Xabi Alonso has raised standards at Real Madrid. The question inside the dressing room is who is willing to live with them.
Something feels off at Real Madrid this autumn. The league table looks fine. The squad is stacked with big names. But inside the dressing room, players are still figuring out what it means to play for Xabi Alonso instead of Carlo Ancelotti. For a club that ran on talent and habit, the message now is blunt: talent doesn’t cut it anymore. Everyone runs.
The reset started last summer. Ancelotti’s four-year cycle ended, and Madrid handed the keys to a former midfielder who’d built his reputation on structure and intensity. At the same time, the club went all-in on renewal—a hectic window brought Trent Alexander-Arnold, Dean Huijsen and another wave of young talent to sit alongside Jude Bellingham, Vinícius Júnior and Kylian Mbappé. Our breakdown of the Real Madrid summer transfers 2025 showed just how aggressive that reset was.
Spanish reporting since then paints the same picture. Alonso walked into a dressing room that had grown comfortable with Ancelotti’s lighter touch and travel freedom, then immediately tightened the screws. Recovery protocols, punctuality, physical work without the ball—all of it stricter now. Players talk privately about longer video sessions, more detailed game plans and zero patience for shortcuts. Some, especially those who felt last season drift, think it’s overdue. Others are experiencing something closer to culture shock. They’re being asked to unlearn the habits that helped them win.
Results haven’t settled the debate. Last summer, Madrid opened Alonso’s tenure with a grinding 1-1 draw against Al-Hilal at the Club World Cup—a match that already showed a team caught between eras. Our report on that match described a new coach pacing his technical area, a frustrated crowd and young players feeling the weight of the shirt for the first time. The pattern’s continued into La Liga. Madrid dominate stretches of games, then look oddly short of ideas or intensity. Something’s unsettled behind the scenes.
The divide in the dressing room
That unease shows up clearest in how different players have processed Alonso’s standards. Some see the logic. For younger pros like Aurélien Tchouaméni and Arda Güler, more structure and running is just modern elite football. For Mbappé, the bar could hardly be set too high. These players frame the new regime as necessary if Madrid want to keep winning against hyper-athletic opponents.
Others aren’t convinced. Some of the dressing room’s loudest voices have been uneasy with how quickly hierarchy shifted. Vinícius’s angry reaction to being substituted in the Clásico—captured on television, followed by a carefully worded apology—didn’t come out of nowhere. Federico Valverde’s public frustration about being used at right back, then a surprise night on the bench, landed as another message: no one is immune from tactical decisions. Trent’s slow reintegration after his hamstring injury has been read not just as caution over fitness, but as a reminder that reputation doesn’t buy minutes under Alonso.
Alexander-Arnold’s situation has become a symbol of the tension. Inside the club there’s real concern about how little rhythm he’s found since arriving, and how often he’s watched from the bench even when cleared to play. Opponents have targeted his side when he does start. They know he’s still adjusting—new league, stricter defensive scheme, different expectations from teammates who grew up playing full back in Spain. Around the team, people talk less about his crossing and more about whether he can live with the physical and positional demands Alonso wants from his back line.
Huijsen sits at the other end of the spectrum. He’s a 20-year-old center back who’s been pushed into responsibility faster than planned. Reports in Spain describe a staff that loves his range of passing and calm on the ball, but quietly worries about fatigue, concentration dips and what an early red card and an injury might do to his confidence. Senior players are protective. They see a prospect who can change how Madrid build from the back, but also one who needs shielding from the boom-and-bust reaction cycle where every mistake gets clipped and shared.
Scroll through fan reaction after a flat 0-0 draw or a loss, and the mood swings are obvious. One corner of the fanbase has already moved into crisis language—”disconnect” between Alonso and the dressing room, questioning whether the manager’s standards are worth the friction. Others argue this is exactly what a reset looks like. A squad that had grown used to choosing its own rhythms was always going to push back when someone new started rearranging the room. The memes and gallows humor tend to land on the same themes. Trent is the expensive luxury that never gets plugged in. Vinícius is the emotional barometer. The dressing room becomes a soap opera where every touchline handshake or lack of eye contact gets read as a sign of collapse or rebirth.
Inside the club, the view is less dramatic. Madrid know the history. The club has won more Champions League titles than anyone. Managers come and go. Players arrive at their peak and leave in silence. The one thing that doesn’t change is the expectation that the dressing room, however talented or moody, will eventually align around winning. That’s the bet the hierarchy has made on Alonso. They believe the bad habits he tried to strip away needed to go, and that the short-term discomfort of strict rules and bruised egos is worth paying if the result is a squad that runs harder, presses higher and defends together.
The coming months will tell whether that bet pays off. If results hold and Madrid stay in the title race and go deep in Europe, the story becomes one of necessary growing pains. The dressing room will retroactively look unified, and the early arguments will get filed under “demanding environment.” If performances stall and the star names drift further from Alonso, those same flashpoints will be cited as the moment the project started to lose the room. Right now, Madrid’s dressing room sits in the middle of that fork, louder and more complicated than it looked from the outside, but still intact enough to go either way.
