Even though Real Madrid were nowhere near their best level and clearly inferior to Barcelona in La Liga while getting destroyed at the Champions League level under Xabi Alonso, a manager with no real track record of success at the elite Champions League level of football, there were an awful lot of apologists amongst the fan base ready to turn their backs on literally the best players in the world who had won, in many cases, multiple Champions League titles for the club.
At no point did Alonso publicly do anything to support the players or diffuse the situation. He turned out to be a crazed egoist who could not manage players at a top club, and he really was the second coming of Rafael Benitez. In a way, he may have been even worse, because whereas Benitez said things like telling Luka Modric to stop doing trivelas, Alonso would literally force his best players out of position, turning Jude Bellingham into a left back and Fede Valverde into a right back, subbing off Vinicius Junior in games when he was dominating, and then wondering why nobody liked him.
Xabi Alonso was out of his depth at Real Madrid
Alvaro Arbeloa did not have the experience or quality to fully get Real Madrid back on track as his replacement, but you could already tell the difference in how the locker room viewed and respected him, minus a clearly mentally spiraling Kylian Mbappe.
Now that Jose Mourinho is in charge, the difference is so obvious. This is how a top manager should be and act. Everyone, even Mbappe, is enjoying their football and buying into an actual team philosophy, doing their best to perform at a high level and win games. And the superstars are harmonizing, with Jude Bellingham, Vinicius Junior, and Mbappe all getting goals and assists in their best roles. Even Arda Guler is thriving on the right wing, a position he used to be poor in, because Mourinho has fine tuned a role to fit his skills in an area of the pitch.
Mourinho, unlike Xabi Alonso, has wisdom and can enforce standards while still publicly supporting his players and making it clear that he uses the tactics to shape to their strengths, rather than making them do whatever he wants with no rebuttal or explanation on his part. Alonso was not a good fit for Real Madrid, and he was a failed coach, one of their worst ever in terms of the toxicity he brought to the club. And now that Mourinho is having Real Madrid play this well early on, it really shows you just how much of a problem Alonso was; it's finally time people admitted the truth.
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