Fulham will start the new Premier League season by having the neighbours round. The first Monday Night Football of 2026-27 takes Chelsea down the road to Craven Cottage, where they’ll play in a derby that will do little to indicate what’s to come for either team in the next nine months.
Chelsea have more tangible targets than local bragging rights in a rivalry so cosmopolitan that ‘local’ doesn’t mean much anyway. They’ve been going after those goals like they mean it, up to and including a British transfer record move for the hottest property in English football.
Morgan Rogers has linked up at Stamford Bridge with Xabi Alonso, the Blues’ new manager and the man on the end of the pointed backing of the club hierarchy. Alonso won’t have to deal with European football this season. He will have to deliver it, however.
Managers united in Madrid misery
The 44-year-old officially succeeded Carlo Ancelotti as Real Madrid boss two weeks after leaving German Bundesliga side Bayer Leverkusen, where his success was generational and indisputable.
Alonso lasted six months back at the Bernabeu, winning 24 of his 32 matches in charge and leaving by mutual consent in January. Real Madrid were four points behind leaders Barcelona with exactly half a season to play but the manager’s race had been run.
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The outgoing gaffer was succeeded from within by Real Madrid B manager Alvaro Arbeloa. He was replacing the man with whom he had played as a teammate more than any other.
After his 19 league matches in charge, he too had collected four points fewer than Barcelona. Arbeloa stood down at the end of the season and finds Alonso in the away dugout for his first Premier League match as the manager of Fulham.
Unlike Alonso’s, Arbeloa’s Real Madrid departure had been in the works for a while. Question marks over their performances in big matches that marred his half-season in the hot seat were far from baseless.
There were reports of tensions in the dressing room that came to a head when Federico Valverde clashed with Aurielien Tchouameni, and Antonio Rudiger apparently opted for the physical method to express his opinion to Alvaro Carreras.
The scepticism of Bernabéu kingmaker Kylian Mbappe made Arbeloa’s demise inevitable despite his own standing within the club.
Mbappe was more positive about Alonso, but neither the former Leverkusen boss nor Alonso's old teammate got what they’d hoped for from their respective ascensions into the top job with the Spanish capital titans.
When they press the flesh like Dillon and Dutch on the touchline at the Cottage tonight, Alonso and Arbeloa will have that in common. Real Madrid isn’t a job that cuts slack. It’s a Mourinho-sized role with Mourinho-sized ups and downs.
Same tee, different pins
There’s no point in drawing conclusions about a manager after a few months spearheading football’s greatest basket case. Some managerial personalities can pull it off. Others, well, they can’t. It doesn’t say much about them either way.
What separates the two who landed in West London this summer is the nature of their experience before they each spent six months as an egg in a cement mixer.
Alonso, as a Bundesliga champion, double winner and invincible with Leverkusen, has proven himself up to a point. Arbeloa has not. In that sense, they have at least popped up at Chelsea and Fulham the right way round.
Alonso has the chops and the more acute need to prove it. Fulham are embarking on life after Marco Silva and that comes with a very particular kind of pressure.
Alonso has the chops and the more acute need to prove it. Fulham are embarking on life after Marco Silva and that comes with a very particular kind of pressure.
Youngsters Gonzalo Garcia and Cesar Palacious followed Arbeloa from Real Madrid but doubts over whether the Cottagers have done enough to account for losing the direct impacts of Harry Wilson and Raul Jimenez for nothing are entirely justified.
19-year-old striker Jonah Kusi-Asare has joined from Bayern Munich and promising young midfielder Shea Charles has come in from Southampton, but selling Sasa Lukic and Issa Diop to promoted Ipswich Town could prove more significant than Fulham would like if they don’t have their wits about them.
Alonso’s brief is a touch spikier. Chelsea dropped to a level they consider beneath them and are investing in bouncing back. Qualifying for the Champions League is the new manager’s minimum objective. He won’t be there this time next year if he doesn’t.
Whether that would make Leverkusen rather than Real Madrid the Alonso anomaly would be for Chelsea fans to decide, and their Fulham counterparts will have their say on the early-career trajectory of Arbeloa too.
Free of the Bernabéu factor, untangled from the merciless mangle that is Real Madrid, 2026-27 will help define exactly what tier of manager these former colleagues are going to be.
Their aims are different this season, but they’re starting at the same time, in the same game, under the same floodlights.
