This player, one of my all-time favourites, certainly deserves his own thread in here.
Next season, he’ll manage Borussia Mönchengladbach, a fine club. Happy for him, and it will be interesting to see how he performs with them. 
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Is that confirmed Hope? I saw Kicker placing some doubt on that yesterday as there seemed to remain the possibility he may still be at (?) Real Sociedad?
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Yeah that is right. Kicker say that according to their information, he isn’t Gladbach’s preferred choice.
A pity… I could have seen him doing well there.
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May still happen, of course, but I’m not sure it’s definite yet.
https://twitter.com/FabrizioRomano/status/1374061081371553806
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Bild is a tabloid and shouldn’t be taken seriously. Kicker is a sport/football magazine and I assume they will be closer to the facts.
Yeah definitely.
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If it happens I can see a preseason friendly in Glasgow.
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Now that he has his thread, I’m going to bombard it with clips and links 
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They have not given any official source, have you seen anything from Sociedad platforms?
Any idea how he developing as a manager? It’s his third season as manager, any review/analysis in the media?
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Unless they were going promote him to the main side it makes sense. The only B side in the Segunda was an achievement in itself.
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Have a story about Alonso. Not 100% confirmed but seems to be accepted and commonly said about when he came over to Ireland as a 15 year old to learn English for the year.
We have a sport called Gaelic football over here, like a mix between basketball, football etc. If you are the highest level of talent in your county you represent them. He came to Kells in Meath who would be an average talented county. Xabi came over , learned about Gaelic football, played it for the first time, got good, then played for Meath underage all in the space of a year. Lads from Meath dream of lining out for them, and he has only picked up the sport and did it.
Shows how much natural talent he had and how skilful professional footballers must be to be so good at most other sports they try. He was also at Meath bs Louth in our province final in 2010 cheering them on which was cool. Again, the story isn’t 100% confirmed but is said where I’m from.
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Yeah, I think he talked about it in the past. His dad was also with him a few times. Mentioned that it helped his long passing.
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There is actually really good evidence across a range of sports that playing other sports as a kid/teen actually helps development in your primary sport. Of course it is easy to say that the physical talent of the kids who make it lends itself to them having been good at other sports as well, but there’s pretty good research that is able to separate that out and tease out the effect of additional development per se. Steve Nash is a Canadian basketball player who was regarded as one of the best point guards of his generation, and he wasnt just good but seemed to play the game very differently than other PGs. His dad was a professional football player and Nash only started playing basketball as a teenager and did so with the perspective of someone who’d grown up playing football. He attributes a lot of his success to this perspective he was able to bring to the game.
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Like Kelleher his whole family are either footballers or play Hurling for their county. Then wasn’t it Martin Skrtel who could have gone pro in ice hockey?
Confirmed as new Leverkusen coach.
Big step for him.
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It`ll be a good opportunity to build experience before he joins us.
Our last Coach from the German League is doing okay.
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