Xabi Alonso Can Be a Success at Chelsea if They Embrace Him Like Bayer Leverkusen Did | OneFootball

Xabi Alonso is the latest man tasked with making sense of Chelsea Football Club. Is the Spaniard up to the task? It will likely only work if they just let the manager do his job.

Everything seemed perfect in the world of Xabi Alonso 360 days ago.

The former Bayer Leverkusen boss was appointed Real Madrid head coach on 25 May 2025 – exactly 20 years to the day after winning his first UEFA Champions League as a player with Liverpool – and seemingly set up to reach the next stage of his incredibly promising managerial career.

However, things didn’t work out in the Spanish capital, and Alonso and the 15-time European champions parted ways in January.

The consensus was that he had been on a bit of a hiding to nothing at the Bernabéu, though, taking on a notoriously difficult job at a club where the only certainty is that there will always be uncertainty.

So, naturally, his next career move has been to join Chelsea.

It has been another rollercoaster of a year for the Blues. After following up winning the UEFA Conference League by lifting the FIFA Club World Cup last summer, they have since sacked the coach who guided them to both, Enzo Maresca, replaced him with Liam Rosenior, and sacked him, too.

They have now turned to Alonso, hoping the former Liverpool and Bayern Munich midfielder can use his learnings from the Bundesliga and La Liga to finally make sense of the project at Stamford Bridge.

It seems significant that he has been handed the title of manager instead of head coach, suggesting Alonso will have more power than his predecessors.

But why have Chelsea put their faith in him?

The club’s statement read: “His appointment reflects the club’s belief in his broad set of experiences, coaching quality and game model, leadership attributes, character and integrity, which were key to the decision to ask him to help lead the next phase of Chelsea’s journey.”

A Basque native, Alonso’s coaching career began at Real Sociedad, where he led the club’s B team, otherwise known as Sanse.

In just his second season, he guided them to promotion to the Segunda División for the first time in 59 years. They were relegated after one season, but Alonso had already made a positive impression, and he left in May 2022 with plenty of interest from around Europe.

He waited for what he considered the perfect opportunity, and that arrived in October 2022 when Bayer Leverkusen asked him to replace Gerardo Seoane.

It was not an easy task. Die Werkself were second from bottom in the Bundesliga, with just five points from their first eight games. He turned them around immediately, though, guiding them up the table and to an eventual finish of sixth. Leverkusen won 45 points from his 26 games in charge (W13 D6 L7) that season; only Borussia Dortmund (56), Bayern Munich (56) and RB Leipzig (55) won more following Alonso’s arrival.

In fairness, Leverkusen had finished third in the 2021-22 season. Being second from bottom when Alonso came in was probably not a reflection of their overall quality, just the result of a particularly bad start to the season 2022-23 campaign.

That said, nobody could have expected what the 2023-24 campaign would bring.

Alonso led Leverkusen to their first ever Bundesliga title, and did so as the first team in the competition’s history to go undefeated. Not even Bayern Munich have ever achieved that, but Alonso’s side won 28 and drew six of their 34 league games, also winning the DFB-Pokal.

But for an uncharacteristically limp performance in the Europa League final against Atalanta, they would have had an incredible undefeated treble, with that 3-0 loss being their first and only of their 53 games in all competitions.

That success was largely built on a solid defence. Leverkusen conceded just 24 goals in the Bundesliga in 2023-24, at least 15 fewer than any other team, but they also scored an impressive 89 goals. Of teams in the top five European leagues, only Inter (+67) had a better goal difference than Alonso’s men (+65).

There was a dip in 2024-25, but that was hardly surprising given the inexplicably high levels reached the previous year. Leverkusen still finished second, losing just three times in the Bundesliga (W19 D12), but they finished 13 points behind a resurgent Bayern under Vincent Kompany.

And following his third season in Germany, Alonso was ready for something new, and that came in the form of one of the biggest jobs in world football.

Having won La Liga, the Champions League and two Copa Del Rey trophies as a player at Real Madrid, Alonso was now in the hot seat.

It wasn’t an easy start, immediately thrown into the expanded Club World Cup with very little time to get to know his new squad. They reached the semi-finals, but a humbling 4-0 defeat to Paris Saint-Germain started questions before Alonso had really even got his feet under the table. Going 3-0 down to the European champions at MetLife Stadium after just 24 minutes on the international stage for a club with so much pride was not ideal.

The season began well enough, though, with Alonso winning his first six La Liga matches as well as beating Marseille in the Champions League. Much like the PSG game, though, when a defeat did arrive, it was the nature of it that was most damaging.

Real Madrid were 2-1 up against rivals Atlético Madrid, before collapsing to lose 5-2 at the Metropolitano. It was the first time Atlético had scored five times in a game against Los Blancos since November 1950.

That did appear to be a one-off, though. They went on to win their next six games in all competitions, including a 2-1 victory over Barcelona. However, that game did have one unfortunate moment for Alonso, who substituted Vinícius Júnior for Rodrygo in the 72nd minute. Vinícius reacted furiously, confronting his manager and threatening to leave the club as he stormed down the tunnel.

Alonso suffered his first defeat in the Champions League when he went back to former club Liverpool, and drew his next three La Liga games against Rayo Vallecano, Elche and Girona as things started to unravel.

A 2-0 home loss to Celta Vigo was a real low point where Madrid’s players lost their discipline, and the club called time on Alonso’s reign after a 3-2 defeat in the Supercopa de España final to Barcelona.

Despite the high-profile lows, Alonso did leave with a 71% win percentage (W24 D4 L6) in all competitions, putting him sixth among Real Madrid managers to take charge of at least 25 games.

He didn’t always fare well in big games, though. The heavy loss to PSG at the Club World Cup was somewhat understandable given the lack of preparation time, but Madrid were also beaten by Barcelona, Manchester City, Liverpool and Atlético on his watch.

That could be an issue for Chelsea, given they have won just three of their 17 games against the other nine teams in the top half of the Premier League this season (D6 L8). Only the three teams in the relegation zone have won fewer points against the current top 10.

But football is rarely that linear. Alonso’s remarkable success at Leverkusen could equally be pointed at by eager Chelsea fans as a reason for optimism, so instead of speculating, let’s look at Alonso’s preferred style of football and see what the Blues can perhaps expect next season.

His success at Leverkusen came with a three-at-the-back system, with a box midfield, flying wing-backs, and a number nine.

He often played formations with four at the back in Sociedad, and he broadly did the same in Madrid, so he’s certainly not wedded to one system, though perhaps that was part of the problem at Real Madrid.

As we pointed out in our article on Alonso’s short time in Madrid in January: “In his title-winning Bundesliga season in 2023-24, Alonso played a 3-4-2-1 formation in every single league game. This season, he never found a shape he could return to. In 19 league games, Madrid lined up in 15 different formations.”

Alonso would have the players to go back to a 3-4-2-1 at Stamford Bridge, but whatever the formation, he will want his new team to have the ball. His Leverkusen side in 2023-24 averaged 62.1% possession, the most in the Bundesliga, while they averaged 59.6% the following season (2nd most), and Real Madrid averaged 59.1% this season by the time he was sacked (3rd most in La Liga).

His preferred style in terms of speed and directness is not too different to how Chelsea play now, though. Whether that’s a positive or negative is up for debate, but it should at least mean the adjustment for the players will be minimal.

Chelsea are averaging the slowest direct speed upfield in the Premier League this season (1.57 metres per second) and have the second most average passes per sequence (4.52). In their 2023-24 title season, Bayer Leverkusen had the slowest direct speed upfield in the Bundesliga (1.71 m/s) and the most passes per sequence (5.01).

Bayer Leverkusen did not press much when Alonso arrived. From his appointment to the end of the 2022-23 season, only Union Berlin (16.9) averaged more passes per defensive action (PPDA) than Leverkusen (15.9). PPDA is a measure of pressing intensity, taking the number of opposition passes allowed outside of the pressing team’s own defensive third and dividing by the number of defensive actions by the pressing team outside of their own defensive third.

In addition, only two Bundesliga teams made fewer than Leverkusen’s 169 high turnovers, which are possessions that begin in open play within 40 metres of the opponent’s goal. Interestingly, though, only three teams made more shot-ending high turnovers than Leverkusen (32), so they were direct when they did win the ball high.

However, the next season, as they strolled to the title, Leverkusen recorded 367 high turnovers, at least 54 more than any other Bundesliga team. In fact, across Europe’s top five leagues that season, only Manchester City (10.9) averaged more high turnovers per game than Leverkusen (10.8).

That did reduce in 2024-25, though, only recording 279, fewer than Bayern (324) and Mainz (282), but Real Madrid did excel in winning the ball high under Alonso. They made 166 high turnovers in La Liga in his time there – only Athletic Club made more (181) – while their 41 shots and seven goals from high turnovers were both league highs.

Alonso’s first job in the Premier League is perhaps not the one people assumed it would be, but there are reasons to think he could make a success of it.

It is still up in the air whether Chelsea will have European football next season. Their 2-1 win over Tottenham on Tuesday means they go into the final day of the season in eighth place in the Premier League, which, as things stand, would see them qualify for the Conference League again.

As strange as it sounds, it could benefit Alonso if they miss out on Europe altogether. Manchester United have shown how valuable not having midweek games can be this season. Having more time on the training field would be invaluable to a manager who wants to mould a young and talented squad.

A big reason for his success at Leverkusen was undoubtedly that the club and squad humbly embraced Alonso and his ideas. At Real Madrid, humility is somewhat understandably in short supply. No representative of the club is ever more than two sentences away from saying ‘biggest club in the world,’ which can make it an almost impossible job for even the best.

With Chelsea, you would need to go a long way to find anyone who thinks the club is closer to Leverkusen than Madrid in that regard, but they have to recognise where they are and where they need to go. The higher-ups must resist the urge to interfere like they have in the past, otherwise there is little point hiring Alonso in the first place.

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