What’s in a club DNA? Alonso exit shows the only reliable predictors of success are wealth and good decisions | Real Madrid

“It is all too easy to make mistaken inferences unless the process involved is already very well understood.” Francis Crick, molecular biologist

“This club is about winning, winning and winning again. It’s in our DNA.” Álvaro Arbeloa

You return in a blaze of glory, speaking of home and familiar feelings, feted in an official statement as one of the club’s “greatest legends”, entrusted with reinventing the riches of the past for a new footballing age. You leave in a maelstrom of snide briefings and chaotic performances, after losing a power struggle with star players and falling out of favour with the club’s godlike president. Let’s just say that Xabi Alonso got the full Real Madrid experience in his eight months as coach.

Obviously Alonso was appropriately reverent in his exit statement, expressing his gratitude for the opportunity, describing it as “an honour”. No point in burning your bridges when there’s every chance you might get invited back: after all, one of the more underrated ways of getting yourself hired as Real Madrid coach in the future is having done the job in the past.

For a club able to take its pick of the world’s greatest managerial talent, Madrid often chooses to cast a curiously narrow net. The announcement of Álvaro Arbeloa as Alonso’s replacement now means that the past eight coaching appointments, and 34 of the 57 since the second world war, have had some previous association with the club.

Vicente del Bosque came back for a third stint. Luis Molowny had four stabs at the job in the 1970s and 80s, in among his time as a director. Indeed you have to go back to Carlo Ancelotti in 2013 to find the last coach Madrid appointed without having played or worked for the club before. Naturally, Ancelotti would also circle back later for another go.

All of which feeds into the idea of “Madrid DNA”, so dutifully invoked by Arbeloa in his first press conference, by fans and the commentariat, even by president Florentino Pérez himself. The idea that there is some special sauce, some unbroken identifying thread running all the way through to the present, a sporting double helix that can be reproduced and propagated, passed down the generations. Madrid DNA is silverware. Madrid DNA is big names, dramatic comebacks, exemplary spectacle.

And, of course, when things start to fray, club DNA offers a reassuring route out of the mayhem. Just been outplayed in the clásico? Four points back in the league? Getting eaten alive in transition? Simply return to the sacred texts, which may on closer inspection actually be the internal email directory. Stick the head of the reserve team in charge. Watch nature heal itself. Fifteen Champions Leagues can’t be wrong.

Meanwhile, Michael Carrick has been appointed as Manchester United’s new interim manager, narrowly pipping Darren Fletcher, Ole Gunnar Solskjær, Ruud van Nistelrooy, Tom Cleverley, Darron Gibson and Bebé to the role. Fletcher, the pre-interim interim manager, will return to coach the under-18s, whom he has been showing videos of Cristiano Ronaldo and Wayne Rooney in an attempt to educate them in the club’s ethos.

And so with a breathtaking speed, the departure of Ruben Amorim has been spun as a kind of liberation, a glorious counter-revolution, freeing United from its frowning Portuguese yoke and taking back control. “United need a manager who fits the DNA of the football club,” Gary Neville announced after Amorim’s departure. “Adventurous, exciting football. Playing young players. Entertaining the crowd. Manchester United must take risks and be creative.”

Which all sounds great, with one minor hitch: is this not basically what everybody wants? Are there any clubs out there pledging to build their identity around washed-up veterans and journeymen, aspiring to play slowly and on the back foot, taking no risks? Have you watched Atlético Madrid at all in the past few years? Did you watch Burnley under Vincent Kompany? And, as a follow-up: if United DNA consists entirely of vague, sweet-smelling nostrums that could apply to anyone, then frankly what is the point of it?

Push United fans for specifics and they will probably point to the style of football employed under Matt Busby and Alex Ferguson, two coaches who – at the risk of being pedantic – possessed zero “United DNA” when they arrived. And if the lesson of Ferguson teaches us anything, it is that dynastic greatness rests not in tradition but apostasy, not in slavish replication but in violent mutation: a fact that should have been patently obvious from the moment Ferguson’s handpicked successor crashed and burned within months.

Perhaps what we so handily describe as club DNA is ultimately a story, a myth concocted to fit reality, which is not to describe them as invalid or immaterial. Stories give our life shape. Stories are how we make sense of the chaos. The values and history and culture of a club are in a sense its very essence, bound up in people and rituals and memory. The confusion arises when we confuse the narrative device with the sporting strategy, when we forget that the story is the product and not the ingredient.

Brentford are doing quite well; anyone care to define Brentford’s DNA? Set pieces? Lloyd Owusu? What meaningfully links the Brighton or Manchester City or Wolves of today with the Brighton or Manchester City or Wolves of the 20th century? Where does Ferguson’s ultra-reactive system in the 2008 Champions League semi-final against Barcelona fit into the club’s image of itself? What about the ultra-physical Barcelona of the early 1980s?

As for Madrid, perhaps all the talk of comebacks and ingrained winning mentality provides a convenient fog for the financial and political supremacy they have enjoyed in European football for decades. The hugely favourable land deals, the lavish credit lines, the supreme business acumen, a pliant media landscape, Pérez’s the indelible influence in the corridors of power through his construction conglomerate ACS. The immense apparatus of soft power and accounting instruments that allows them to pick off the world’s best footballers year after year. Twenty-one consecutive seasons in the top three of the Deloitte Money League: it’s just our DNA.

But, of course, these are not the stories football clubs like to tell about themselves. So we gloss over the cautionary tales of Alonso and Santiago Solari, the counter-examples of Ancelotti and José Mourinho, the inconvenient truth that the only reliable predictors of footballing success are abundant wealth and good decisions. After all, those who live by the DNA are destined also to die by it.