Real Madrid entered April 15, 2026 in the kind of position the club has not occupied in years.
Nine points behind Barcelona in La Liga with seven games remaining. Out of the Copa del Rey. Zero trophies won. One competition left.
Against a Bayern Munich side that beat them at the Bernabéu and is playing the best football in Europe.
This is what the 2025-26 season has become for the most decorated club in the history of European football, and how it got here is one of the more turbulent stories Spanish football has produced in a long time.
How Did Real Madrid’s Season Start?
Xabi Alonso arrived at the Santiago Bernabéu in June 2025 carrying expectations that were almost unfair to give any manager.
After two seasons at Bayer Leverkusen, including an unbeaten Bundesliga title, he had become one of the most coveted coaches in the world. Real Madrid signed him on a three-year contract to replace Carlo Ancelotti, and the early signs were good.
Madrid won 10 of their first 11 La Liga games. They beat Barcelona 2-1 at home in October, with Kylian Mbappé and Jude Bellingham scoring. It looked like the beginning of something.
Then things began to fray. Losses to Celta Vigo, a 4-0 humiliation by Paris Saint-Germain in the Club World Cup semi-final, defeats to Liverpool and Manchester City in the Champions League league phase, and growing reports of a disconnect between Alonso and certain players, most visibly Vinícius Júnior, who had been publicly unhappy about substitutions.
Then came the clip. After the Supercopa de España final loss to Barcelona in Jeddah on January 11, footage circulated on social media showing Mbappé apparently ignoring Alonso as the manager attempted to organize his players toward the Barcelona handshake.
Whether the clip captured what it appeared to capture is debatable. What it did to Alonso’s authority in the dressing room is not.
The next day, January 12, 2026, Real Madrid announced that Xabi Alonso had left by mutual consent after just seven months in the job.
What Happened After Alonso’s Departure?
The man appointed to replace him was Álvaro Arbeloa, a former Real Madrid right-back beloved by supporters, a decorated player who won two Champions League titles and was part of the Spain squad that won three consecutive major international tournaments.
His coaching credentials were rather different. Arbeloa had been managing Castilla, Real Madrid’s B team, since June 2025, a role he had held for six months.
Before that, five and a half years in Real Madrid’s youth academy, never outside the club’s Valdebebas training complex, never at any professional club other than the one he played for as a player.
The appointment was immediately characterised by most analysts as temporary, a stabilising measure while Florentino Pérez’s hierarchy identified the next long-term manager.
Enzo Maresca, Zinedine Zidane, Jürgen Klopp, and Andoni Iraola were all named as longer-term candidates in various reports.
Arbeloa has been careful in interviews not to describe his own role in those terms. He is the manager. He manages the team.
His first game was two days later: a Copa del Rey round of 16 tie away to Albacete, a club in the second division of Spanish football.
Real Madrid lost 3-2. Jefté Betancor scored the winner four minutes into stoppage time. Copa del Rey eliminated. Arbeloa’s debut ended in humiliation.
Since then the results under Arbeloa have been mixed enough to keep the Champions League as a live possibility while surrendering the La Liga title race entirely.
A 6-1 Champions League win over AS Monaco in January showed what the squad was capable of when it functioned. The 1-1 draw at Girona last Friday, leaving Madrid nine points behind Barcelona with seven games remaining, showed what the structural problems still are.
As Sports Illustrated noted after that result, the gap between Barcelona and Real Madrid is not just points. Through 31 La Liga games, Barcelona had scored 84 goals to Real Madrid’s 65.
The better midfield, the better manager, the better bench — all of them point in the same direction.
What This Season Has Become For Real Madrid
Three trophies were available to Real Madrid at the start of 2025-26. The Supercopa de España final was a 3-2 loss to Barcelona. The Copa del Rey was a 3-2 loss to a second-division club on Arbeloa’s debut.
La Liga is nine points gone with seven games left. The Champions League is what remains, the only competition still open, the only way for this season to end with something rather than nothing.
Real Madrid have not had a trophyless season since 2020-21. That was the year they lost the semi-final to Chelsea in the UCL and finished second in La Liga.
The five seasons since have each produced at least one major trophy, including the Champions League in 2021-22 and 2023-24.
A failure to go deeper in this year’s competition would not just mean finishing empty-handed, it would punctuate a season defined by a managerial sacking, a Copa exit to second-division opposition, and a La Liga surrender, with the additional weight of having those things happen in Mbappé’s second season at the club.
The Bayern Quarterfinal
Bayern Munich beat Real Madrid 2-1 at the Bernabéu on April 7 in the first leg of the quarterfinal.
It was a result that reflected the balance of play, Bayern were the better team for most of the match, with Luis Díaz and Harry Kane scoring either side of half-time before Mbappé’s 74th-minute goal gave Madrid a narrow lifeline.
Kane, returning from an ankle injury that had made his participation uncertain, scored his 49th goal of the season and 11th of the Champions League campaign.
Bayern came to Madrid and won, which is what the best team in Europe does.
The context going into tonight’s second leg at the Allianz Arena was precisely that bleak.
Real Madrid going to a ground where Bayern have not lost a Champions League game all season, needing to overturn a first-leg deficit against a team on a 15-match unbeaten run that just broke its own all-time Bundesliga goals record (105 goals in a season with five games to play).
Bayern have won 12 of the 13 Champions League two-legged ties in which they won the first leg away from home.
And yet. Real Madrid have won the European Cup and Champions League 15 times.
They are the only club in the world with more than five titles. In 2024, Joselu came off the bench in the semi-final second leg at the Bernabéu and scored twice in the final minutes to eliminate Bayern from a tie Bayern had looked to have won.
In 2018, Ronaldo hit a hat-trick in Munich to put Madrid through. In 2017, they won at the Allianz Arena.
Whatever statistical case you make against Real Madrid in a Champions League knockout game, the counter-case is always the same: this is Real Madrid, and this is what they do.
The Lingering Question
Mbappé arrived at Real Madrid in the summer of 2024 as the most anticipated signing in the history of a club that has made historic signings a habit.
He has scored goals, he entered tonight’s second leg chasing Cristiano Ronaldo’s record of 17 goals in a single Champions League season, sitting three behind with games potentially remaining if Madrid advanced.
He has been one of the best players in the world this season by most individual metrics. And yet the team around him, or perhaps the team including him, has not delivered the silverware the investment demanded.
The Champions League quarterfinal second leg at the Allianz Arena is therefore not simply a football match for Real Madrid.
It is the last meaningful question of a season that has produced a managerial sacking, a Copa exit to second-division opposition, and a La Liga title effectively conceded before April.
The club that has reinvented the concept of the great European comeback needs one tonight, not as a matter of tradition or romance, but as a matter of salvaging something from a season that is otherwise nearly lost.
