Speaking during Chelsea's pre-season stop in Sydney, the first leg of a tour that will also take in Hong Kong, Indonesia and Malaysia, Alonso reflected candidly on a brief and difficult spell in charge of Real Madrid before his move to Stamford Bridge this summer.
"Luckily there are not too many scars in my career," he said. "So, OK, I got a scar, but this heals.
"Now it is healed and now I am very motivated and determined to enjoy this next step, as I did when I started in Madrid. You move on.
"Looking back, I take the positives and the things that didn't work. I have been very critical about myself, thinking about what I could have done better, because for sure it did not go as expected. But you move on to other things."
Chelsea's decision to move for Alonso came together quickly following the club's difficult spell under Liam Rosenior last season.
"It had to be a lot from here, and also from here, from the guts," Alonso said, gesturing from his head to his stomach. "It was good timing. Good timing for the club. Good timing for myself. This is a team that played really well recently. The situation was not as bad as it looked at the end of last season. There is big potential. Let's see how long it takes. We are in that process. I felt that I had the chance to enjoy being a manager."
The 44-year-old, who completed a 10km run at a pace of four minutes 30 seconds per kilometre during an early jet-lagged morning in Sydney, said he deliberately used his time away from football after leaving Madrid to recharge rather than dwell on the game.
"I used my time to reset the energy because you need to be full of energy as a manager to pull from the rest," he said. "It is very important for me to transmit this passion, this enthusiasm for the game in every training session, every game plan. I used that time mainly for that. I didn't watch much football. It was mainly about myself, about feeling it. You learn from the disappointment of things that were not meant to be and you think things will be better."
Alonso has already reshaped Chelsea's recruitment approach after years of the club fielding one of the youngest squads in the Premier League, sanctioning free or low-cost deals for Danny Welbeck, 35, from Brighton, and Jordan Henderson, 36, on a free transfer after Brentford agreed to terminate his contract early. Between them, the pair add 863 Premier League appearances' worth of experience to the squad.
"For me, you need the right balance of personalities, of maturity stages, early 20s with early 30s and in between, players in different stages of their careers," Alonso said. "There's not a formula for that, but there is a feeling for that. If they have good qualities and good interaction between them, you create good connections and good bonds between them and that helps the team spirit. For me, this is as important as tactics.
"First it is the team spirit. After it is playing good football. After it is winning games. I learned this from playing football. 'I love playing with this team.' You could feel it. For me, it's very natural. In the Basque Country, we have a lot of that collective purpose, that culture."
That culture served Alonso well at Bayer Leverkusen, where he led the club to an unbeaten Bundesliga title and the DFB-Pokal in 2023-24, the club's first ever German league crown, while also reaching the Europa League final.
"It was unexpectedly fantastic," he said, smiling. Alonso is careful not to model himself on any of the major managers he played under, including Pep Guardiola, Carlo Ancelotti, Rafa Benitez and Jose Mourinho.
"It's not copy and paste," he said. "Never." But he draws on lessons learned from all of them, particularly around man-management, recalling how it felt when Benitez wanted to replace him with Gareth Barry at Liverpool in 2008.
Chelsea's sporting leadership, led by co-owner Behdad Eghbali and sporting directors Paul Winstanley and Laurence Stewart, have been impressed by Alonso's energy since his arrival, according to sources close to the club.
"I had a view of Chelsea from the outside. I could see the positives, and my concerns, so I addressed them," Alonso said. "We are taking steps together, decisions to have a good team. This is the ultimate goal."
The club has also moved to give Alonso specific backroom support he wanted, triggering a release clause to bring in Austin MacPhee as a set-piece coach from Aston Villa, where he had built a reputation as one of the Premier League's most effective dead-ball specialists.
Players have responded well to Alonso's hands-on approach in training, where he remains directly involved in drills — setting up crosses, finishes and passing exercises — while wearing an old pair of Adidas Predator boots.
"When I am 10 years older, maybe I won't be able to do that, so I will be more on the sidelines," he said. "But while I still can, I will enjoy it. I like to feel it. I like to be close to the players. That energy, it goes both ways. It is for them and for me."
A keen cook whose speciality is the Basque dish kokotxas, Alonso said relocating his family to London had been a significant factor in taking the Chelsea job.
"It is not a case of going anywhere I want… no, no, no," he said. "It makes sense in this stage of our lives to come to London. My wife loves it. My daughters are coming. My son is going to university."
His route into coaching was shaped early by his father, Periko, also a professional player and manager.
"Because of my upbringing, the road was not unknown for me," Alonso said.
"I had seen that at home. It was all work. Preparing the training for the next day. Preparing the team selection. That was in the kitchen and I was next to him. So I'm not saying it was meant to be, but I had to try it."
He credited his time playing under Guardiola at Bayern Munich between 2014 and 2017 with sparking his curiosity about coaching in earnest.
"I was in that moment of my career where I could go to his office, 'Pep. Why is this happening? What's going to be the game plan?' Maybe when I was 20, I didn't have that confidence, to go to the manager's office to ask those things. But at that moment, because of the trust, I needed to do that, I wanted to do that. I felt much more responsible for the team than in my earlier years as a player."
He began coaching at Real Madrid's Under-14s rather than rushing to the top level.
"It felt natural, not to rush," he concluded.