Why Xabi Alonso Will Choose The Love of Liverpool

If the Liverpool fans love you, they really love you

I’m busy planning lots of celebratory content for the final months of Jürgen Klopp’s reign, but right now my thoughts are looping back to Xabi Alonso, and the future of the Reds. (And I’m still writing my post-match articles, as I’ll do tomorrow.)

If the Liverpool fans love you, they really love you. I don’t think many clubs have quite the same relationship with a manager, and while that makes change hard, previous evidence shows that it’s the club to manager, if you’re good enough.

Newcastle loves its no.9s, and Liverpool loves its messiahs. (But just don’t expect miracles all the time, you naughty people.) The Rafatollah was meant to be humorous, too – a mockery of the devotion, but also, an excuse for devotion. Benítez was anointed, even before Istanbul. The love for Klopp was instant, too.

On Alonso’s future, here’s a key point: the Bayern Munich and Real Madrid jobs come up all the time.

The Liverpool job does not. If you want the former jobs, they’re free most summers. At Liverpool you could do 5-8 years and then still go to Madrid or Bayern in your 40s.

I want to feel optimistic post-Klopp, to make his departure less of a downer. I think it’s a great opportunity for the right manager, if he’s the right person.

I’ve said before that not only did Bob Paisley replace Bill Shankly, but in 1984 Joe Fagan won the club’s first and still highest-ranking treble after replacing Paisley (in 1983) and but for tragedy, might have won back-to-back European Cups (or Champions Leagues, to younger readers in an age where people use the expressing for the sodding Uefa Conference League).

Next, Kenny Dalglish won the (rare at the time) double in his first season in 1986, then transformed the team to play the best football England had ever seen, according to the likes of Tom Finney and Michel Platini, who witnessed it.

Tragedy interrupted Dalglish’s later years of that imperial phase, too, and the handover to Graeme Souness was with an older squad, is incredibly similar to where Liverpool were 12 months ago. Souness then went about the rebuilding in totally the wrong way, but we have Klopp to thank for staying long enough to avoid that falling on his successor. That would have been much harder: following Klopp whilst overhauling the squad and the XI.

None of the Liverpool managers mentioned, bar Klopp and Shankly, were extremely charismatic. They were just great, in their own ways. Only a weak person would be afraid of taking the job now, when the squad is so talented, if afraid of Klopp’s shadow.

So again, if you appoint David Moyes to succeed Alex Ferguson you’re appointing proven mediocrity (before and since). So if Liverpool were to replace Klopp with the equivalent of David Moyes, then obviously there could be trouble. Except FSG won’t do that.

Even if you replace the then-elite Rafa Benítez with another king of mediocrity, Roy Hodgson (before and since), you’re not getting an up-and-coming coach who can win it all, but proven mid-table win-nothingness based on sturdy but outdated ideas.

I wanted to think of the reasons why Alonso would choose Liverpool above all the other options that will now pop up, including staying at Bayer Leverkusen (and I’d respect his decision to do that).

While Alonso had his first great love in his hometown Real Sociedad, Merseyside became his second home; he said felt more at home in Liverpool than in Madrid and Munich, and his children are Scousers.

Even now, Istanbul – the game and the experience around it – was probably the most intense 48 hours of my life. I’ve never know euphoria like it, before or since; tied in with the fact that it was shared with friends, in a strange foreign land, at a time when I didn’t get to travel much at all. The whole trip was one amazing buzz.

But imagine being a player? Imagine scoring the equaliser in the final, from 3-0 down? Imagine seeing and feeling the reaction when you get back to Liverpool. That has to burn itself hard into the heart.

Alonso fell out with Benítez a few years later, and I got the latter’s side when I spent the day with him in October 2009. But I know that all stories have two sides, and communication and relationship breakdowns happen all the time, with both parties often to blame in some way (in terms of misunderstanding the other).

Indeed, they’ve happened behind the scenes at Liverpool in the past two years, between different departments, and is one of the reasons – I suspect – the otherwise ideal and tactical-transformer Pep Lijnders isn’t in the frame. (It could be that he’s seen as rookie, too, but I think he was being groomed for the role, prior to 2022.)

Also, given the way Alonso left 15 years ago, it just makes me think that he could have a sense of unfinished business at Liverpool.

He won everything at Real Madrid and Bayern Munich; but they often do. As a manager, so what?

Winning with Liverpool means more, as the club, while massive, is not a dominator in a weaker league. It’s a challenge to win the biggest honours with Liverpool, but success is more appreciated.

Would Steven Gerrard swap his Istanbul experience for three or four league titles at Chelsea, had he gone in 2004? I don’t think so. And I don’t think anything Alonso achieved as a club player could match that 2004/05 season.

By 2004 I’d given up my season ticket due to ill health, but Michael Hines from RAWK (who just happened to direct every episode of the BBC’s ‘Still Game’ – “Awa’ an bile yer heid”) very kindly offered me a ticket in the Kop for the visit of Norwich City.

It was the first game Alonso started for Liverpool at Anfield, and he and Luis Garcia (starting his second Anfield game) were sensational.

The Road to Istanbul that season, and the final itself, will have left an impression on the young Alonso, as his first major trophy, and even now, none that followed were ever won in more dramatic fashion.

There are so many advantages that Liverpool have over any big club interested in Alonso right now.

I can see a few drawbacks too, just as no manager is ever perfect; but if I were him, I’d be asking my agent to sort the deal to Liverpool whilst trying to win the Bundesliga for the first time in Leverkusen’s history.

To me, his alternatives are less appealing.

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