Real Madrid are broken and Zinedine Zidane is not the man to fix them | OneFootball

Cast your mind back to the summer and things were really looking up for Real Madrid.

Following two hugely disappointing seasons on the domestic front, Zinedine Zidane was preparing for his first full season back at the helm and by early June, president Florentino Pérez had already blessed the Frenchman with such shiny new toys as Eden Hazard, Luka Jović and Ferland Mendy.

They weren’t supposed to be done there. They were supposed to add a player of the calibre of Paul Pogba or Neymar to their ranks, leaving them with a squad capable of challenging for honours both domestically and on the European stage.

But that never happened and what they’ve been left with is a disjointed squad lacking in depth and struggling for goals who don’t look anywhere near equipped to win the LaLiga title or the Champions League.

Where are the goals coming from?

Los Blancos lost their first LaLiga game of the season when they were beaten 1-0 away at newly promoted RCD Mallorca last weekend but in truth, a result like that had been in the post for some time.

It was the third time in their first 11 matches of the season in all competitions where they’d failed to score, and Karim Benzema has been responsible for six of the 19 goals they’ve scored so far.

It’s a far cry from the team which scored in 73 consecutive matches during Zidane’s first tenure at the club, and Madrid’s failure to even come close to adequately replacing Cristiano Ronaldo seems to have become a problem the manager simply cannot solve.

Having contributed just one goal and two assists after all the noise that was made about his arrival at the club, it’s fair to say Hazard has underwhelmed so far while €60m summer signing Jović has been hugely disappointing.

The Serbian netted 27 times for Eintracht Frankfurt last season but he’s yet to open his account for his new club and after starting against Mallorca, he failed to fashion a single effort on goal before he was unceremoniously substituted after 66 minutes.

And following a summer of tiresome speculation about his future, Gareth Bale isn’t exactly setting the world alight at the moment either.

Yesterday’s midfield

The inability to land Pogba or a player of Pogba’s quality in the summer is also proving problematic.

Madrid lack options in the midfield department and Zidane can’t seem to settle on his favourite combination.

Against Mallorca he rather foolishly started with Isco alongside Casemiro but in the game before, against Granada, he played Casemiro in a three-man midfield next to Toni Kroos and Federico Valverde.

Kroos and 34-year-old Luka Modrić are both past their best at this point, while Valverde lacks the experience required to be the midfield lynchpin for a club of this stature.

The fact Zidane is also rotating Isco and James Rodríguez – two players it was pretty clear he was hoping to get rid of in the summer – in and out of his team tells you all you need to know about the squad he’s working with.

It’s nigh on impossible to be successful if your midfield isn’t right and this problem must be addressed at the earliest opportunity.

Sack the physio

To lose one player to injury may be regarded as a misfortune, to have 16 players pick up 22 different injuries by mid-October looks like carelessness.

And a reported 75% of those injuries have been muscular, which suggests they’re the result of neglectful training methods rather than just pure bad luck.

Former fitness coach Antonio Pintus left to join Inter Milan in the summer and his replacement Grégory Dupont appears to be struggling.

Something has to be done about it.

You should never go back

Zidane’s departure from Madrid just five days after clinching the club’s third consecutive Champions League title in May 2018 was the perfect ending to the story.

He left with his head held high and his reputation should have been untouchable forever.

Maybe he should never have taken another coaching job again but in a sport where the word “fraud” is tossed around with reckless abandon, he definitely should not have returned to the scene of the crime.

It felt like both Zidane and Madrid were making a mistake when he returned to the club back in March and 10 wins in 20 LaLiga games since then would appear to have confirmed those suspicions.

To put that in perspective, Zidane’s predecessor Santiago Solari had a 70.6% win ratio during his short stint in the hot-seat.

Zidane still doesn’t seem to know what his best team is and his tactics and in-game management both leave an awful lot to be desired.

Madrid often start games slowly and quickly find themselves handicapped by conceding the first goal. In fact, prior to Tuesday night’s win over Galatasaray, goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois had conceded a whopping nine goals from the last 14 shots he’d faced.

Above all else, the Santiago Bernabéu appears to have lost its fear factor and the worrying thing is that Zidane seems incapable of finding solutions for the litany of problems plaguing his side.

Time is rapidly running out and José Mourinho is waiting eagerly by the phone.