New Leverkusen coach: Will Alonso become a Guardiola double?

Conducting, correcting, and always on the move: Xabi Alonso continues as a Leverkusen coach where he left off as a professional footballer. With success.

SStatisticians have long calculated everything that is relevant or irrelevant to professional football. On Saturday the timers looked closely at the clock and lo and behold: Xabi Alonso, the new coach of Bayer 04 Leverkusen and successor to the Swiss Gerardo Seoane, who was sacked after a series of failures, sat on the so-called coaching bench for just 114 seconds in the first half.

He didn’t take the time to sit back and relax. There was too much to do, observe, correct and make better. The 40-year-old Basque jumped up from his seat again and again, paced through the coaching zone, sorted the game of his team, which had been unsettled for weeks, with gestures and used every injury break to give relevant information in short conversations with his players. In short: Xabi Alonso, as a defensive midfielder at FC Liverpool, Real Madrid and FC Bayern Munich, is the supreme supervisory authority for his teams, and as a coach seems to have remained a first-class law enforcement officer.