Nine points, seven games and Alonso already gone: Real Madrid's title race is really a job audition for Arbeloa
Nine points with seven to play is not a mathematical death sentence, but Real Madrid have the look of a side that knows the La Liga title is already halfway across town. Barcelona sit on 79 points from 31 matches. Madrid are on 70. The fixtures tighten, the calendar narrows, and the margin for Barca to trip is now one bad week and a run of results nobody should bet on.
That is the league picture as Alaves roll into the Bernabeu on Tuesday night. What is more interesting, to me, is what this run of games actually is. It is an audition. Alvaro Arbeloa was handed the first team on 12 January 2026 after Xabi Alonso was moved on at the seven-month mark, and the brief has quietly slid from winning the league to proving he belongs at the top of it.
The dressing room wants him. The boardroom is less sure
Arbeloa has the players. That part of the story has been building for weeks, and the noise around the training ground is that the squad would happily keep him beyond the summer. He has been at the club in one form or another for twenty years, he knows every floor of Valdebebas, and the academy graduates who have broken through under him are the ones most publicly in his corner.
What he does not have, yet, is the kind of stretch of results that makes the decision obvious for Florentino Perez. It is nearly a month since Real won a match in any competition. The Champions League quarter-final ended with a 4-3 defeat at Bayern Munich in the second leg. The goal difference has sagged. A tuning-up win over Alaves on Tuesday will not quiet the manager-of-the-future conversation, but losing it would finish it.
Alaves arrive with just enough to be awkward
Alaves sit in 17th, one point clear of the relegation zone. That sounds worse than their recent form suggests. Their new manager's bounce has produced four unbeaten matches, even if only one of them was a win, the spectacular trip to Celta in Vigo that flipped their season. Madrid have won their last eight against them, which should matter. It did not matter against Mallorca, who beat them 2-1 at the start of April. It might not matter here either.
The injury list does not help. Thibaut Courtois remains out with the thigh problem that has kept him on the sidelines for the last five games, and Andrey Lunin continues in goal. It is not a crisis, but it is one more thing for an Arbeloa side that cannot quite find its footing at the moment to manage.
What a Tuesday night really decides
Here is the read, for what it is worth. If Madrid win well on Tuesday and string together a proper finish to the season, Arbeloa makes it very hard for the club to go out and hire someone with a bigger name in the summer. Six months ago that would have sounded fanciful. It does not now. The players are publicly in his corner. He has been the only coach in a long time to get them to play with anything like a collective identity.
The counter-argument is that this squad has underperformed at a grand scale in a season where Barcelona were winnable. That is on the coaches, and Arbeloa is one of them. A 4-3 Champions League exit in Munich is not a reason to extend anyone.
The honest answer is probably somewhere in the middle. The title is effectively gone. The Champions League is gone. What is left is seven games to remind everyone why he was worth promoting in the first place. Tuesday night is where that audition begins in earnest.
Cricket Updates
