
Ancleotti did a lot of great things for Real Madrid that fans should be eternally grateful for, but he also got lazy and was a bit too old-school and laissez-faire with things like pressing.
Alonso is going to let the hounds be hounds, harrying opposition defenders into mistakes and turning pressing and defending into playmaking that will make players like Mbappe and Vinicius hungrier to play defense.
The editor of A Trip to Cibeles for Real Madrid, Joe Soriano helped manage The Real Champs covering Real Madrid as a dedicated writer from 2019 to 2022, making it one of the biggest team soccer sites on the web. He currently also runs the world soccer site The Trivela Effect, the Tottenham site Hotspur HQ, and a pro wrestling site called Let Them Wrestle.