Alex Kirkland

It started to matter because the response from the club essentially was, well, shouldn't have taken him off, should he?

So rather than reinforcing the manager and giving him the authority and saying, yes, the player is out of order because the player publicly, if you like, challenged his manager and undermined his authority, the club continued to do so by basically saying, well, don't take him off.

And of course, that tells you something about the environment around you.

Now, those aren't necessarily...

the things that define everything or the things that guarantee that you're not going to continue as coach of Real Madrid.

But it plays a part and it is part of that whole environment.

And, you know, you know this, Clay, at Real Madrid, we've seen this with so many managers and so many players, that it is a different environment to other clubs.

And you come into it and you have to manage in a slightly different way.

And I think for Xabi Alonso, of course, that has been problematic.

Well, right.

I think there's two different ways of looking at it.

I think what Stevie says in terms of if you look at a manager and you try and say, OK, what has he achieved in this time at Real Madrid?

I think Stevie's right to say there isn't anything that you really hold on to.

Now, during the Club World Cup, the first three games, we thought we're starting to see a structure.

We're starting to see different ideas.

We're starting to see something quite interesting.

And Stevie mentioned this earlier, and I think it's absolutely right.

One of the things about Alonso is he came in after Ancelotti as the guy that in theory was going to make them modern.

and structured and there was going to be a formation and a clear identity and that didn't happen whereas whereas Ancelotti was a bit more kind of free-flowing let the players express themselves find find a basic way of getting the best out of them whereas Alonso we all felt was here's a systems manager unfortunately of course it's a systems manager at a club that generally speaking hasn't liked systems very much now so as as Stevie rightly says if you take what's happened at Real Madrid is there anything there that says this has worked

The truth is, there's almost nothing.