Trent Alexander-Arnold takes first step of Real Madrid high-wire act

On Tuesday morning the Miami Herald carried a story about a Local Man arrested in Florida’s Polk County for breaking into a stranger’s house to make himself dinner and have a bath rather than going home to face his wife after an argument.

The Local Man, who has no criminal history, was apprehended just as he was settling in for a relaxing soak. He has since been charged with burglary. So on balance, and while an entirely tempting, innovative option, this is probably not the way to go.

Pressure makes diamonds, as online graft-influencers like to say. But it also makes the average human yearn for a little quiet space. That same Tuesday morning Trent Alexander-Arnold, who could probably also do with a break from the white noise, was taking his second Real Madrid training session in the 32C (90F) heat of the Gardens North County District Park, a hundred miles south-east of Polk, and in a team where the entire experience can at times resemble an unceasing spousal argument.

Madrid are the most relentlessly exposed football club on the planet, huge even in a place where it feels at times as if nobody actually knows the Club World Cup is going on just up the road. Towards the end of the opening ceremony on Saturday a Fifa-branded wailing wall of hope was wheeled out on to the pitch at the Hard Rock Stadium, trailed by a gaggle of children, who then solemnly implanted 32 lighted bricks bearing the badges of every competing club.

The big screen lingered on one badge only, the Madrid emblem, drawing huge, shrill cheers from a crowd that had to that point seemed interested only in Lionel Messi doing his Elvis in Vegas act. Welcome to the world, Trent, as we may now call him, a place where every moment is public, every second in the branded nylon out there to be hungrily consumed.

The Hard Rock Stadium is also the venue for Madrid’s opening game against Al-Hilal on Wednesday in the brain-mangling heat of a (frankly insane) 3pm kick-off. Before then it is to be hoped there is space to take a few breaths, because this will surely be the most scrutinised pre-season debut any footballer has faced, globally streamed, instantly consumed and analysed. In America the sun rises every day, as Ronald Reagan pointed out, accurately. But it tends also to bring quite a bit of light and heat with it.

There is something else, too. For all the hype and hopeful talk, one thing is true: the evidence is that he will probably fail. This is not a criticism, more an assessment of the balance of facts. There are also competing positives. Madrid have a huge wealth of talent plus a very good new manager. The early sessions with the team have been encouragingly moreish.

The chat among the Spanish journalists who follow Madrid is that Trent has tended to trail after Jude Bellingham “like the new kid at school”, and there was something tender about the first glimpse of Alexander-Arnold in the rondo, out there surrounded by all those faces, Luka, Kylian, Vini, trying to control a ball on plastic grass, like some recurring anxiety nightmare.

View image in fullscreen Alexander-Arnold has been trailing after Jude Bellingham ‘like the new kid at school’. Photograph: Hannah McKay/Reuters

But his own verdict was encouragingly plain: “It’s high quality, the ball moves very fast. It’s a lot different to what I’m used to.” And the optics are good. He’s a proper athlete, not just a mobile passing brain, impressive physically, with a grace and power that aren’t always evident on TV. Trent in sleeveless Madrid training gear looks starry, handsome, easy in his movements.

Speaking Spanish early on is also very smart, the hala Madrid-la stuff, the serviceable accent. The “rebranding” as Trent is a nice idea, a New Me, a post-breakup reinvention. Trent12 posing in front of Madrid’s massed European Cups looked disarmingly relaxed. He has already lifted that pot you know. He has already done terrible things to Barcelona. The new kid has moves too.

But there is also one great unanswered question. Is Alexander‑Arnold actually a transferable commodity? He is both a very good player and a very strange one. This is not like bolting on an orthodox centre‑half or a goal-sniffing No 9. Alexander‑Arnold was brilliant for Liverpool in a highly specialised role. And there is so far no evidence, aged 26, that this can be transplanted.

All of his professional success has been for one club under one manager: Jürgen Klopp’s Liverpool, that system, three hard-running midfielders inside him, empowered to lean only into his strengths. The Arne Slot season was decent, so-so, a fudge. Either side Alexander‑Arnold has never played for any other club, never managed to succeed with England. He has only been his best self in one shirt, under one manager, at the club he grew up with.

View image in fullscreen Trent Alexander-Arnold impressed by speaking Spanish at his Real Madrid unveiling. Photograph: Chema Moya/EPA

It is easy, from this starting point, to see only the darker clouds. Klopp drew extraordinary returns out of Alexander-Arnold’s creative, high-precision passing. But we remember also the tendency to switch off, the good, competent defending interspersed with moments of no defending at all. Some will suggest no Englishman has ever really succeeded at Madrid, aside from Steve McManaman, a different kind of player, and probably David Beckham, El Jefe de Miami.

There is another more structural problem. Madrid don’t just have a new manager, they have an entirely new type of manager. In Xabi Alonso the club of vibes, energy, imperial freedoms, have appointed a hard systems coach. Basically, Kylian is going to have to do things now. How’s that going to work out?

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This is also nuanced. Alonso is not an aura-dad in the Carlo Ancelotti mould. He’s also not a pure number-wanging technocrat. He’s a blend of these personas, a super-cool systems guy, aura and numbers. He’s got nice tailoring. He’s also got an iPad. For all that, two things are undeniably true.

First, the Madrid squad is not instantly suited to replicating the Bayer Leverkusen style, which featured exceptionally disciplined pressing, learned patterns, brutal periods of running and resilient defence. And second, Alonso obviously knows this. He knows the club and the players. He knows the task here is not to go Full Amorim, to adapt and integrate.

For all the pre-analysis nobody actually knows how Alonso is going to embrace this point of tension. Like Trent he faces the associated challenges of the step up to this stage, a manager who will basically spend his first few months trying to juggle a bowl of fruit while also putting out a minor kitchen fire and making soufflé for 500 paying guests.

View image in fullscreen Xabi Alonso has to find a way of getting the best out of Alexander-Arnold. Photograph: Hannah McKay/Reuters

But there are also good points for Alexander-Arnold in this. Much has been made of Alonso’s Leverkusen formation. But at its best this was only ever really a starting point, an armature for a controlled fluidity, rotation, drilled overloads.

And the fact is that wing-backs/full-backs were key to that success. Alonso drew his flank players into the central rotation. He had dribbling on one side, passing smarts on the other. Perhaps the best early model for Trent in Madrid is as a kind of right-sided Álex Grimaldo, freed up to use his creative passing, to spark the transitions, to move into the centre.

It is clearly also a good thing that Mbappé will start on the left. Nobody has been able to make him run backwards. But perhaps Trent can make him go the other way, his excellent diagonal passing into the Mbappé channel an obvious point of interest.

Madrid’s new No 12 is very, very good at providing creative direction for speedy players in front of him. Make the midfield work, make those players fit and understand their roles, and there is an opportunity for some pretty decent chemistry here.

The only real issue is time. As in: you don’t get any. The same goes for margin for error, forgiveness, latitude, even when the urge to crawl off and hide in someone else’s bathtub is at its most profound. This why even the opening act in Miami feels vital, the first step in a high‑wire act, and a first chance to prove the Trent identity, always a little butterfly-ish, can flourish in that unforgiving heat.

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