Right. Sit down. Pour yourself a strong one. Because I am about to tell you something that I genuinely did not think I would ever hear again in professional football.

A manager took the blame for losing a game.

Not his players. Not the referee. Not the pitch. Not the travel schedule, the alignment of Jupiter, or a dodgy prawn sandwich at the team hotel. Álvaro Arbeloa, the man in charge of Real Madrid, stood in front of the cameras after a 2-1 defeat at Mallorca and said the responsibility was "absolutely, all mine."

I had to rewind it three times. I genuinely thought my hearing aid was playing up.

In my day, this was normal. You lost, you fronted up, you said you got it wrong, you went home and stewed on it with a cup of tea and the classified results on Ceefax. That was management. That was leadership. You didn't need a PR team and a sports psychologist to draft your post-match quotes for you.

But somewhere along the way, accountability became a dirty word. Managers started hiding behind "the process." They'd lose 4-0 and talk about "underlying metrics" and "expected goals" like they were presenting a doctoral thesis instead of explaining why their centre-half had the positional awareness of a traffic cone.

Don't get me started on the excuses we've had over the years. "The grass was too long." "The ball was too round." "We dominated the expected possession of the transition phases in the final third." Mate. You lost. Say you lost. Say it was your fault. Move on.

And now here's Arbeloa. A young coach. A man who played under Mourinho and Ancelotti and Benitez. A man who clearly learned something from the old school, because he looked down the barrel of that camera and said the one thing modern managers are allergic to saying. It was my fault.

That's the problem with modern football. Everybody's got an escape route. Everybody's got a clause. Everybody's got an agent ready to brief a journalist that actually, the loss was because the left-back's aura was misaligned and the dressing room feng shui was off. Nobody just holds their hands up anymore.

I managed in the lower leagues for twenty years. Twenty years! You know what happened when we lost at Barnet on a Tuesday night in front of 800 people and a dog? I told the local paper it was my fault. Because it was. I picked the team. I set up the tactics. I told Gary Nuttall to play as a false nine when the lad could barely play as a true nine. That was on me.

And you know what happened? The players respected it. They ran harder the next Saturday. They knew the gaffer wasn't going to throw them under the bus. That's how you build a dressing room. Not with data analysts and mood lighting and smoothie bars. With honesty.

Now look. Arbeloa might not last at Real Madrid. That's a club that eats managers for breakfast and uses their bones to pick its teeth. The pressure there is unlike anything I ever faced, and I once had a chairman who communicated exclusively through passive-aggressive notes left on my windscreen.

But for one brief, beautiful moment, a football manager reminded me of what this job used to be about. Standing up. Taking it on the chin. Not blaming the VAR room, the ball supplier, or Mercury being in retrograde.

Arbeloa said it was all his fault. And honestly? That might be the most impressive thing any Real Madrid manager has done all season.

In my day, we called that character. Now they'll probably send him on a leadership retreat and make him do trust falls into a swimming pool full of analytics interns.

Football. Honestly.