Jonathan Liew

the primacy of the dressing room, I guess.

And then, of course, the totemistic figure of Perez.

The internal currents of that job are almost unique.

And it's very hard predicting which coaches are going to succeed at it and not.

Mourinho, when he goes there in 2010, you'd say he's basically at the peak of his powers.

And just about, I think, manages to do...

He does an okay job there.

He wins from the league, which he still keeps banging on about.

But is he the man who's going to get the best out of...

The slightly uneven array of talent that Madrid have now, I'm not really sure.

You know, we talked about the Vinicius, the Prestiani incident.

I wonder if a lot of Madrid fans are going to want to have him in place.

They obviously want, you know, they made little secret the fact that they wanted Jurgen Klopp and they were trying to persuade Klopp, might still manage to do it, but doesn't appear to be much progress on that for now.

No, I mean, the Alonso appointment was really interesting because it was almost an attempt to synthesise this kind of the Madridismo, the club culture, the club DNA sort of appointment with a coach who, you know,

is clearly very hands-on, who has very defined ideas of what he wants a team to do and how he wants them to run and play and press and pass.

And it got to a point where they just weren't having it.

So I think that should be a kind of...

a wake-up call for them.

They essentially have created a team that only a certain kind of coach can ever really get to a tune-out of.

And I think that's quite an invidious position for them to be in because it basically rules them out of 80 or 90% of the up-and-coming coaches in world football.