Alonso exit shows dynastic greatness rests not in tradition but ditching beliefs

JOSE BRETON/SHUTTERSTOCK/DEFODI

Xabi Alonso (above) has been sacked by Real Madrid 

this week while Michael Carrick returned to Manchester United

“It is all too easy to make mistaken inferences unless 

the process involved is already very well understood.”

   - Francis Crick, molecular biologist

“This club is about winning, 

winning and winning again. 

It’s in our DNA.”

   - Álvaro Arbeloa

We gloss over the truth that the only reliable predictors 

of football success are wealth and good decisions

15 Jan 2026 - The Guardian

Jonathan Liew

You return in a blaze of glory, feted in an official statement as one of the club’s “greatest legends”, entrusted with reinventing the riches of the past for a new footballing age. You leave in a maelstrom of snide briefings and chaotic performances, after losing a power struggle with star players and falling out of favour with the club’s godlike president. Let’s just say that Xabi Alonso got the full Real Madrid experience in his eight months as coach.

Obviously Alonso was reverent in his exit statement, expressing gratitude for the opportunity, describing it as “an honour”. No point burning your bridges when you might get invited back: one of the more underrated ways of getting yourself hired as Real Madrid coach in the future is having done the job in the past.

For a club able to take its pick of the world’s greatest managerial talent, Madrid often chooses to cast a narrow net. The announcement of Álvaro Arbeloa as Alonso’s replacement now means the past eight coaching appointments, and 34 of the 57 since the second world war, have had some previous association with the club. Vicente del Bosque came back for a third stint. Luis Molowny had four stabs at the job in the 1970s and 80s, in among his time as a director. Indeed you have to go back to Carlo Ancelotti in 2013 to find the last coach Madrid appointed without having played or worked for the club before. Naturally, Ancelotti would also circle back later for another go.

All of which feeds into the idea of “Madrid DNA”, so dutifully invoked by Arbeloa in his first press conference. The idea that there is some unbroken identifying thread running all the way through to the present, passed down the generations. Madrid DNA is silverware. Madrid DNA is big names, dramatic comebacks, exemplary spectacle.

And when things start to fray, club DNA offers a reassuring route out of the mayhem. Just been outplayed in the clásico? Four points back in the league? Simply return to the sacred texts, which may on closer inspection actually be the internal email directory. Stick the head of the reserve team in charge. Watch nature heal itself. Fifteen Champions Leagues can’t be wrong. Meanwhile, Michael Carrick has been appointed as Manchester United’s new interim manager, pipping Darren Fletcher, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, Ruud van Nistelrooy, Tom Cleverley, Darron Gibson and Bebé. Fletcher, the pre-interim interim manager, will return to coach the under-18s, whom he has been showing videos of Cristiano Ronaldo and Wayne Rooney to try to educate them in the club’s ethos.

And so the departure of Ruben Amorim has been spun as a kind of liberation, freeing United from its frowning Portuguese yoke. “United need a manager who fits the DNA of the football club,” Gary Neville announced after Amorim left. “Adventurous, exciting football. Playing young players. Entertaining the crowd.” Which all sounds great, though is this not basically what everybody wants? And if United DNA consists entirely of vague, sweet-smelling nostrums that could apply to anyone, then what is the point of it?

Push United fans for specifics and they will probably point to the style of football employed under Matt Busby and Alex Ferguson, two coaches who possessed zero “United DNA” when they arrived. And if the lesson of Ferguson teaches us anything, it is that dynastic greatness rests not in tradition but apostasy, not in slavish replication but in violent mutation: a fact that should have been obvious from the moment Ferguson’s handpicked successor crashed and burned within months.

Perhaps what we describe as club DNA is a story, a myth concocted to fit reality, which is not to describe them as invalid. Stories give our life shape. Stories are how we make sense of the chaos. The values and history and culture of a club are in a sense its essence. The confusion arises when we forget the story is the product, not the ingredient. Brentford are doing well; anyone care to define Brentford’s DNA?

As for Madrid, perhaps all the talk of comebacks and ingrained winning mentality provides a convenient fog for the financial and political supremacy they have enjoyed in European football for decades. The hugely favourable land deals, the lavish credit lines, the supreme business acumen, a pliant media landscape, the indelible influence of the club president, Florentino Pérez, in the corridors of power through his construction conglomerate ACS. The immense apparatus of soft power and accounting instruments that allows them to pick off the world’s best footballers year after year. Twenty-one consecutive seasons in the top three of the Deloitte Money League: it’s just our DNA.

But these are not the stories football clubs like to tell about themselves. So we gloss over the inconvenient truth that the only reliable predictors of footballing success are abundant wealth and good decisions. After all, those who live by the DNA are destined to die by it.