Alex Kirkland

You know, Zidane was Castilla coach, had no experience really beyond that, came in midway through the season, just like Arbeloa does now, and the rest is history.

You know, winning three Champions Leagues in a row and everything else.

Not everyone is going to be Zidane.

You know, that was a very, very special thing.

But like I said, there are some precedents which are encouraging.

Well, look, that's been much less public.

And I should say that's something that Jude Bellingham himself, when he's spoken about it recently in a press conference, has denied.

He denied any suggestions of dressing room unrest or anything like that.

But there have been multiple reports from different sources that there have been, in terms of Bellingham's role in the team,

how he plays, how the coach wanted him to play, that they haven't always entirely seen eye to eye on that kind of thing.

So maybe less about personalities and more about kind of tactics and the role and how to get the best out of him.

Well, Real Madrid have announced this this afternoon.

We all knew, didn't we, that the way that things were at Real Madrid, that it was likely that the final judgment on Xavi Alonso was going to be on the basis of the Super Cup.

We're yet to discover.

We're trying to find out, obviously, over the last couple of hours since this news broke, the exact process by which his tenure as Real Madrid manager has come to an end.

In other words, what it was that was the final detonator

But we always thought that it was likely that Jeddah would be, if you like, the cut-off point.

And so it's proven he's been in charge since only as early as July.

Of course, he didn't want to.

And to be honest with you, I think part of the problem started there, that right from the very start, Alonso was accepting certain levels of interference, which I think as time went on, he probably felt he shouldn't have done.