In the wake of Real Madrid’s home defeat against Levante, it’s only logical to ask whether Julen Lopetegui has already reached the end of the road as Los Blancos boss.
The situation, for sure, is looking dire. Consecutive defeats against teams the calibre of Levante, Alaves and CSKA Moscow, shortly after a horrendous thrashing at Sevilla and a lifeless derby draw against Atletico, is simply an unacceptable run of results for Real Madrid.
Lopetegui is clearly on borrowed time, and the only doubt is whether all-powerful club president Florentino Perez should act right now or give Lopetegui one last chance to turn the situation around in next weekend’s Clasico trip to Barcelona.
If you take a step back from the emotion of the situation, it’s plain that firing Lopetegui now, barely two months into the season, would be an incredibly kneejerk reaction and extremely unfair on the former Spain coach.
Yes, the situation is bad. Very bad. But before condemning Lopetegui it is necessary to gain some context.
Over the course of the last 13 months, Madrid have now lost 14 games including defeats to lowly opposition such as Girona, Espanyol, Leganes, Alaves and Levante.
Most of those losses, of course, came under the management of Zinedine Zidane, and the fact that Madrid somehow managed to finish last season with a third consecutive Champions League title should not disguise the fact that this team has been bedevilled by serious flaws for a considerable amount of time.
Rather than judging Zidane’s final year on his European triumph, which needed highly fortuitous victories over Bayern Munich and Juventus, not to mention a freakish sequence of events in the final against Liverpool, a more accurate reflection of the state of the team he left behind is their third-place finish in La Liga, 17 points behind champions Barcelona and with the team’s lowest points tally since 2004.
This is the team that Lopetegui inherited…but not quite, because we cannot forget that the squad, which struggled so badly throughout much of the last 12 months that Zidane admitted he did not know how to keep them successful, was then weakened by the departure of one of the greatest goalscorers in the history of football.
So you take a team which finished third last season and then remove Cristiano Ronaldo without replacing him…is it any wonder that Lopetegui is encountering problems?
Of course, that doesn’t mean Madrid fans should meekly accept successive league losses against Alaves and Levante. For all its flaws, this squad should still be more than good enough to win games of that nature.
And it is not intended to denigrate the achievements of Zidane, whose magisterial man management skills played a major role in his team’s ability to gain positive results even when they played badly, and it’s reasonable to argue that the lack of aura emanating from the sidelines is a factor behind the current troubles.
But the weaknesses running throughout the team pre-date Lopetegui’s arrival, and he is not responsible for them. He has to fix them, though, and he has to do so quickly. But if he was the best person to lead Los Blancos through a transitional period in July, he should be given far more than three months and a dozen games to prove himself.
Whether that will happen is, of course, another matter. Another loss in next weekend’s Clasico would leave Madrid seven points behind Barcelona, and Perez could decide that desperate times call for desperate measures.
If Lopetegui is fired now, the manner in which he stabbed Spain in the back on the eve of the World Cup will ensure he does not attract much sympathy. And that will count against him when it comes to garnering support in the Spanish press, many of whom felt betrayed by his actions in the summer.
But the team’s weaknesses would not disappear with his departure, and a new coach would not necessarily fare any better. Real Madrid have big problems – and the identity of the manager is by no means the most serious.
