Julen Lopetegui’s ill-fated Real Madrid reign reveals uncomfortable truth

Julen Lopetegui is out at Real Madrid following Sunday’s Clasico humiliation. He will be replaced by Santiago Solari on an interim basis.

Humiliation in El Clasico sealed Julen Lopetegui’s fate at Real Madrid, but most fans and reporters knew as early as the previous week, following a home defeat to Levante, that Lopetegui’s reign at Real Madrid was all but over.

It’s a fitting way to round off a miserable half a year for the Spaniard. Just a few months ago — June 12, if you want to be exact — his dream job at the Spanish capital awaited him after he led a much fancied Spanish national team to World Cup glory. Now his reputation is ruined and he will likely spend the rest of his managerial career trying to prove that the last four months were a one off. The most frustrating part of all this for Lopetegui, and those who were so optimistic about his appointment, is that it largely isn’t his fault.

When he joined, many were expecting a massive revamp at Madrid after a third European triumph had papered over what was an otherwise disastrous season. Los Blancos finished 17 points behind Barcelona in the Liga title race and got lucky on more than a few occasions on the way to the Champions League final. Even after Cristiano Ronaldo officially left the club, there were reasons to be optimistic, and an extra 100 million in the bank would go a long way to securing some much needed reinforcements. Yet, as the summer went on, those reinforcements never came, despite the coach’s best efforts. Madrid entered the season still lacking a player that could even attempt to ease the loss Ronaldo.

Fortunately, there was optimism around Lopetegui’s appointment outside of just potential signings. The Spaniard brought something different to the table in comparison to his predecessors with his philosophy promising a hard working, high pressing collective that meticulously broke down their opponents through keeping the ball. Lopetegui also had a track record of trusting in youth and these qualities helped him transform a stale, post-peak Spain team into World Cup favorites. With such a prominent Spanish contingent in the Madrid dressing room, one would have hoped that the transition would have been seamless and until the start of October, it was seamless.

However, a rough run of fixtures, injuries and a record scoreless streak scuppered Madrid’s progress. The defeat to Alaves was a real turning point, following that game, much of the good Lopetegui had instilled in Madrid disappeared and for the last week of the Spaniard’s reign, the Madrid dressing room have been leading a double life in which they claim to the press that nothing is wrong when the performances on the pitch heavily suggest the manager had lost the dressing room.

It didn’t take long following the Clasico humiliation for the blame game to begin, both online and in the press. From the mentality of the dressing room to the decision making of both the manager and the president, the search for answers on what went wrong this season has already begun and will go on, as it always does, until Madrid win something. Herein lies the philosophy of the club: To win every game and trophy on offer or face a quick descent into crisis.

Yet through all the criticism and finger pointing that surrounds Madrid every time things goes bad, the president and the players always remain. If one was to go through the history of Real Madrid, 80 percent of the strongest figures in the club’s history were players and the other 20 percent were presidents, namely Santiago Bernabeu and Florentino Perez. During Madrid’s long and illustrious history, not one manager has impacted the club like Johan Cruyff and Pep Guardiola did at Barcelona or Alex Ferguson did at Manchester United.

There’s an obvious reason for this: Managers rarely get the time to make an impact at Real Madrid, with Miguel Munoz’s 15-year reign at the helm an outlier at a club where managers rarely manage over 250 games. Even in their most successful eras, Madrid rarely stuck by the man in the hot seat. Los Blancos went through five different coaches across seven seasons between 1953 and 1960. They sacked three different coaches between 1985 and 1990 despite winning the league every season. Between 1998 and 2002, when Real Madrid ended their long wait for a Champions League and won the competition a further two times in the next four years, they had five different coaches with Vicente Del Bosque becoming the second longest Madrid manager in that time.

Managers like Lopetegui, who want to implement a style at the club and prioritize the collective rarely succeed at Madrid as such an approach takes time and patience, qualities that are in short supply in the Bernabeu.

To understand the perfect Real Madrid manager, one need look no further than the recently departed Zinedine Zidane. The Frenchman understood the club from almost every angle, having experienced Madrid as a player, as a sporting director and as an assistant manager. He had just enough tactical nous to get by and had a unique understanding of the current dressing room. Managing this balancing act, wasn’t easy for Lopetegui and it proved even more difficult when he was succeeding a coach who, for three years, seemed to do it so easily.

Succeeding Zidane was always going to be a poison chalice, in that sense, Lopetegui might find redemption in the fact that intangible factors played a massive role on why he failed.