When you are offered the chance to coach Real Madrid, you cannot say no. It’s impossible. It is a unique opportunity. This is confirmed by some German media outlets, which have reported that when Xabi Alonso renewed his contract last year, he told some members of the Leverkusen board that if an offer came in from Real Madrid, he would leave immediately.
All indications are that the time has come for Real Madrid to sign Alonso. Only time will tell if this is indeed the right decision and if he is the perfect coach to manage the club at a time when the Merengues are going through a crisis with Italian coach Carlo Ancelotti.
What leads me to this hypothesis is Xavi Hernandez’s failed experience at Barcelona, when he arrived at a time of crisis, and the Spanish media began to market him as the perfect coach to solve Barcelona’s problems, and that no one else could do it because of Xavi’s intimate knowledge of the club.
However, the end of this soap opera, in which Xavi was the hero and the Spanish press the narrator, was a sad one. Xavi left the team of his dreams without having achieved any of his big ambitions.
I fear that Xabi Alonso’s experience will be similar to Xavi Hernandez’s, because decision-making in the world of sport, and especially in football, is not easy. It requires planning, thinking and what the Stoics called “evil foresight or inversion philosophy”, which means imagining the negative outcomes that could happen six months or a year after a decision is made and avoiding falling into the trap of cognitive biases that hinder the decision-making process.
Researchers in cognitive psychology know that there are three cognitive biases that interfere with the decision-making process, which I will discuss below:
– First, the narrowing effect: This occurs when we are stuck in one way of thinking about the decision at hand, or we fail to consider other options available to us by forcing ourselves to generate a second alternative.
– Second, confirmation bias: Our tendency to seek out and favor information that confirms our beliefs while ignoring or devaluing information that contradicts our beliefs.
– Third, short-term emotion: Thinking in a non-strategic way and favoring options that may satisfy a short-term desire without considering the long term.
These biases may explain why Real Madrid’s signing of Xabi Alonso may not be the best choice. The narrowing effect occurs when the Real Madrid board considers only one option to replace Ancelotti, without seeing other options on the market that might be better. In terms of short-term emotions, Xabi Alonso’s career could be affected if he fails at Real Madrid, because from the outset he made a decision solely to satisfy his desire to manage the club of his heart. That’s why the Barcelona-Xabi soap opera ended in a bad and unexpected way.
No one can deny Xabi Alonso’s value and tactical knowledge, not his former coaches, most notably Guardiola, who said that “all the coaches who had the opportunity and pleasure of having Xabi as a player always knew he would become a great coach”, nor Xabi Alonso’s highly successful experience with Leverkusen, where he won three titles (Bundesliga, German Cup, Super Cup).
A new story will begin between Madrid and Alonso the coach, which could end as brilliantly as Zidane’s story with the Merengues or fail as Xavi’s did. Only time will tell. So, Is he prepared enough to confront the prevailing winds of Real Madrid ?
Yassir Aziar, Sports Reporter And Researcher
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