Only time will tell if Chelsea’s acknowledgement that something needs to change with their stalling business model is genuine. However, as a starting point to getting this lumbering titan on its feet once more, there might prove to be few shrewder than appointing Xabi Alonso as their new manager.
The 44-year-old was announced Sunday as the permanent successor to a raft of head coaches; the phrasing there is significant, and will begin work on his four-year contract on July 1. Alonso had long since emerged as a frontrunner for the vacancy following Liam Rosenior’s sacking last month, and indeed, there was more skepticism within the game as to whether Chelsea could convince the manager than vice versa.
Alonso, though, has pronounced himself entranced by his new employers, saying, “Chelsea is one of the biggest clubs in world football and it fills me with immense pride to become manager of this great club. From my conversations with the ownership group and sporting leadership, it is clear we share the same ambition. We want to build a team capable of competing consistently at the highest level and fighting for trophies.
“There is great talent in the squad and huge potential at this football club and it will be my great honor to lead it. Now the focus is on hard work, building the right culture and winning trophies.”
Those words are well-timed in the aftermath of Saturday’s defeat to Manchester City in the FA Cup final. One of the defining traits of the Chelsea of old, before Clearlake took the helm in 2022, was that even in their down years, this club found a way to win things. Four years into a new era, and they have a Conference League that would have been harder work not to win and a Club World Cup that left building blocks that were soon demolished amid the turmoil of Stamford Bridge.
Can hiring Xabi Alonso halt Chelsea’s downward spiral after FA Cup defeat to Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City?
Chuck Booth
There is hardly a thing at Chelsea that doesn’t need fixing. The playing squad looks like one that will do well to get away from the Champions League bubble. The promise of a dramatic upswing in revenue might only be fleeting, given that 2026-27 holds the promise of domestic football only. Fans are mutinous. The best that can be said is that Behdad Eghbali has at least partially acknowledged that the business model needs to be adapted.
Hence, hiring Alonso. This is not the act of a club whose director is said to have expressed a belief that coaching is not that important to success. You hire the Spaniard because you believe he can have the transformative effect he had in the Bundesliga, where the club derided as Neverkusen were reforged as the domestically unbeatable juggernaut who could knock Bayern Munich off their perch. You don’t hire Alonso, and Alonso doesn’t say yes, if you are not prepared to entrust your club to him.
What Alonso inherits in west London is hardly what one would call a blank slate; how could it be when much of the squad is signed up into the 2030s? He does, however, arrive at a club that sees the need to change. Handing their new manager a four-year contract is a sop to the norms of the industry, one in which you do not see a highly-rated but untested young coach and make a commitment to employ him until 2032.
Naming your new manager as a manager, rather than a head coach, is a sop to the old ways of doing things. It acknowledges that for some leaders, a broader overview allows them to be more impactful on the pitch, just as has been the case for Mikel Arteta, whose Arsenal rebuild has often been referenced as a blueprint for Chelsea. Now, Chelsea have a Basque head coach of their own, a boyhood friend of Arteta whose managerial trajectory was even more rapidly impressive.
Alonso gives Chelsea what they need. For starters, his first summer in management bore plenty of hallmarks with what his new club are planning on doing. Bayer Leverkusen had been buying prospects to sell for big bucks before Chelsea turbocharged that model, but in 2023, their manager was central in convincing them to tweak their model. In came Alejandro Grimaldo, Jonas Hofmann, and, in particular, Granit Xhaka, of whom Alonso would say at the end of their remarkable first season together, “without him it wouldn’t have been possible.”
Uniting these players was their manager’s desire for “football intelligence” and, as he told CBS Sports in November 2023, players who could reinforce his message in the dressing room.
“Two, three guys repeating the same message you’ve been giving is fundamental,” he said of his dressing room leaders. “When you have that, you have a big part of the team in your hands.”
Chelsea have belatedly come to see the value in that. This summer, they are, according to CBS Sports sources, expected to target experienced reinforcements in defense and midfield to supplement the core of Levi Colwill, Moises Caicedo, Enzo Fernandez, Cole Palmer and Joao Pedro, all aged between 23 and 25. Alonso is believed to want signings who can serve as voices in the dressing room from the get-go.
On the field, he has proven himself adept at fixing a defense that has been the greater of this team’s twin issues this season, 55 goals conceded in 36 league games, the 10th best record in the league. Even if Chelsea aren’t generally allowing the xG on their goal that they were a few months ago, a rolling 10-game average of 1.25 is too high for a club with their aspirations, particularly as tightening up the backline has nerfed this team as an attacking force. They look like a team trying to build attacks on foundations of quicksand.
CBS Sports
When Alonso arrived at Bayer Leverkusen in October 2022, many expected him to implement the sort of elegant possession play that had made him so beloved as a player at Liverpool, Real Madrid or Bayern Munich. Instead, those early weeks were described by Jeremie Frimpong as “first and foremost, defend our goal, don’t give up goals. That was really the foundation Xabi wanted to build.”
In his two and a half years at the Bay Arena, Alonso’s side conceded nine fewer goals than Bayern Munich. Their unbeaten domestic season, one of the greatest achievements top-level European club football has seen this century, was powered by discipline without the ball and control with it.
Tactically, Alonso immediately looked like he knew what he was doing. Take the win at Bayern that powered Leverkusen’s first Bundesliga title, where the Spaniard almost baited Thomas Tuchel into changing his system to respond to the threat of Florian Wirtz et al., only to then switch his own up by dropping both Frimpong and any natural striker, playing without the ball in pursuit of victory.
That his brief time at Real Madrid did not really harm his reputation speaks to how exceptionally he had his players performing on the pitch, even as they proved so hard to manage off it. The 3-4-2-1 did not follow Alonso from Madrid, but the principles of dominating possession and working as a unit to get the ball back did. He might not have been able to manage every star player, but between August 19 and January 12, there really was not much arguing against Kylian Mbappe being the best footballer on the planet.
The problem was platforming Mbappe while ensuring Vinicius Junior and Jude Bellingham shone nearly as brightly. That might just be intractable for any Madrid manager. Dressing room management is rarely a cakewalk at Cobham, particularly when Rosenior left so soon after falling foul of the Spanish-speaking contingent of the squad. Then again, this Chelsea squad cannot point to the Champions League medals that their predecessors have; instead, this is a group that are already having to prove to fans (and indeed a hierarchy that are not averse to player trading) that the Club World Cup was not a fluke of a favorable draw and one brilliant half against Paris Saint-Germain.
Again Alonso’s words from the midst of the title-winning season augur well.
“We’ve talked about the football side, about going back to the basics, but it was a lot of psychological work,” he said of how he drilled his message into the Leverkusen squad. “The players had the quality, the potential to do much better.
“It was about trying to get that commitment, that self-esteem from them, to show them that they could do better and what they were not doing right. We were not intense; we were very passive. Without intensity, it was impossible.”
Intensity is just what Chelsea need. Not the rabid hot streaks that have seen them lead the league in unnecessary yellow cards and reds. Not the diffidence that has probably seen them tank from the Champions League places out of European qualification entirely, a potential blessing for Alonso who could get an awful lot of free weeks to work with his plus-sized squad.
Under the leadership of Eghbali, Todd Boehly and the Clearlake consortium, Chelsea have got an awful lot wrong. The problems they have made for themselves in recruitment, cost-building and management of the on-field product may prove to be intractable for any leader, manager, head coach or whatever else he is called. If Alonso cannot get it right at Chelsea, it probably will be because no one can. After all, it is hard to think of anyone better suited to this moment in the club’s history.
