We are up above Down Under with Xabi Alonso, looking out over the Darling Harbour from the 27th floor of the W Sydney hotel in the appropriately-named Extreme Wow penthouse suite.There are worse settings than this ultra-luxurious 202sqm space for Alonso to be feeling a little jet-lagged, and he starts by telling us how he has made the most of his early morning wake-ups between 2am and 6am. He completed a 10km run – at four minutes and 30 seconds per km, a highly respectable speed at 44 years old – before we begin discussing something else which flew by.That is the seven months he spent as manager of Real Madrid, whose loss will hopefully be Chelsea’s gain. ‘Luckily there are not too many scars in my career,’ Alonso tells us.’So, OK, I got a scar, but this heals. Now it is healed and now I am very motivated and determined to enjoy this next step, as I did when I started in Madrid. You move on.’Looking back, I take the positives and the things that didn’t work. I have been very critical about myself, thinking about what I could have done better, because for sure it did not go as expected. But you move on to other things.’To bigger and better things, hopefully, now that he is in charge of Chelsea in the Premier League. He is a hell of a hire by their BlueCo owners, as good as an appointment that they could have secured after the hiring and firing of Liam Rosenior last season. Xabi Alonso has opened up about becoming Chelsea manager and what drew him into joining He was sacked just months into becoming Real Madrid boss last term – which he calls a ‘scar’ Having now ‘reset’, the 44-year-old is now in charge of Chelsea – having joined this summerMoving his finger from his head to his stomach as we talk taking over Chelsea, Alonso continues: ‘It had to be a lot from here, and also from here, from the guts. It was good timing. Good timing for the club. Good timing for myself. ‘This is a team that played really well recently. The situation was not as bad as it looked at the end of last season. There is big potential. Let’s see how long it takes. We are in that process. I felt that I had the chance to enjoy being a manager.’Sydney is just the first stop on Chelsea’s pre-season tour. Next, Alonso will be in Hong Kong, then Indonesia, then Malaysia, playing one friendly in each country before returning to England.Alonso is not actually staying in the Extreme Wow suite. We have just borrowed it for this sit-down with Chelsea’s new manager. There is a bottle of Castaneda 1965 Bas-Armagnac to our right, but if we open it, it will set us back $950 (£497) with our Australian hotel hosts. It feels like a space fit for a super villain, and Alonso is too nice for that. He screams emotional intelligence.’I used my time to reset the energy because you need to be full of energy as a manager to pull from the rest,’ Alonso continues. ‘It is very important for me to transmit this passion, this enthusiasm for the game in every training session, every game plan. I used that time mainly for that. I didn’t watch much football. It was mainly about myself, about feeling it. You learn from the disappointment of things that were not meant to be and you think things will be better.’Alonso arrived at Chelsea believing he knew what was needed. They are used to having the youngest side in the Premier League. Now they have completed deals for Danny Welbeck, 35 and from Brighton, and Jordan Henderson, 36 and from Brentford. While the fee for Welbeck is currently undisclosed, he is believed to have cost next to nothing, while Henderson is a free transfer as his club allowed him to terminate his contract a year earlier than expected. Together, they will add 863 Premier League games’ worth of experience to this youthful squad.’For me, you need the right balance of personalities, of maturity stages, early 20s with early 30s and in between, players in different stages of their careers,’ Alonso says when asked for the ingredients to a winning culture. ‘There’s not a formula for that, but there is a feeling for that. Danny Welbeck (left) and Jordan Henderson will bring veteran nous to the Blues this season’If they have good qualities and good interaction between them, you create good connections and good bonds between them and that helps the team spirit. For me, this is as important as tactics. First it is the team spirit. After it is playing good football. After it is winning games.’I learned this from playing football. “I love playing with this team”. You could feel it. For me, it’s very natural. In the Basque Country, we have a lot of that collective purpose, that culture.’Alonso had that at Bayer Leverkusen, where he did the Double in 2023-24, winning the Bundesliga for the first time in their history as well as the DFB-Pokal. They also finished Europa League runners-up. The Spaniard prioritises the best people over the best players, and adds on his time at Leverkusen while smiling: ‘It was unexpectedly fantastic.’Alonso is not trying to mimic one of his old legendary managers, of which he had a few, such as Guardiola, Carlo Ancelotti, Rafa Benitez, Jose Mourinho. ‘It’s not copy and paste,’ he says. ‘Never.’ But he has that ‘knowledge’ and especially in regard to ‘man-management’ because he can recall how he felt when, say, Benitez wanted Liverpool to replace him with Gareth Barry in 2008.Per sources, Chelsea’s sporting leadership team, led by co-owner Behdad Eghbali and sporting directors Paul Winstanley and Laurence Stewart, have loved working with Alonso thus far. They have seen his enthusiasm, and Alonso adds: ‘I had a view of Chelsea from the outside. I could see the positives, and my concerns, so I addressed them. We are taking steps together, decisions to have a good team. This is the ultimate goal.’ Chelsea are also giving Alonso what he feels he needs to succeed, including bringing in Austin MacPhee as a set-piece specialist from Aston Villa. While not yet announced, he may fly to Hong Kong to team up with his new club there.As for Chelsea’s players, they have loved seeing how involved Alonso is in training. He sets them up for goals, for crosses, for passes – at the heart of each and every drill. ‘When I am 10 years older, maybe I won’t be able to do that, so I will be more on the sidelines,’ says Alonso, who wears old-school Adidas Predators in sessions. ‘But while I still can, I will enjoy it. I like to feel it. I like to be close to the players. That energy, it goes both ways. It is for them and for me.’ Alonso’s training methods have already proved a hit among his squad who have ‘big potential’While Alonso is a good cook – his speciality is a Basque dish named Kokotxas – he will happily take good tapas restaurant recommendations in London if you have them. We did tell him about a place in Sydney called Deux Freres where he could take his staff after we tried it ourselves the night before. But living in the capital of England was a big draw for him and his family. ‘It is not a case of going anywhere I want… no, no, no,’ he says. ‘It makes sense in this stage of our lives to come to London. My wife loves it. My daughters are coming. My son is going to university.’Alonso’s father, Periko, was a football player and manager. ‘Because of my upbringing, the road was not unknown for me,’ he says. ‘I had seen that at home. It was all work.’Preparing the training for the next day. Preparing the team selection. That was in the kitchen and I was next to him. So I’m not saying it was meant to be, but I had to try it.’In the last part of my career, when I moved to Germany (Bayern Munich between 2014 and 2017 with Guardiola as his manager), that was important for me to start thinking about how I would do things. I was very curious. I was in that moment of my career where I could go to his office, ‘Pep. Why is this happening? What’s going to be the game plan?”Maybe when I was 20, I didn’t have that confidence, to go to the manager’s office to ask those things. But at that moment, because of the trust, I needed to do that, I wanted to do that. I felt much more responsible for the team than in my earlier years as a player. I wanted to not just think about myself but think about my team-mates and about how we were going to play and about supporting the young players. Where you are at in your early 20s is not the same as where you are at in your early 30s. We have seen this in many cases, and this was it in my case.’Later, I wanted to try it (coaching), but not straight to the top level, so I started in the (Real Madrid) Under 14s. It felt natural, not to rush.’While Alonso did not intend on sprinting to the top, he is too fast to have not made it here, now in charge of a club which harbours ambitions of winning the Premier League with him at the helm.