There are always high expectations with coaches who have been legends as footballers. This has been the no retirement of the majority who do not want to be totally detached from football and who refuse to be a commentator. Sometimes even a great team has been called up simply because of the rookie coach’s past.. And not all of them have turned out as well (Lampard, Pirlo, Seedorf…) as Guardiola did for Barcelona or Zidane for Madrid.
In the case of Xabi, the steps seem to have been the correct ones. From the Juveniles of Madrid to a subsidiary, that of Real Sociedad, who got the tremendously meritorious promotion from Second B to Second. And after a season in professional football, the jump to a First Division. “I wanted to mark the times that I felt were natural. That’s how I started in children’s school in Madrid and it helped me say: “I might like it.” The next step was to return home, to Real, in an almost professional structure, without the urgent need for the result but with all the means to work with freedom and peace of mind to get to know myself, to see where I was failing and where I was not. Because you have to know yourself: how authentic you are when it comes to interpreting what you feel. My last spell at Bayern has a lot to do with my decision to come here. German clubs have very little vertigo to give youngsters opportunities. I saw him with Nagelsmann at Hoffenheim, at Gladbach, and at Dortmund too… He saw me. It fit,” he explained in The country.
Xabi Alonso followed the appropriate steps until he made the leap to the bench of a big league
Before that, a childhood with a soccer coach father. An admirable career as a midfielder, surely the position that is most involved in the collective organization of the team. Experience in the best teams of three of the four major leagues. And in them, some of the most exceptional coaches in football history.
“Which of all my coaches do I owe my way of feeling about work? To my father. Not that I’ve studied it. I’ve seen him as a crib”, he responded in that interview in The country. Besides, he wasn’t a bad student. José Morais, Mourinho’s assistant during his time in Madrid, he was impressed by how Xabi approached the theory. “Xabi was interested in the reasons for things. He learned the rival reports almost by heart, the two or three pages, and he wanted more. He wanted a deep understanding of what was going to happen in the match. Later, Xabi was a leader in positioning, his own and that of his teammates ”, he pointed out in ACE. Before retiring, he said that he did not know if he would be a coach because he had a list of things to do without the footballer’s rush, but he only lasted a year without smelling the grass. And from those seeds, these flowers.