Chelsea hired Xabi Alonso as its latest coach on a four-year deal on Sunday, with the Spaniard making his return to management after a disappointing eight-month spell at Real Madrid.
Alonso will formally take charge on July 1 as the replacement for Liam Rosenior, who was fired last month, and will become the fifth permanent coach appointed by Chelsea’s American owners Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital since they bought the club in 2022.
Alonso lasted eight months at Madrid before leaving the club by mutual consent in January after poor results and widespread media reports that he lost control of the locker room. That damaged his strong reputation built at Bayer Leverkusen, which he led to the German title and an unbeaten domestic campaign in the 2023-24 season.
Chelsea described Alonso as “one of the most respected figures in the modern game.”
“From my conversations with the ownership group and sporting leadership, it is clear we share the same ambition,” Alonso said in a Chelsea statement. “We want to build a team capable of competing consistently at the highest level and fighting for trophies.”
Chelsea looks highly unlikely to be in next season's Champions League, however, and might miss out on European competition entirely. The club was guaranteed a trophyless season by losing to Manchester City in the FA Cup final on Saturday, though did win the Club World Cup last summer.
After an unseemly end to Rosenior's turbulent tenure, Chelsea's ownership said it would be undertaking “a process of self-reflection” ahead of its next coaching appointment, amid growing tension among supporters about the direction of an increasingly dysfunctional club and its massive financial concerns following years of heavy spending.
Since the 2022 purchase of Chelsea by a consortium fronted by Boehly, part-owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, and largely funded by private equity company Clearlake Capital, the club’s leadership has spent around $2.5 billion on new, mostly young and unproven players on long contracts and taken on a debt approaching $2 billion, according to figures compiled by The Athletic.
Chelsea’s most recent financial results revealed the club made pre-tax losses of $350 million, a record in the Premier League era.
It's with this backdrop that Alonso moves to Chelsea, which he described as “one of the biggest clubs in world football.”
“There is great talent in the squad and huge potential at this football club and it will be my great honor to lead it,” he said. “Now the focus is on hard work, building the right culture and winning trophies.”
AP soccer: https://apnews.com/hub/soccer
FILE - Real Madrid's head coach Xabi Alonso looks on before the Spanish La Liga soccer match between Real Madrid and Real Betis Sevilla in Madrid, Spain, Jan. 4, 2026. (AP Photo/Pablo Garcia, File)
ROME (AP) — The researchers in Ireland looked at their computer screen, marveling at a medieval book tracked down in a Roman library. They flipped through its digitized pages and found their sought-after treasure: the oldest surviving English poem.
“We were extremely surprised. We were speechless. We couldn’t believe our eyes when we first saw that,” Elisabetta Magnanti, a visiting research fellow at Trinity College Dublin's school of English, told The Associated Press.
What's more, she said, the poem was within the main body of Latin text: "It was extraordinary.”
Composed in Old English by a Northumbrian agricultural worker in the 7th century, "Caedmon’s Hymn" appears within some copies of the “Ecclesiastical History of the English People,” written in Latin by a monk and saint known as the Venerable Bede. His history is one of the most widely reproduced texts from the Middle Ages, with almost 200 manuscripts, according to Magnanti's colleague Mark Faulkner, an associate professor of medieval literature at Trinity.
He considers Caedmon’s poem to be the start of English literature.
The manuscript he and Magnanti found is one of the oldest, dating from the 9th century. Two earlier copies contain the poem in Old English, but as afterthoughts — translated from Latin and scrawled into the margin by later scribes or appended but not within the text's main body, according to the researchers.
The discovery sheds light on the English language's wide diffusion, long before what was previously understood, Faulkner said in Rome, where the duo had traveled to view the text in person for the first time.
“Prior to the discovery of the Rome manuscript, the earliest one was from the early 12th century. So this is three centuries earlier than that. And so it attests to the importance that was already being attached to the English in the early 9th century,” Faulkner said.
And it's something of a miracle they uncovered it at all.
Caedmon is said to have composed the poem while working at Whitby Abbey in North Yorkshire, after guests at a feast began reciting poems, Faulkner said.
“Embarrassed that he didn’t know anything suitable, Caedmon left the feast and went to bed," he said. "A figure then appeared to him in his dreams telling him to sing about creation, which Caedmon miraculously did, producing the nine-line hymn."
Some 1,400 years later, this copy of his poem resurfaced in Rome’s main public library — but not before crossing the Atlantic Ocean at least twice and changing hands even more times.
Monks transcribed this copy of Bede's history in the scriptorium of the Benedictine abbey of Nonantola, one of the most important transcription centers during the Middle Ages, located near modern-day Modena in northern Italy, according to Valentina Longo, curator of medieval and modern manuscripts at Rome's National Central Library.
In the 17th century, as the abbey's importance declined, its vast collection of manuscripts was shifted to another abbey in Rome, then moved to the Vatican and finally on to a small church.
Along the way, some of the texts went missing, only to emerge in the early 19th century in the possession of famous international collectors, Longo said.
This copy of Bede's history went to renowned English antiquarian Thomas Phillipps. He fell on hard times, selling off bits and pieces of his collection, and Swiss bibliophile Martin Bodmer secured the book. From there, somehow, it arrived in New York City, in the trove of Austrian-born rare bookseller H.P. Kraus during the 20th century.
Italy's culture ministry was scouring the world for the Nonantola abbey's missing manuscripts, snapping them up in auctions and from collectors around the world. It bought the copy of Bede's history from Kraus in 1972, Longo said, and since then the illustrious text has remained in Rome's library — but received scant notice.
Enter Magnanti, who had spent over four years studying Bede’s history and was compiling a catalog of extant copies.
“I knew that the book was listed in the library’s catalog, so I was almost certain that the book was, in fact, still here," she said. “I realized that, because of the very complex history of this book, no big scholar had really looked at it. So it had been virtually unstudied."
She emailed the library, which confirmed the book was in its stacks. Three months later, she received digital images of the entire manuscript.
Now we must praise the guardian of the heavenly kingdom,
the might of the creator and his intention,
the work of the father of glory, in that he of each wonder,
eternal lord, established the beginning.
He first created the earth for men,
heaven as a roof, the holy creator,
then the middle earth, the guardian of mankind,
the eternal lord, afterwards created
for men on earth, the almighty lord.
The library has digitized the entire Nonantolan collection and it is freely accessible through the website, Longo said.
It's part of a massive project by the library to make thousands of rare books and manuscripts available to researchers around the world, according to Andrea Cappa, the library's head of manuscripts and the rare books reading room.
“The discovery made by the experts of Trinity College is just one starting point, a single manuscript that might pave the way for countless other discoveries, in countless other fields, through international cooperation like this,” Cappa said.
The 8th-century manuscript copy of the Venerable Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, containing a rare, long-lost copy of Caedmon's Hymn — the first poem ever written down in Old English — is seen at Rome's National Library, Thursday, May 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Andrea Rosa)
A rare, long-lost copy of Caedmon's Hymn — the first poem ever written down in Old English — is visible in the five lines above the final line of a page from an 8th-century manuscript copy of the Venerable Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, at Rome's National Library, Thursday, May 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Andrea Rosa)
From left, Elisabetta Magnanti, Mark Faulkner of Dublin's Trinity College, Andrea Cappa and Valentina Longo of Rome's National Central Library examine a manuscript containing a rare, long-lost copy of Caedmon's Hymn — the first poem ever written down in Old English — at Rome's National Library, Thursday, May 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Andrea Rosa)
From left, Elisabetta Magnanti and Mark Faulkner from Dublin's Trinity College and Valentina Longo of Rome's National Central Library look at a manuscript containing a rare, long-lost copy of Caedmon's Hymn, the first poem ever to be written down in Old English, at Rome's National Library, Thursday, May 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Andrea Rosa)
A rare, long-lost copy of Caedmon's Hymn — the first poem ever written down in Old English — is visible in the five lines above the final line of the left page from an 8th-century manuscript copy of the Venerable Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, at Rome's National Library, Thursday, May 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Andrea Rosa)null
