Real Sociedad are struggling with their own equation
Imanol Alguacil's side have thrived on the margins for a long time, but now find themselves on the wrong side of them.
As Imanol Alguacil put it rather bluntly on Sunday evening, losing a game of football isn’t all that surprising in the grand scheme of things. “It’s football. You win games, you draw, and you lose.”
Nobody can argue with that. What many are beginning to argue with, however, is where Real Sociedad’s season might be going. They’ve just lost three games in a row for the first time since December 2020 – two of which came against teams fighting relegation. And according to Opta’s predictor model, they now have just a 1% chance of finishing in the top four this season. Of course, missing out on a fourth-place finish wouldn’t be a disaster for them, but being this far away from the possibility of doing so does constitute a problem.
The concern level ratcheted up another level at the weekend, following a shock 3-0 home defeat to Getafe. That’s a team, by the way, who had scored 14 goals in 20 league games this season heading into the fixture, and who were taking the lowest quality shots on average of any side in the division. José Bordalás’s side couldn’t buy a goal before they rocked up to the Reale Arena.
After losing handsomely to a team with severe attacking issues, it’d be logical to assume defensive problems are the big present issue for La Real. In reality, however, their difficult run of form isn’t the product of a team who can’t defend.
Quite the opposite.
A challenging succession plan
After the summer sales of Robin Le Normand and Mikel Merino — two pillars of Alguacil’s Real Sociedad — it was clear the club had to make a decision. By all accounts, Alguacil was in favour of replenishing in a way that would keep them in compete now mode. Evidently, the club didn’t — and perhaps couldn’t — work in precisely the same way.
With two long-serving, experienced players out of the picture, Real Sociedad’s work in the transfer market wasn’t a like-for-like exercise. All four of the players they paid transfer fees for were 23-or-younger, in the form of Luka Sucic, Javi López, Sergio Gómez, and Orri Óskarsson. “We’re going to be different,” was how Alguacil described it during their pre-season tour of Japan, while he’s since stated his belief that this group will need 2-3 years to reach its maximum level.
Of course, it’s altogether possible that will be the case, and Real Sociedad will benefit from it in the future. In the short term, however, the problems of sustaining balanced performances and doing so across three different competitions, while trying to mould a competitive team and get newer, younger players up to that level, are there for all to see.
Alguacil’s side are a particular case, too. Much of the joy they’ve had as a team over the last five years or so has been through becoming one of – and for periods, the best – Spanish team in the art of winning duels all across the pitch. A number of opposition managers described them as much in this period, and they’ve done so against many of Europe’s best teams too. It’s easy to recall that half-time clip of PSG boss Luis Enrique from last season, berating his players that Real Sociedad were pressing with six players and not 16 (so stop looking so terrified).
Even when Kieran Tierney signed on loan from Arsenal, his experience playing in Scotland and England still didn’t insulate him from the intensity he found in San Sebastián. Describing his experiences of training, Tierney told the Athletic:
“I thought, ‘I love this, this is what it’s about’. No one was holding back, everyone was running into challenges. There was no going at 85 per cent as we’ve got a game coming up. People think about Spain and tiki-taka but this group is about winning through hard work.
The way they compete is unbelievable. It comes from the manager. Everything is about winning your duels. If you don’t, you’ll know about it.”
Imaginably, it is not the easiest environment to enter, get up to speed, and assert oneself as a trusted player under Imanol Alguacil. Much of their success over the years has been down to a fundamental group who could carry out and maintain those demands over a long period, translating them from the training pitch to stadiums across Europe. The five outfielders with the most minutes played for them since 2019-20 are Robin Le Normand, Mikel Merino, Igor Zubeldia, Martín Zubimendi, and Mikel Oyarzabal — 40% of whom are now gone.
Losing two of those guarantees in the same window, in the form of Merino and Le Normand, has undoubtedly frayed the edges of La Real’s 24/7 competitive powers — at least if they want to maintain their core ideas.
La Real’s ailing attack has reached a tipping point
Real Sociedad have never been a high-scoring team under Imanol Alguacil. Not even when they had Alexander Isak in their ranks, nor when they had David Silva still playing at an elite level late in his 30s (thought it was easier then). The highest-scoring team of the Alguacil era, back in 2019-20, saw them net 52 non-penalty goals in LaLiga. Seven different teams have all bettered that in seasons since.
In many ways, their moderate scoring has been linked to their out-of-possession strength. There are ways in which La Real have built a strong defensive record by what they do with the ball, particularly with their build-up play. They’re tremendously patient, they usually use a flat line of four defenders to cover the width of the pitch, and they often end up playing down the sides, limiting central turnovers. The game doesn’t perpetually run through Martín Zubimendi, nor do Real Sociedad make a significant effort to involve him if he’s been marked for special attention. They are, without saying it in a purely negative sense, quite a predictable team in possession.

What La Real always have been though — and still are — is a dependable defensive side. Among the ever-present LaLiga teams since 2019-20 (Alguacil’s first full season), only the big three have conceded fewer goals in that time than La Real.
Together, those two things tell the story of Alguacil’s Real Sociedad: an (almost) always strong defensive team and an (almost) always just about good enough attacking team.
The problem occurring now is that, having thrived on the margins over a long period of time, La Real have started to struggle with their own equation. Their defensive record continues to be among LaLiga’s best when it comes to limiting chances, but those 1-0 and 2-1 wins have dried up. They’ve lost the ability to find the crucial goals that make their stingy defence worthwhile, and they’re not sustaining the neutral minutes as well as they once did.
Across the board, Real Sociedad’s attacking production is now at a low point of the Alguacil era. Since his first full campaign in 2019-20, the current side are averaging season-lows for shots, goals, xG, big chances, and shot conversion rate. Particularly with respect to the latter, there’s no doubt a finishing slump is also part of the current equation. But it’s clear that there are deeper problems at play.
With Real Sociedad, there’s a big risk of denigrating them now for doing things that we’ve praised in another time — things that have taken them to very good places. It’s not to say they can’t work their way out of their current malaise without ripping everything up. Football moves quickly though; dynamics change, players move on, expectations shift. And more than anything, La Real’s lack of verve in possession is starting to make things look worn.
It's there on the attacking side that we’re seeing the worst of them. Real Sociedad still defend well structurally most of the time, they still work incredibly hard, and they can still spook opponents with their team-wide pressing efforts. With the ball, though, there’s a pervading sense of safety and predictability. They’re one of only six sides who haven’t scored a goal following a 10-pass sequence this term, despite having had 217 of them in total. Indeed, without Take Kubo’s individual incision, they have constantly ran into walls when trying to shift the opponent around and open up space through movement of the ball.
Instead, their best creative tool tends to be recovering the ball high up when their opponent is displaced; something which is no easy feat to sustain across their schedule, and especially after numerous seasons doing just that when you’ve just lost two essential cogs in the machine.
The question they have to determine now is whether it’s right to keep trying to develop a changed squad through a long-standing idea, and accept the bumps in the road, or whether they need to adapt the intentions behind them.
The weekend defeat to Getafe was an example of their current predicament. With the visitors setting out an aggressive 4-4-2 and marking them man-to-man from goal kicks, La Real quickly submitted to playing long balls. That wasn’t a problem in itself, but for the duration of the game they merely engaged in Getafe’s game and played the same role, descending the play into constant turnovers and contested balls. By the end, Real Sociedad had found a teammate with just 66% of their passes; their lowest completion rate in a home league game (11v11) since 2019 v Eibar, and one that was no better than Getafe’s (also 66%).
Not so long ago, Alguacil’s side might well have been able to emerge from a game as ugly as that one – and certainly not lose it, with three separate instances of not defending their box well enough.
Yet on a day where La Real’s football looked no more refined than a Bordalás side who have little intention of putting passes together, it was left to Take Kubo, again, to try and find the attacking solutions. Seven of the 10 chances created by Real Sociedad players came from their winger, including all their best inroads. And if you stretch that across their league games played since the turn of the year, their right-sided output dwarfing that of the left has been more than a single-game theme.
Kubo has become the only constant avenue in a team whose attack can’t be allowed to falter, and one whose resources for offsetting their low-scoring nature aren’t as dialled in as they once were.
In his press conference after the Getafe defeat, it wasn’t hard to read between the lines of Alguacil’s comments: “The club have made a very clear bet, and that’s for the future. So when you bet on the future, we were all aware of what could happen.”
Not too long ago this would have felt like a game his side could have handled without problem, in the exact same way it was played. However, in a team who have since acquired more technical players and lost a few of their all-terrain competitors, a home match against Getafe is one in which they need to be able to fight a different fight. With younger players to inherit and more varied skillsets throughout the squad, La Real will have to find more appropriate footballing responses in the absence of being able to dominate all the duels, all the time like they once did.
It would be wrong to doubt Imanol Alguacil, a figure who has raised the bar to a level that now feels like a daily battle to sustain. As he said himself at the weekend, there aren’t many teams around who have been able to compete in three competitions — they have, and remarkably well at times.
After some of the biggest changes of the Alguacil era over the summer, however, the forward momentum they’ve been pushing over a number of years has hit some resistance in the form of squad identity, and how it relates to continuing to compete while adapting to new parts. Real Sociedad, increasingly, feel like a team who are less equipped to win the battles they once won, still valiantly trying to fight them on the same terms.
Without finding new alternatives — whether it’s through altered ways of playing or locating the right pieces in the transfer market — their once trusty equation threatens to hurt them as much as it aids them.