Real Madrid Cuts Down Its Fall Guy

It's pretty remarkable to recall today, after the firing of Xabi Alonso and the uncertainty about the state of Real Madrid's star-studded project, that the club is only a year and a half removed from the absolute pinnacle. The 48-hour period between June 1 and June 3, 2024, when the team won the Champions League final and then announced that it had added to that championship group the best player in the sport, Kylian Mbappé, could credibly stand as the very apotheosis of what Real Madrid aspires to be. From those heights, it maybe shouldn't be so much of a surprise that the club had nowhere to go but down.

If Real Madrid's fate since those days stands for anything, it's that nothing can be taken for granted in this sport, and that tomorrow is not promised to anybody, not even those who already appear to possess it. It's not the case that the Blancos' struggles in the Mbappé era were completely unforeseeable, and in fact the risks were obvious from the outset. A team is a delicate mix of synergies, partnerships, hierarchies, and personalities, and it was clear that the de facto exchange of Toni Kroos for Mbappé would fundamentally alter the balances the team had arrived at over the years, and not necessarily for the better. The biggest question for Madrid the day Mbappé signed was how exactly the team planned to incorporate the Frenchman's talents with those of his new superstar teammates, Vinícius and Jude Bellingham, since the three did not seem to be the most natural of fits. A year and a half later, Real is still struggling to figure that out.

When Mbappé first arrived, the Blancos were led by the sport's most brilliant jigsaw solver, Carlo Ancelotti. But not even he could coax any sustainable connections between the trio itself and the mishmash collection of players behind them. When the club's patience ran out with the Italian, they turned to Alonso, the crown jewel of that offseason's coaching carousel, one of the most promising young managers in the game, a man seemingly ideally placed to succeed inside the game's most unforgiving crucible. Like the Mbappé signing, the Alonso hire felt like a coup, a dream. But like with the Mbappé signing, the club was not adequately prepared to make the most fanciful aspects of the Alonso dream a reality.