Fernando Carro, the Spanish president of Bayer Leverkusen, invited Uwe Richrath, the social democratic mayor of Leverkusen, to the champion’s locker room. In the middle of the celebration of the Bundesliga title, last Sunday, the spectacle that was discovered before the mayor of this town of 160,000 inhabitants in the Rhineland was most mundane and endearing. Beer mugs flew from hand to hand and the players, the coaching staff, their families and friends bathed themselves inside and out with the foamy liquid, as dictated by the centuries-old tradition of German football. In the midst of the revelry, the high priest of the fans and the squad, coach Xabi Alonso, fully participated in a ritual that consecrated him as something more than a coach.
The Leverkusen city council reported yesterday that at the plenary session on May 6, the appointment of Xabi and Carro as illustrious sons of the city will be proposed. The dedication of a street or square to honor the memory of the Basque coach, responsible for the first Bundesliga title in the history of the club, founded in 1904 and currently owned by the chemical company Bayer, will also be put to a vote.
“It is very special to be here celebrating that we are finally champions of Germany,” said Xabi to the crowd gathered in the stadium on Sunday. “But we want more. We want more! “We want the Cup too and we want the Europa League!”
The shock that Leverkusen’s victory has caused in Germany with five days remaining in the championship is proportional to the historical imbalance between the Bayer club and traditional powers such as Bayern, Dortmund, Borussia Mönchengladbach, Hamburg, Cologne or Eintracht. That Leverkusen is one step away from lifting the German Cup – they play the final on May 25 against Kaiserslautern – and are doing like a shot in the Europa League – they beat West Ham 2-0 in the first leg of the quarters—delves into the general perplexity but does not seem to faze Xabi. The player from Tolosa encourages the fans and his players to take advantage of the wave of enthusiasm in the five weeks remaining in the competitions. The treble seems like a feasible milestone for a team that plays more united every day and has not suffered a single defeat so far this season. Even more feasible than The Infernal Catapult, the improbable play that Xabi and his brother Mikel learned from the Oliver and Benji series and that they never managed to transfer to real football no matter how much they insisted on reproducing it when they were young, throughout an entire afternoon that must have taken them to the limit of his acrobatic possibilities.
Xabi was never an acrobatic type of footballer, but his diplomatic skills and people skills earned him a nickname among his colleagues when he played for Madrid: The negotiator. For months he has had to activate these skills to practice tightrope walking as he received proposals to coach Liverpool and Bayern next season.
They say in Madrid that even Florentino Pérez is considering offering him the bench, in case Ancelotti leaves the club in 2025. To quell rumors, Xabi, against general expectation, announced a month ago that he will continue at Leverkusen for another year. “Bayern is going through a very profound transition at the top, and at the moment it is a difficult bench,” observes Jonas Boldt, who was Leverkusen’s sporting director until 2019. “And succeeding Klopp at Liverpool requires living up to a legend. Phew! I see it as normal that Xabi chooses Madrid. In his contract it is foreseen that he can be released if some of these clubs call him in 2025. Until then he is armored.
At 42 years old and with only a season and a half as a coach in the First Division, Xabi Alonso is experiencing an adventure that he describes as “unexpected.” As if winning two Champions Leagues, two Euro Cups, a World Cup and a few leagues were not enough, he is now galloping towards the treble with a people’s team.
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