It has been just under three weeks since Jurgen Klopp shocked Liverpool and the wider football world with his announcement that he would leave Anfield at the end of the season.
On the field, progress has remained smooth. And off it, one clear candidate has emerged as the favourite to succeed the German: Xabi Alonso, the former Liverpool midfielder now steering Bayer Leverkusen towards a possible first Bundesliga title.
There is no absolute guarantee that the Spaniard will return to Merseyside, but why has he emerged as the frontrunner and what sort of manager could he be? Our Walk On podcast experts gathered to discuss those questions and more.
Tony Evans: Xabi Alonso — he looks as good a candidate as we could possibly get.
Simon Hughes: I think he is the only outstanding candidate. Not one of the coaches in Europe ticks every single box, but Alonso ticks the most. The most obvious one being is that he’s created a team out of pretty much nothing in the space of 18 months that is on the verge of winning the Bundesliga against a Bayern Munich team which has spent heavily on experienced players.
Naturally, people are going to talk about his allegiance with Liverpool, which helps, but above everything else, it’s about how quickly he’s created a really top quality team and the style of football they have. And their defensive security as well.
Tony Evans: If you take out the fact that he played for Liverpool, he still fits the profile.
Caoimhe O’Neill: Absolutely. With certain players, there was always that feeling that you wanted them to come back to Liverpool but Xabi Alonso was one of those that you could never really dream about. He was at Real Madrid, then Bayern Munich. But now he could come back as a manager, which would be massive.
Xabi Alonso had some memorable moments as a Liverpool player (Jamie McDonald/Getty Images)
Tony Evans: Is there any chance that someone else will come in for him?
Simon Hughes: Well, Liverpool have got a bit of a head start, in the sense that they know Klopp’s leaving. But only Real Madrid and Bayern could compete with Liverpool.
The last time I spoke to him for an interview was three, four years ago. He was at the beginning of his managerial career then, and he saw it as a long-term career. He didn’t want to burn brightly and then fade away. He’s seen a lot of coaches take jobs too early and then find themselves with nowhere to go very quickly.
All that said, the Liverpool job doesn’t come up very often. Klopp’s been there for a long time. And if you make a success of it, the club isn’t going to push you out the door. So I think he’ll see Liverpool as a sensible next step. He’d want to stay a long time with a view to maybe moving on to some of his other former clubs in the future. And no one’s going to begrudge him going elsewhere after that.
Caoimhe O’Neill: I think he’d prefer it to be Liverpool to Real Madrid than Real Madrid to Liverpool.
Simon Hughes: I think so. I think he will get more responsibility at Liverpool because the managers tend to after a certain period of time. But he’s a smart guy. He will realise that. The Liverpool job might not come around again soon, whereas there’s every chance the Real Madrid manager or Bayern Munich manager will be sacked within six months.
Tony Evans: But do you want to be the man who follows Klopp?
Simon Hughes: It’s impossible to replace Klopp in terms of charisma and personality. I guess he’s probably a one-off in world football. What they have to do as an ownership group is find somebody who commands respect. As a player, Xabi Alonso certainly did that. And what he’s done at Bayer Leverkusen is going to excite.
Where they are similar is that he’s his own person with strong views about the way the game is played and about the way he conducts himself. If you look at why it unravelled at Liverpool when he fell out with Rafa Benitez (in 2008), Alonso stuck to his guns then and you’ve got to respect that. Maybe at the time, he got a bit of criticism. He wasn’t playing particularly well. People tended to side with Rafa early on in that argument. But what it shows is that he’s a tough person who will stand up for himself.
Leverkusen’s players and Xabi Alonso have a strong bond with their fans (Leon Kuegeler/Getty Images)
Tony Evans: What is the reaction in Germany to all the speculation?
Seb Stafford-Bloor: Pretty much every major media outlet in the country is descending into crisis mode around Bayern and Thomas Tuchel’s future. But with Leverkusen, they’re a club who are built to recycle: to lose players, coaches and go again. And so the idea of Xabi Alonso potentially moving on is not a huge story. It’s just expected that he’ll do good things at Leverkusen and then move on up the ladder.
Tony Evans: Given the level of ‘crisis’ at Bayern Munich, they will surely be first in the queue for any up-and-coming young manager in the Bundesliga…
Seb Stafford-Bloor: It’s a little bit overstated the idea that Bayern Munich just plunder every other club in the Bundesliga for players or coaches. Plus, the idea of what Bayern are heading into is still a little bit undetermined. There are problems at that club and there are better options on the horizon for someone whose stock is as high as Alonso’s.
Plus, if you’re Xabi Alonso and you win the Bundesliga with Bayer Leverkusen and the German Cup, what do you potentially gain by going to Bayern? Maybe a tilt at the Champions League. But Liverpool, for instance, are a better vehicle to do that.
Simon Hughes: There’s a lot of discussion, certainly in the UK, in relation to the style of football Alonso brings and whether it’s an easy fit, given Klopp’s reputation for delivering teams with high intensity. What’s your interpretation of that football and how easy would it be for Alonso to come into Liverpool with the players they currently have?
Seb Stafford-Bloor: From a technical perspective, no doubt Liverpool have the players that Alonso would like to use. The most pronounced dynamic in his Leverkusen team is the relationship between the two wing-backs or the two full-backs, depending on the system used. You have Jeremie Frimpong being pushed very, very high — sometimes the furthest man forward. And you have Alex Grimaldo playing a bit more of a considered playmaking role.
Alex Grimaldo has thrived under Xabi Alonso (Lars Baron/Getty Images)
On the other side, you have your internal playmakers who are very gifted technical footballers. Clearly, Liverpool have plenty of those. And then forwards who score goals but also can create and do some of that out-to-in playmaking.
The little caveat I would insert here is that Leverkusen is not a big place. It’s a town built around a factory, the biopharmaceutical company. The team is the factory team, traditionally. And in terms of big media coverage in Germany, if you don’t play for or coach Bayern Munich, the level of scrutiny is just nothing, with the exception maybe of Borussia Dortmund.
That is important as it didn’t click immediately for Alonso. Bayer were quite boring to watch — it was a bit like Mikel Arteta’s Arsenal before it evolved properly. Quite stale and plodding. There were a few disparaging remarks made but you’re able to have that at Leverkusen because you’re not expected to challenge for the title.
Tony Evans: One of the concerns is that arguably the three biggest players at the club (Virgil van Dijk, Mohamed Salah and Trent Alexander-Arnold) are out of contract in a year’s time. Does Alonso have the status to make them go, ‘Alright, we’ll give this a go?’
Caoimhe O’Neill: Absolutely. He’s got 11million followers on Instagram! He’s someone a lot of the players at Liverpool will have watched — Thiago played alongside him (at Bayern) and they’re close friends. Alonso was one of the people who told Thiago to go to Liverpool.
It feels like he’s a personality who would quietly command the dressing room because of who he is and what he’s achieved as a player, but also what he’s done to become a manager. It’s been maybe a quieter path – going back to his roots of Real Sociedad and now doing it in Germany – but I think he would come with a lot of respect. It might not be heavy metal football, but Liverpool could still keep their place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Tony Evans: He has got gravitas, hasn’t he? He’s the sort of person that you want to listen to.
Stafford-Bloor: One hundred per cent. The word I’d use is probably “reverence”. Over the summer, I had the chance to go to Leverkusen’s training camp in Austria and watch a few of their sessions. I know the assumption is he’s going to coach like he played, as an elegant, classy footballer — all gestures and laughs. But actually, he’s very similar to Arteta. And Granit Xhaka said the same thing. He saw the similarities in the way they think about the game and how they coach and deal with the technical elements. You’ve got to have a certain amount of respect to be that way — especially if it’s your first senior job.
And if you think of players such as Odilon Kossounou, Edmond Tapsoba, Florian Wirtz, Jeremie Frimpong — all these guys have gone from being simply well thought of to world-class in the making. To have that effect on players, you’ve got to have some kind of hold on them.
Tony Evans: One thing that FSG should look at on CVs is success in Europe because that’s something that obviously we all value. And he’s been very good, hasn’t he?
Simon Hughes: That was something they really overlooked in the early years of their ownership, thinking that they could appoint a young, up-and-coming manager like Brendan Rodgers, who had no experience of Europe. And it really showed.
Let’s not forget Xabi Alonso has played in Europe as well, so he knows what it’s like as a player and the challenges around that. He will appreciate what the players need because of his own experiences.
One thing I noticed the last time I met him is he uses fewer words to make his points, which comes across as being more decisive. He’s obviously got a sense of his own self-worth, but he’s not an egotist like many other managers are. I think that’s because he’s got the medals to prove that he was a very good player. So there’s no self-doubt there. But I did notice last time I met him when he first became a coach, he was a lot more succinct in what he was saying, a lot more deliberate. And I think you would see that on the football pitch, whether it be on the training ground or in the matches.
(Top photo: Lars Baron/Getty Images)
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