No Retreat, No Surrender - El Espartano Alvaro Arbeloa Manager Thread

seeing his reaction after the goals scored against Madrid, he did not show confidence .. he looked resigned already. hand in pockets like I dont give a damn...


lets see if his stance changes

 

I'm not even going to mention Arbeloa, it's unfair to direct any blame at him; the players, however, are truly a disgrace.

Fede and Jr. were absolute dog shit.

 

The irony is that Fede finally got to play at MF once again, which is what he wanted

 

Mickey Mouse can go too.

 

Fede's issue is his skillset resembles Frankenstein. He's quick, has a good shot and hustles. That's why he's been played at RW and RB. He's just not robust and strong enough defending or in the air to be great at mid. He doesn't have the passing range either.

His strengths put him on the wing.

 

Update: didn't even need a serious opponent

 

They were more serious than us,
Does that count?

 

It's impossible to blame him after only 1 training session and 24 hours at the club. If anything I feel it had more to do with the mess that Xabi helped create mentally and physically in this team. No idea of play, no pressing schemes or automatisms, fitness the worse in years, etc. I don't know how a 50 minute training session fixes that?

Having said that, we must be congruent with what we have said with Xabi and demand from Arbeloa to impose authority and make the difficult decisions over time. He is the manager after all, he will decide the style of play and the defensive and offensive structure. It is on him now. Even if it is clearly interim till the summer.

He has a complete lack of experience and so it will be difficult for him but I am not of the belief that no manager in the world can fix this in the future and that the whole squad is rotten and that the Bernabeu should be burned to the ground. In fact only a manager can fix this.

In the summer we will have to assess and go for "our hansi flick". They said the barca team was rotten - it was a manager that fixed it (suddenly pedri the alcoholic is a world beater). Florentino made his mistake with Xabi but in the summer he will have to find the right man.

Also please don't say Xabi was our Flick, it is beyond laughable, it is a question of character and Xabi doesn't have it in this moment - he was not respected by the players and laughed at, that wouldn't happen to Flick if he was here.

 

No amount of justification is allowed for the loss just based on the sheer difference in talent between the two clubs. That wasn't even a La Liga level team.

 

Nice PR message. Real Madrid’s marketing department may have a look at it and use it as their excuse. Nobody else is to blame here. Not Pérez, not the players, not Arbeloa. This is on Xabi Alonso. So why even get angry? If things keep going wrong, we can just blame Xabi for the rest of the summer. Conceding three goals and falling behind three times against a segunda division team that might get relegated again. Clearly Xabi’s fault.

 

You think someone can fix all the bad habits of the last 7 months in 24 hours?!? Arbeloa inherited this from Xabi. We can start judging him after a few matches at least.

My post was a reaction to all the "I told you so" and Xabi memes we got after the defeat yesterday. Seems like some are getting great joy out of our failure so that they can keep pushing their narrative. Shit fans.

 

This is basically the optics most Real Madrid fans and most outsiders see.

Rodrygo: "I'm not playing in the Asia Cup, I'm not Bengali, I'm Brazilian!"



The New Dehli Messi strikes again.

 

Madrid only has two saviors.Zidane or Mourinho.I like Klopp too but he needs time to get know with the squad.

 

It's amusing to see the shock about Xabi when the standards for winning that were imposed on Carlo were always going to apply doubly so for him. Xabi as Real Madrid manager was kinda cool aesthetically, so it was easy to forget.

It was also funny to see some hedging going around about the supposed new manager honeymoon phase the team is supposed to experience moving forward--as if it couldn't be possible that Xabi was just not the right fit.

After yesterday maybe Courtois should talk about Xabi's automatisms and how that can not be changed in four days.

Crazy not to mention Ancelotti here.

 

It's literally impossible to win any major trophy you are still competing in with when you get sacked in January.

 

We literally won 13 of our first 14 games, we’re top 8 in the Champions League, we were still alive in the Copa del Rey, and we’re 2nd in the league. And he has the same win percentage as Flick across his first 34 games; so why wasn’t he sacked last season by Barcelona? Why is that win rate considered perfectly acceptable everywhere else, but treated like a crisis here?

And before the resident genius shows up with the recycled line; 'we won 15 UCLs so anything less than a 100% win rate is unacceptable.' Spare us with the fanatical bullshit please.

Some fans of this club are genuinely delusional. Either they were spoiled by that golden decade, or they live too deep in the digital world where everything has to be instant, dramatic, and extreme. It’s honestly worrisome and ridiculous.

At any other big club, Xabi’s first 34 games wouldn’t even register as a problem. But here, every single loss gets treated like a DEFCON 1 emergency. The club’s PR machine instantly goes into overdrive, blaming everything on the manager while ignoring the grim reality behind the scenes.

The structure is subpar across the board: player discipline, diet, fitness, sleep habits, professionalism, accountability; all of it. And yet we still act shocked when the team looks disjointed, lazy, or unprepared.

So the real question is: why do other elite clubs take football seriously at every single level; while we treat basic standards like optional extras? This club is ran like a company that’s 'too big to fail,' where any suggestion of improvement is dismissed as unnecessary. Right up until the next humiliation forces everyone to pretend they didn’t see it coming.

Then these same people turn around and ask:
Why can’t we beat Albacete, a Segunda team in danger of relegation?
Why do we struggle against Elche and Rayo?
How did we get humiliated at home by Celta?

Maybe because you can’t run a serious elite club like a celebrity daycare, cut corners everywhere internally, and then act shocked when you get exposed on the pitch by teams who are hungrier, sharper, and better organized.

 

Arbeloa overdoing it on the 'extraordinary' 'outstanding' 'exceptional' lines of the players in his press conferences and "I'm the one to blame" - no you're not, the board and players are to blame. We all see it.

 

Hes saying the right things, but so did Xabi and it meant nothing. So did Carlo, more than the previous two probably, and the only thing it activated in the players was complacency instead of responsibility as desired.

 

Huh? Carlo won it all a lot with Madrid. You were one of those clamoring for a tactician who could "fix" things when any manager who has ever had success at this club has just man-managed resources and set them up for success then trusted them to get it done.

 

Yes the introduction of Mbappe warranted a different approach since it represented a tactical conundrum that wasnt going to fix itself through man management. The idea wasnt to bring a pure tactician with zero man management ability but someone who can do both. Otherwise there are better pure tacticians out there than Xabi Alonso. He checked both boxes.

 

On the other hand Xabi wasn’t fired until he actually lost a trophy he could have instead won.