Sebastian Parrilla
Assistant Manager • Argentina
Sebastian Parrilla joined Chelsea's coaching staff as one of Xabi Alonso's assistant managers for the 2026/27 season. He is part of the backroom team Alonso brought with him to Stamford Bridge, having worked alongside him in previous coaching spells. Parrilla plays a key role in the tactical and technical planning behind Chelsea's first-team sessions.
Sebastian Parrilla is Argentine, and spent close to two decades working inside Real Madrid’s youth academy before he became known as one of European football’s most trusted assistant coaches.
Between 2001 and 2018 he worked across almost every age group at Real Madrid, starting with the U11s and eventually taking charge of sides right up to Real Madrid Castilla, the club’s reserve team. It was during his final year in that academy system, in 2018, that he first crossed paths with a rookie coach named Xabi Alonso, who had just begun his own coaching career leading Real Madrid’s Infantil A side.
That single season working alongside each other in the academy was the start of a partnership that has barely been apart since.
Parrilla is not the assistant brought in to shout from the touchline. His value has always been in the detail: tactical planning, technical work on the training pitch, and the day to day sessions that shape how a team actually plays.
At Bayer Leverkusen and later Real Madrid, he was regularly described as one of Alonso’s most trusted voices in the building, someone who translates the head coach’s ideas into the specifics of a session, and who Alonso leans on heavily when it comes to opposition analysis and in-game adjustments.
He is not a specialist in one single area so much as a coach who understands Alonso’s footballing philosophy as well as Alonso himself does, built from nearly a decade of working inside it.
Parrilla’s coaching career began at Real Madrid, where he spent 2001 to 2018 working through the club’s youth ranks, from the U11s up to Castilla.
In 2018, he linked up with Xabi Alonso for the first time, then a first-year coach in the same academy. When Alonso left that summer to take over Real Sociedad B, Parrilla went with him, beginning a coaching partnership that has now lasted the best part of a decade.
The pair moved to Bayer Leverkusen together in October 2022, where they won a first Bundesliga title in the club’s history unbeaten in 2023-24. When Alonso was appointed Real Madrid head coach in 2025, Parrilla again followed as his assistant manager, and he has now made the same move to Chelsea for the 2026-27 season.
No FAQs added for Sebastian Parrilla yet.
