Xabi Alonso’s Real Madrid: One month in, what do we know?

Turn off I-95, north of Palm Beach, Florida, and take a right onto Shady Lakes Drive, a quiet, leafy street lined with well-kept lawns, palm trees and condos. At the end of the road, in a converted public park next to a middle school, Xabi Alonso is building his new Real Madrid team.

“Moving! Moving! Moving!” Alonso shouts, first in English, before switching to Spanish. “Eso es, todos en movimiento. That’s it, everybody moving!” At their training base in Palm Beach Gardens, Madrid’s players are in the middle of a possession drill, split into three groups, crammed into a small space, marked by cones on the training pitch.

Alongside them, Alonso paces restlessly, like a tiger in a cage. He yells instructions, corrections and praise. “Yes! Yes! Much better!” When he’s not pacing back and forth, Alonso crouches, hands on his knees, watching intently. “Moving, moving, Trent! Good structure!”

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Palm Beach Gardens is an unlikely place for a revolution, and the degree of difficulty is dauntingly high. Coach Alonso got started in the job only a month ago. Two weeks later, he was flying with the squad to the United States. Four days after that, he was taking charge of his first game at the FIFA Club World Cup. The team have already played in Miami, Charlotte and Philadelphia, battling an East Coast heat wave and dodging thunderstorms. Many first-team players have been out injured. Despite all of those limitations, there are signs of the team Alonso wants, and the changes he’s determined to make. They’ve been articulated in the coach’s long, discursive news conferences, glimpsed in those meticulous training sessions, and put into practice in matches.

What are Alonso’s priorities, then? The answer came in his first news conference on U.S. soil on June 17, and it has been reflected in every training session since. “It’s about the distances [between players], with and without the ball,” he said in Miami. “We have to be better positioned. We have to recognize where we ought to be, to have the ball, to win it back. The team needs to be closer together.”

But with so little time to work, Alonso has had to compromise. “It’s about prioritizing the message, the concepts,” he said on Wednesday. “It’s not about covering all the other items. We try to cover the key ones. … I’m sure we’ll be a better team at the end of the tournament than we were at the beginning.”

With limited time on the training pitch, Alonso and his staff have been relying on video sessions with the players to get his ideas across. “You can’t do too much, with the heat,” he said on June 21. “In the afternoon, at the hotel, we try to be efficient with the images. We do it collectively, we do it line-by-line, and individually. And that’s not just for now, but for the whole season.”

But the Club World Cup has brought unexpected complications. Kylian Mbappé, scorer of 43 goals last season, was hospitalized with gastroenteritis, and hasn’t played a minute in three group-stage games with Al Hilal, Pachuca and FC Salzburg. The injury list is long, the hangover to a draining 2024-25 season. Mbappé, Dani Carvajal, Éder Militão, Eduardo Camavinga, David Alaba, Ferland Mendy and Endrick — all first-team contenders — have been unavailable.

A seventh-minute red card for Raúl Asencio meant the team played almost all of the Pachuca game with 10 players. Alonso had to tear up his gameplan in the first cooling break. Madrid’s first match, a 1-1 draw with Al Hilal in Miami, was a letdown, the team struggling in the humidity at Hard Rock Stadium. Asencio gave away a penalty, and Federico Valverde missed another spot kick in added time.

“We’ve been with [former coach Carlo] Ancelotti for four years,” goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois said afterward. “We have to change to what the boss wants now. It doesn’t happen in four days.”

Courtois has described the process as “trial and error.” In Charlotte, Madrid recovered well from Asencio’s red card to beat Pachuca 3-1. Jude Bellingham, Arda Güler and Valverde provided the goals from midfield. And in Philadelphia, liftoff: The team reveled in a new 3-4-3 formation, beating Salzburg 3-0 and playing with an intensity and clarity not seen since 2023-24.

So after three Club World Cup matches, and with everything they’ve had to deal with, how much of Alonso is there in this Madrid team already?

“Very little!” Alonso said with a laugh when asked that question recently. “We try to look for solutions, within some fundamental ideas we have. The games tell us a lot about how we can improve.”

Defense: Tactical flexibility

Alonso has said that he isn’t fixated on playing with three central defenders, as he often did at Bayer Leverkusen. But as soon as he had the players available — with Antonio Rüdiger fit again for the Salzburg game — the coach ditched his back four, and went with Rüdiger, Aurélien Tchouaméni and Dean Huijsen at the back.

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“[Rüdiger] played a lot in a back three when he was at Chelsea,” Alonso said. “I knew he’d quickly pick it up. It gives us flexibility.”

That has been another of Alonso’s buzzwords: flexibility. “In my head it’s always been there, being flexible with the systems,” he said when asked about the change to a back three. “The players have the intelligence and the football culture to know why we use it, and the positive things we get from it.”

And that extends to the team’s ability to adjust within games, as they did when reduced to 10 men against Pachuca. Too often, last season’s Real Madrid felt predictable, and a little stale. The midgame reorganization in Charlotte, implemented in a first-half teamtalk, was coherent and effective. “That game intelligence gives you another edge,” Alonso told ESPN afterwards. “I’m really pleased with how [the players] understood this quick change, in just the cooling break that we had. From that idea, we built a very strong performance.”

The new signings, Trent Alexander-Arnold and Huijsen, also have adapted. Alonso called Huijsen “one of the pillars” of the new project. Teammates have helped. “I don’t think I have to give too much information to Trent,” Courtois said. “He’s been a long time on the scene, he knows everything from when he was at Liverpool. … [Huijsen] is a great defender. It’s about learning what we have to do in defense together. He’s intelligent.”

Midfield: Finding a role for Güler

Güler played only 373 minutes in LaLiga in 2023-24, rising to 1,247 in 2024-25. The early signs are that the 20-year-old attacking midfielder will be more central to Alonso’s plans than he was to Ancelotti’s, in every sense. Güler was introduced at half-time against Al Hilal. The team improved considerably, and Güler kept his place in midfield against Pachuca and Salzburg. In the most recent game in Philadelphia, he played alongside Valverde, in a double pivot.

If Madrid don’t sign a creative midfielder this summer, it will be because Alonso is convinced that Güler can do the job. “I think with [the players] we have, we can be dominant in midfield,” Alonso said on June 21. “We have to work on it, but with our different [player] profiles, I’m convinced.”

Against Salzburg, there was also a new role for Bellingham, playing ahead and to the right of Güler and Valverde, a kind of inside-right position. Alonso has been frank about what he wants to see from Bellingham: doing more by doing less, being more “efficient” without trying to be everywhere. “Jude has the capacity to cover a lot of ground, but he has to start in the right place,” Alonso said. “He has the soul of a central midfielder, he likes to participate in the buildup, and he can get into the box. But where he starts from will be important. That will help him.”

Bellingham will also be helped by surgery on the shoulder that has troubled him since November 2023, allowing him to move freely again. His operation is scheduled for after this tournament. “It’s been a long time coming,” Bellingham said last week. “I’ve come to the end of my patience with the [shoulder] brace.”

Attack: Giving youngsters a chance

A frequent criticism of Ancelotti concerned his reluctance to give young players — especially academy products — an opportunity in the first team. Gonzalo García’s staggering impact at the Club World Cup shows the benefits of trusting in talent, and watching a player flourish.

García scored against Al Hilal, provided an assist against Pachuca, and scored again against Salzburg, an effortless 84th-minute chip, after working tirelessly throughout. Speaking to reporters, he already sounds like a veteran, answering questions with an easy smile. For Alonso, it’s no surprise. “I knew a lot [about García],” the coach said in Philadelphia. “I’d been following [reserve team] Castilla a lot. … He’s a typical No. 9, he reminds me of Raul [González]. He’s always in the right position, always waiting for a chance.”

There is no greater compliment than comparing a Madrid academy player to club legend Raúl. Alonso insists there are “no decisions” taken yet on the squad for 2025-26, but it would now be a shock if García were not part of his plans. There is less certainty about Rodrygo, who played just over an hour against Al Hilal, didn’t feature at all against Pachuca, and had 23 subdued minutes against Salzburg. Alonso has called the Brazil forward “a special player” who will “play an important part at the Club World Cup.” But so far, that hasn’t happened.

Pressing, and working together

As often as Alonso has stressed the need for flexibility, and for the side to be more compact, he has repeated another nonnegotiable: the team working together as a unit, and pressing collectively. It’s something Ancelotti failed to convince his players to put into practice last season, especially the front two of Vinícius Jr and Mbappé.

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“It’s fundamental,” Alonso has said in the United States. “Everyone is involved, in all the phases. … Nowadays, you need a team that presses as a unit. We have 11 individuals who we have to make work together. We need to address it.”

Against Salzburg on June 26, there was one passage of play that delighted Alonso more than any other, a moment he described as “very illustrative.” With 75 minutes played, coasting at 2-0 up, Madrid had a corner kick and lost the ball. “The way all the players chased back was spectacular,” Alonso said afterwards. “They were all sprinting to get back behind the ball. When there’s that feeling, that we all have to defend, to be involved, that’s very important.”

It has been only three games, against average opposition. There will be much bigger tests, starting with Juventus in Miami on Tuesday, followed by a potential quarterfinal with Borussia Dortmund and semifinal with Paris Saint-Germain. Those matches will tell us much more about Alonso’s Real Madrid. But the early signs — especially in the Salzburg game — are positive.

“The group want to evolve. They want to learn. They want to adapt,” Alonso said this week. “They’re top players, so it’s easy with them. They pick up concepts fast. But it’s about daily work, work that gets under their skin. We’re working on it.”