From mental Man Utd to Liverpool

Xabi Alonso has left Real Madrid, because they take the Spanish Super Cup played in Saudi Arabia very seriously indeed.

Obviously, that wasn’t the only reason he’s gone, even if as a camel back-breaker it does seem a particularly small and twatty straw.

But it instantly catapults him to the top of speculative and concrete managerial wishlists for the great, good and batsh*t of world football. By law, all reports about Alonso must from now until confirmation of his next appointment include the phrase ‘no shortage of suitors’.

But where exactly will he end up? Let us rank the options from hilarious to distinctly possible, based on the early noise being generated about those aforementioned suitors.

6) Manchester United

We have very much enjoyed the tone around Manchester United being interested in a man who managed to win the Bundesliga title with a team that is not Bayern Munich. It’s a reminder that for so, so many of us who had our childhoods ruined by Fergie and the lads that Man United remain an outsized deal even in a world that has left them behind.

This is still, somehow, in the eyes of Gen Xers and Millennials, Manchester United Football Club We’re Talking About.

And so all the early reports are about how United will graciously deign to consider appointing him, rather than the other way around. It is absolutely unthinkable that Alonso won’t have better offers than a job literally nobody has been able to do for what is now close on 15 years, but it’s all still framed like United are doing him a favour by sparing some of their own bandwidth to consider the idea.

Also it won’t happen because we all know deep in our bones that Man United will not actually be appointing a new manager in the summer. They will give the permanent job to Michael Carrick. But we must all dance the dance until United, yet again, confuse themselves into the shadow realm at the sight of a beloved former player performing competently in an interim capacity.

By the time they realise they’ve made a terrible mistake, someone else will already have snaffled Alonso. And then Jason Wilcox will appoint himself.

5) Tottenham

Very much the funniest possibility, as is usually the case wherever Bumblef*ck Hotspur FC are involved. If Spurs end up with Xabi Alonso as their manager, then it will be the most spectacular opportunity yet to deploy the Little Britain ‘I fell’ meme from that time when Andy somehow ends up at the top of a tree.

The genius of both Spurs and Alonso’s situation is that the idea is obviously and objectively laughable, but both their respective situations means you can just about talk yourself into imagining a dimension where it is halfway feasible. And that crumb of feasibility, that tiny minuscule link back to actual reality, is key to what makes it so funny.

We can all enjoy entirely abstract absurdity, but even the tiniest grounding in reality is vital to really great comedy.

And the fact is that a manager who succeeds spectacularly at a club like Bayer Leverkusen but falls on his arse at a club like Real Madrid is precisely the right profile of manager for a club like Spurs. A very big club that, try as it might, will never truly be an elite one.

The Real Madrid mess might just mean Alonso has to take some medicine over his next job. It is not entirely impossible that he might have to do a little bit more overachieving before he can have another crack at regular superclub achieving.

And we will laugh our c*cks clean off if it happens. Which, again, it almost certainly won’t. But almost certainly isn’t certainly.

4) Spain

Does feel early for Alonso to skive off to international management, but would you entirely rule it out if the World Cup goes either brilliantly or terribly?

Given the first two options we’ve already got past, it certainly won’t be the least appealing potential option out there for a man with 114 caps and World Cup and European winners’ medals with La Roja.

No disputing the fact Spain must be a tremendously fun squad of footballers to manage, one that are matched possibly by only France in avoiding the usual problem of international management for elite club bosses where you suddenly don’t just automatically get world-class players in every position.

One other thing to consider is that this is Spain and, while currently apparently settled and happy, one can never entirely rule out a great big explosive meltdown and managerial banishment just before a major tournament. So it’s not entirely out of the question for this opportunity to come up before the World Cup.

3) Manchester City

The Liverpool connections that make the red half of Manchester slightly problematic are less pronounced with City, and if anything it feels more rather than less feasible for this job to be actually available in the summer.

It’s definitely possible that Pep Guardiola decides he’s had quite enough of all this after what now looks like a second consecutive failure to mount a sustained challenge for a title that was for many years his confirmed personal property.

There really isn’t much left for Guardiola to achieve or prove at City if he can’t muster the energy to complete a full rebuild of a new dominant team from the current foothills.

Maybe it is time for someone new to have a go at replicating Guardiola’s success. Make it a proper fresh start.

Having failed at Madrid, taking on the formidable challenge of being Guardiola’s direct replacement at City comes with palpable risk for Alonso’s still currently very much intact reputation, but hard to imagine he wouldn’t be up for that particular challenge/risk.

2) Bayern Munich

Played for them with great distinction, became their scourge as Leverkusen manager, and nobody would be at all surprised to see him rock up in Munich again as manager somewhere along the line.

The only real wrinkle here is that they already have a manager and he’s doing very nicely, thank you. Vincent Kompany as, has was always predicted, trod that familiar path from Burnley to Munich with great aplomb and has Bayern on course for further success in his second season at the club.

But also very much worth considering here that the words ‘second season’ should not be used too airily where Bayern are concerned. Two years is very much at the top end of the shelf life for any Bayern Munich manager.

The last manager to go beyond that was Pep Guardiola, who managed three seasons. His immediate predecessor Jupp Heynckes managed exactly two full seasons. Before that you have to go back to Felix Magath’s two-and-a-half years in charge between July 2004 and January 2007 for the last Bayern manager to beat the two-year mark.

Kompany is already barely a month shy of becoming the longest-serving manager among Bayern’s last seven permanent appointments. So, Alonso to Bayern this year is a lot more possible than might seem at first glance to be the case, is what we’re saying here.

1) Liverpool

Obviously. There’s no great trick to putting Alonso’s former clubs right at the top of the list here but sometimes you don’t need to try and be clever. This is a man who has the rare distinction of having played for three legitimate giants in three of European football’s powerhouse countries.

He’s already had a go at managing one of the three and, fair play, it all went to sh*t. But that’s absolutely not going to put off either of the others and probably nor should it.

It feels absolutely certain that Alonso will manage both Bayern and Liverpool at some point down the line.

What’s trickier is how near or far down the line. The Liverpool job is, in theory, as currently unavailable as the Bayern one.

But there have also been plenty of whispers and nudges about the safety and security of Arne Slot’s position even before Alonso became the suddenly available and devilishly handsome elephant in the room.

If Liverpool really do harbour doubts about Slot despite his 24/25 successes, and there are credible reasons this season why they should, then Alonso’s availability becomes another push factor.

Were the manager’s job at Liverpool suddenly to become vacant, it’s easy to see how they and Alonso instantly become each other’s top choices.

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