‘I didn’t know I was coming to train at a kindergarten’ — report details fiery blow up for Xabi Alonso at Real Madrid

SB Nation

Former Bayern Munich midfielder Xabi Alonso walked away from Real Madrid this week, but it appears that no one should have been surprised.

According to a report from Marca, Alonso flamed his squad during

a training session by belting out, “I didn’t know I was coming to train at a kindergarten!”

Ouch.

That statement might have created a bigger rift than already existed between Alonso and some of the team:

Xabi Alonso was sacked in January, but the coach started to leave Madrid at the beginning of November. By then, the divorce between the squad and Xabi Alonso was already noticeable behind closed doors. A distancing that the day-to-day life at Valdebebas was taking to the limit until it blew up. “I didn’t know I was coming to train at a kindergarten!”, exclaimed the coach during a training session.

It was not the typical warning to get his players’ attention, nor was it a one-off outburst at work, it was a cry of desperation, of weariness and almost of boredom. Xabi had long been annoyed because his players were not following him in the demands he wanted to put on each and every one of the training sessions. Above all, in the tactical demands. Bad faces, poor attitude, whispering… Until he could not take it any longer and said something that was the beginning of the end. He told them what he had been thinking for some time and opened a wound with the squad that never closed.

What is becoming abundantly clear is that Alonso’s style was not a fit with Real Madrid’s roster as some training sessions with the ex-Bayer Leverkusen boss were considered to be “excessive”:

The players considered the tactical training to be excessively burdensome and also complained about receiving an excessive amount of information. Xabi’s excessive zeal in tactical work, attention and corrections extended to his assistants, who were also singled out by the players. Sebas Parrilla, his assistant, was the main one. The fact that there were so many people giving orders and paying attention to every detail was a circumstance that made the players uncomfortable. The working environment on a day-to-day basis was not good and this wear and tear took its toll.

Finally, Alonso was never satisfied with the team and the team was not receptive to his attention to detail:

Because Alonso thought the opposite of his players. First the Club World Cup and then a hasty return to competition, with hardly any pre-season, left the coach with no room to work on the footballing idea he wanted to impose at Real Madrid. For the coach there were many things to change and correct and he needed every minute of every training session to impose them on the team.

Alonso knew that the team was far from what he wanted and that he needed to speed up the process. But this pace of work and the acquisition of new concepts from the coach clashed head-on with the team. They did not go hand in hand and day by day it became more and more difficult. Alonso was unhappy with his players and the players were unhappy with him.

BFW Commentary

Through most of the reports that have emerged, some of the Real Madrid player reactions to Alonso come across very poorly. With rumors of bad attitudes and questionable work ethic surrounding more than a few players on the roster, it appears that Alonso’s attempt to clean up the country club lifestyle that was established by Carlo Ancelotti failed miserably.

In fact, you could argue that it was never going to work when the team’s practice habits and expectations for a lack of intensity were set in place and unlikely to change.

Clearly, Alonso would have been better off taking the offer from Bayern Munich.

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