Xabi Alonso is a man with options.
There is a danger that the remainder of this season will turn into one long recruitment process, rather than what he hopes will be the run-in to the first title win by a German club not called Bayern Munich since 2012.
For some sort of cultural context, the last time Bayern were not reigning Bundesliga champions, TikTok didn’t exist, Taylor Swift was merely a successful country singer and Jude Bellingham was nine.
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The scale of Alonso’s potential achievement, if Bayer Leverkusen go on to win the league, should not be underestimated, which is precisely why he is so in demand. He’s also doing this by getting his team to largely play exciting, technical and flexible football, and his playing credentials mean his reputation as a ‘football man’ is unimpeachable. All of which combine to win broad approval from across the football world’s tribes — the aesthetes, the analytically minded and the traditionalists.
He also has the admiration of two superclubs who, for different reasons, are looking for a new manager/head coach.
Alonso is on Liverpool’s list to succeed Jurgen Klopp. His hero status at Liverpool remains from his five years running their midfield in the 2000s. He also would appear to be a candidate for the very club he is in the process of vanquishing, with Bayern considering him as the man to mop up the mess caused by their failed successive Julian Nagelsmann and Thomas Tuchel experiments over the past three seasons. Bayern are clearly in no mood to wait, having announced that Tuchel will depart at the end of the season, a year earlier than planned.
So what path should he go down? Here’s an assessment of which of these two sparkling options would be better for the most in-demand coach in the sport.
The squads
Liverpool’s playing staff is probably better, man-for-man, than Bayern’s. Indeed their core group – Alisson, Virgil van Dijk, Trent Alexander-Arnold, Mohamed Salah – are better than you’ll find at most clubs, not just Bayern.
The German champions clearly have some brilliant players, not least arguably the best No 9 in the world in Harry Kane, plus Jamal Musiala, Joshua Kimmich and Alphonso Davies, but the general quality is lower, a point underlined by their indifferent recent results.
The question of which squad is more suited to Alonso’s style is a trickier one.
It has been pointed out that Liverpool’s current approach is very different to how Leverkusen have operated this season, but many of the players currently at Anfield are pretty adaptable, and they do have the sort of attacking full-backs who could fit as wing-backs, if he wanted to switch to that formation.
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The spending power
Bayern clearly have the allure and the money to essentially buy anyone they want from the Bundesliga, so if Alonso wanted to take pretty much anybody who has thrived under him at Leverkusen along if he chooses Bavaria, then he probably could.
That said, both the financial clout of the Premier League and Liverpool’s recent history suggest that they are prepared to outmuscle most other clubs for a player if they really want him.
This is a long way off, and in the realm of the theoretical, but, given that he prefers playing with a double pivot at Leverkusen, top of his list would most likely be another No 6-type midfielder.
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The infrastructure
This is one of the great unknowns for Liverpool. They do not have a sporting director in place for next season — although the plan is to appoint one as soon as possible. So, as things stand, Alonso does not know who he would be working with if he succeeded Klopp. Which isn’t ideal, but may not be a concern for much longer.
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Away from that, Liverpool’s hierarchy is reasonably set with Fenway Sports Group, the U.S. organisation which owns the club, having shelved plans to sell up, and Anfield’s expansion into a 60,000-capacity stadium now complete.
There’s also an element of transition at Bayern, however, in that sporting director Christoph Freund and chief executive Jan-Cristian Dreesen have only been in those jobs since last summer. But Alonso at least will have the comfort of knowing who he’d be working with in Munich.
He is likely to face more pressure and ‘contact’ from the very top of the club if he went to Bayern, where former players and executives are rarely shy of sharing their opinions, whereas at Liverpool he’d have more of a chance of being left alone to work as he pleased.
The emotional connection
Both clubs will argue that they have the upper hand here. Alonso played those five seasons in Liverpool (2004-09) and later had three in Munich (2014-17), and apparently formed good attachments to both cities.
At Bayern, however, he was merely one of many brilliant players to have clocked in at their winning factory. He is probably more loved at Liverpool, where he was a key part of the team that unexpectedly won the 2005 Champions League, and ran Manchester United close for the title four years later.
The relationship with the supporters would probably be more important at Liverpool: if you want to succeed as a manager at Anfield, you need to have some sort of connection with the fans, whether that’s something you forge yourself or if it’s pre-existing. Alonso has that, so he will be afforded more patience than many other prospective managers.
The challenge and pressure
One of the key selling points Bayern will surely put to Alonso is the chance to shape the club and squad to his image, which at an institution so august and powerful, is not something they offer to just anyone. He will also be following a couple of failed managers (which sounds absurd, given that both Nagelsmann and Tuchel have won the club the title), so he won’t be unfavourably compared to his predecessors.
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And that is where the key drawback of taking the Liverpool job lies: he will be succeeding their most beloved manager since Kenny Dalglish, and arguably their most transformational since Bill Shankly. Being the immediate successor to a generational legend rarely ends well, as David Moyes and Unai Emery will tell you.
That said, a combination of his existing relationship with the club and the fans, plus the fact that success isn’t expected in quite the same way at Liverpool as it is with Bayern, means that he will be afforded much more patience on Merseyside than in Bavaria.
At Bayern, winning the league title is considered the bare minimum, whereas with Liverpool second place is not viewed as a cataclysmic failure — especially not with Manchester City hoovering up titles at every turn.
There will still be pressure, but it will not be quite as oppressive at Liverpool.
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The lifestyle
Alonso lived in Liverpool’s city centre rather than in one of the suburbs typically called home by their players. He apparently frequented student bars because he preferred them to the posh places, while his then-girlfriend and now-wife Nagore Aranburu also worked in the city’s four-star Hope Street Hotel. Their son Jon was born there, too, in 2008.
However, staying in Germany could in theory be less disruptive to his family, even if Leverkusen is at the other end of the country (approaching a seven-hour drive) to Munich, where Nagore supposedly enjoyed living.
Should he return to Liverpool, he will not have to attend Oktoberfest dressed in lederhosen: although whether that’s a positive or a negative from his perspective is unclear at this stage.
The opposition
This is unquestionably one area where Bayern have the upper hand. By moving there, Alonso would by definition have removed their biggest domestic challengers’ main asset: himself.
Borussia Dortmund and RB Leipzig have threatened to topple Bayern in the last decade but never quite managed to actually do it, whereas one of the main drawbacks of life in the Premier League is you have to deal with the behemoth that resides in Manchester’s Etihad Stadium.
You have to pretty much get everything right to effectively challenge City, and even that often isn’t good enough.
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The third way
Actually, he has three options: he could simply thank Liverpool and Bayern for their interest, stay at Leverkusen and continue his good work there.
At 42 years old, he is said to be in no particular rush to “step up” to a bigger club, which is eminently sensible given that, regardless of how brilliant Leverkusen have been over the past six months, this is his first full season managing a senior team. Liverpool and Bayern represent incredible opportunities, ones that he could think may not come along again anytime soon, but they are both absolutely vast undertakings for different reasons.
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Might he be spooked by the cautionary tale of Andre Villas-Boas, who won a treble at Porto in 2010-11 in his first full season as a manager, went to Chelsea that summer at age 33 and was sacked within nine months?
The scenarios are different, and Alonso will have more latitude at either Liverpool or Bayern, but this is an extremely early stage of his coaching life and the sensible option for the development of it might be spending another season where he is. Then again, it’s very easy to say that from afar, and when you haven’t got two of the biggest clubs in the world chasing you.
We’re probably in ‘world’s smallest violin’ territory here, as Alonso faces the equivalent of being forced to choose between the luxury mansion and a palatial penthouse (or the comfortable semi-detached that he has made his home over the past 14 months), but he faces a colossal decision that could define the rest of his career in management when it’s barely started.
It’s a privileged, but unenviable position to be in.
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(Top photo: Ina Fassbender/AFP via Getty Images)
