Carlo Ancelotti: The Beautiful Game of an Ordinary Genius

by Aleesandro Alciato

  First published in the United States of America in 2010 by

  Rizzoli International Publications, Inc.

  300 Park Avenue South

  New York, NY 10010

  www.rizzoliusa.com

  © 2010 Rizzoli International Publications, Inc.

  Originally published (except chapters 1 and 2) in Italy in 2009 by RCS Libri S.p.A., Milano

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior consent of the publisher.

  Translated into English by Antony Shugaar for Paraculture, Inc.

  Nuovo Istituto Italiano d’Arti Grafiche, Bergamo – Italy

  eISBN: 978-0-8478-3558-4

  Library of Congress Catalog Control Number: 2010930884

  v3.1

  For papá Giuseppe and mamma Cecilia.

  And for Stefano.

  —C.A.

  To Eleonora, who is my life.

  And to JT.

  —A.A.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Foreword by Paolo Maldini

  1. The Story of the Steak that Couldn’t Sing

  2. Times Tables and Victory

  3. Summoned for a Meeting with Abramovich. It Begins.

  4. Turkish Delights

  5. The Pig Is Sacred. And the Pig Can Coach.

  6. Faking a Fake

  7. Achilles’ Knee

  8. A Dog, Champion of Italy

  9. “Hello, This Is Silvio. I Want to Win Everything There

  Is to Win.”

  10. Milan under Sacchi, Just Like Bologna under Maifredi!

  11. I Decide the Formation.

  12. A Double in the Last Match

  13. World Cup Dreams

  14. Wobbly Benches

  15. Ancelotti: Anti-Imagination

  16. Montero and the Avvocato, Both Crazy About Zizou

  17. If You’re Looking for Feelings, Please Apply Elsewhere

  18. The End of a Story that Never Began

  19. How I Lost my Temper and Gained my A. C. Milan

  20. King in England, Thanks to the Christmas Tree

  21. Kaká, the Greatest Unknown Player on Earth

  22. The Truth from Istanbul: You Have to Fall to Rise Again

  23. An Impatient Pinocchio

  24. There Is No Such Thing as the Malta Pact

  25. The Perfect Match, Played the Night Before

  26. Once Upon a Time, I Signed a Contract with Real Madrid

  27. We’ll Beat the Bastard

  28. Summoned by Abramovich. The End.

  Carlo Ancelotti: A Biography

  FOREWORD

  I’ll keep addressing him by his first name; I always have. When a footballer stops playing, he can finally make friends with his coach. A certain closeness springs up, and barriers come down. I’ve been lucky in that I got that part of the job done ahead of time. I practically came into the world as a member of Carletto’s team; we’ve always been de facto partners. People say that I was a banner for A. C. Milan. If that’s true, then he was the wind that made me flutter. When the wind of Carletto blows, I’m out on the field, with my jersey, number 3, a perfect number in part thanks to my teammates. And he points the way. In his management of the locker room and team meetings, Carletto remains what he has always been: an unparalleled comedian. He manages to crack jokes even before the final game in the Champions League. He talks about roast dinners, he cocks an eyebrow, and we go on to win, because we are relaxed. People imagine that a coach has to make tear-jerking speeches to his team at the most decisive moments, and in fact there have been tears shed at times like that—but it was always because we were laughing so hard. On certain occasions, we’ve heard total silence from the locker room of the opposing team, while in ours Silvio Berlusconi and our coach were telling us jokes. We’re a family, and that’s what families do.

  Carletto never goes overboard—with the possible exception of when he’s eating, because once he sits down and grabs a knife and fork, you’d need an exorcist to stop him. Ever since he became a coach, he sits at a special table, with a special menu, and a special digestive system. He eats, he drinks, he eats some more, he drinks some more. When something good is served, forget about all his discipline and all his methods, including his beloved Christmas Tree. He can’t stand to keep all that abundance to himself. So he starts calling us over: “Paolo, come here. You have to taste this.” “But Carlo, I’m the captain, I’m supposed to set a good example.” “And I’m your coach: have a little taste of this. It’s good.” He’s generous in that part of his life as well. He enjoys life, and that helps us no end. Out of all the locker room management techniques I’ve witnessed, his is definitely the least problematic. He holds in all his own worries and pressures, and so the team preserves its tranquility. And goes on to win. And win some more. And keep on winning. From time to time, though, even the most patient man in the world blows his cool. The last time he actually exploded was in Lugano, after a pre-championship exhibition game against a Swiss team in Serie B. He looked like he’d lost his mind. He said the worst things to us, he peppered us with unforgivable insults. Horrible things, I couldn’t repeat them here. He just kept it up, and I started to feel like laughing. He’d gone off the rails: I’d never seen him like that. He turned beet red, and sitting next to him was Adriano Galliani, wearing a bright yellow tie. Together they looked like a rainbow. Two days later, he came and asked us to forgive him, because he could never be mean through and through. He’s a teddy bear, deep down. The secret of our track record is the fact that he’s a regular guy. There’s no need to be the Special One, Two, or Three to win. It’s enough to have an inner equilibrium and to stay out of the limelight, to keep from setting off fireworks in front of the television cameras.

  Carletto and I have always had a comfortable and close working relationship. We’ve always talked about everything. Whenever he loses his temper, he unfailingly comes to me afterward and asks: “Paolo, was I wrong?”

  Carlo never wants to do everything on his own. It’s a sign of his considerable intelligence. And that’s why he can win wherever he goes: at A. C. Milan, at Chelsea, at Real Madrid—anywhere. His knowledge of soccer is global, enormous. He has mind-boggling experience of every aspect of the game. Even as a player he was an outstanding organizer—of the game and of ideas. You can’t really criticize him, either in technical or human terms: if you do, you’re not being fair. At A. C. Milan, from the times of Arrigo Sacchi on, we’ve had lots of coaches, nearly all of them winners, but each of them managed the group in his own manner. Leaving aside the question of methods and results, if I were asked who brought the highest quality of life in those years, I’d absolutely have to say it was Carletto. Before he came to Milanello he was fairly rigid, less open to tactical innovation; but over time, he grew. He evolved. And we evolved with him, because you need to give a man like that players who know enough not to take advantage of him. Underlying everything that we did was a reciprocal trust. Over the years, there have been people who took advantage of the situation, but we were quick to make sure they understood how to behave. In particular, we explained to them that they had to respect Carletto, always, no matter what. Because of the magical soccer he seems to be able to conjure up. For the way he talks to his team. For the way he behaves off the field. And for the words he wrote in this book, where he has told the story of his li
fe, and of himself, without keeping any secrets.

  People have described him in a thousand different ways. For me, quite simply, he is a friend. A big, easygoing friend. And I miss him.

  Paolo Maldini

  CHAPTER 1

  The Story of the Steak that Couldn’t Sing

  Only once in my life have I felt like I needed a psychiatrist. I was looking at Yuri Zhirkov, but all I could see was a rib-eye steak. Perfectly grilled, juicy, smoking, medium rare. I looked him in the eye and suddenly I was starving. Which is nothing new, really. Meat, fish, red wine, Coca Cola, salami, mortadella, romano cheese, a chunk of gorgonzola, fish and chips, layer cake, an after dinner drink, spaghetti, bowties, pesto, Bolognese sauce, a rack of ribs, veal stew, antipasto, appetizers, entrées, dessert, and even—this one time, in a shrine to nouvelle cuisine in northern Italy—I had an espresso made from coffee beans grown on a compost heap, grown in the farmer’s own manure, for all I know. In other words: I’ve gobbled down everything imaginable in my life, but never had my hunger stirred up by a football player. All the same, just then, that’s what was on my mind: I had developed a strange new appetite. It may have had something to do with the fork that was flying straight at his face, following a trajectory that, I must say, had a certain elegance. Thrown by an unknown hand, with a clear objective. Ballistically speaking it was perfect, hurtling silently through the air, a clearly identified flying object. There was no plate, and the knife and spoon were missing, but the restaurant was there, and so were the diners: us, Chelsea Football Club. There was me, a manager with a slight trend toward waistline expansion. There were the players, hungry for victory. And there was him, a Russian midfielder with a host of talents and just one shortcoming: he can’t sing. He just makes a lot of noise.

  But now he was going to have to sing. It was his moment. If you want to join the team, it’s not enough just to sign a contract. There’s another hurdle, and it’s the toughest, where pity isn’t a word, where mercy isn’t known. A player has to make it through karaoke night, a sacred ritual, and in this case it was being staged in a hotel in Los Angeles during our 2009 summer tour in the United States. This was my first time on the road since leaving A. C. Milan. Hollywood was just a stone’s throw away and Yuri was on stage—I was trying to figure out if I was watching a slapstick comedy or a horror flick. More scary movie than comedy, judging by the shivers running up my spine. For players coming up from the youth team, the requirement is to dance in front of their new teammates, in front of the whole squad, a full audience. Players or new staff members that have come from another club are simply expected to choose a song and belt it out. Without musical accompaniment, without help of any kind: a solitary torture. I, for example, immediately seized on a northern Italian folk song, in dialect, one that I’ve always liked: La Società dei Magnaccioni, by Lando Fiorini. The kind of stuff you’d hear at a small town party, where everyone’s drunk. For those of my readers who don’t know the song, I would suggest listening to Elton John and then trying to imagine the exact opposite. I did pretty well, none of the players booed or hissed. Maybe that was because they knew I was capable of benching them for the entire season … No, really, they all cheered when I was done, and in fact somebody pulled off the tablecloth and began waving it back and forth, like a banner. They all surrendered to my bravura.

  That’s not how it went for Zhirkov, who had been introduced to the crowd by one of our team masseurs: “Ladies and gentlemen, silence please. It is my privilege to introduce to you tonight an artist who comes to us from the East, he’s here tonight just for us, please lend an ear, and then you be the judges.” The snickering in the background didn’t bode well. From Russia, with fury … The sacrificial victim was led toward the gallows, and by now I could see in John Terry’s and Frank Lampard’s eyes the terrible drama that loomed on the horizon. They were already laughing, even before he could open his mouth. Ivanovic was rooting for him—“Go on, Yuri!”—but it was the kind of encouragement you get when someone’s setting you up for a pratfall. His teammates had been ribbing him for days, telling him he needed to train for this moment as if it was the Champions League final, that his future at Chelsea would depend on his performance that night. This was no joke, practically a sacred rite of passage. He looked as worked-up as I get when I’m about to walk through the door of a trattoria, and the fact that he’s fundamentally shy anyway certainly didn’t help. He stood on a stool and began. My. God. I’ve never heard anything that bad. It was a disaster, he didn’t hit one note, not one. Pieces of bread were flying within seconds, followed by pieces of whole fruit—there was more good food on him than there was on the table before long. And that’s when I started to like him. Eyes staring off into the middle distance, he went on singing like a drowning cat, like a stuck pig, for nearly two solid minutes. Garbled lyrics, a depressingly dreary melody: my old president from A. C. Milan, Silvio Berlusconi, would have summed it up with the words: “Of course, a typical Communist.” Instead, the entire roster of Chelsea F. C. did something far worse: they let him finish the song. They refused to take pity on him, refused to interrupt that bloodcurdling cacophony, refused to let him go back to his chair in disgrace, go to bed without finishing his supper. And it was the last verse that truly screwed him, because when he reached the point where his teammates just couldn’t take it anymore, someone finally let fly that blessed dinner fork.

  I stared at it, suspended in midair. It was graceful in a way. It revolved as it flew, defying the law of gravity, like a precision missile. A very smart bomb, a bomb with an impeccable ear for music. As it reached the end of its trajectory, it slowed down and changed direction, like a football someone had kicked with a little downward-curving English on it. The fork was embarrassed, too. At that exact moment, I had my vision. When it comes to food and eating utensils, my brain is a one-way street, leading to my stomach. The association was instantaneous and organic: fork = steak. I smiled, and for an instant I was the happiest man in the room. Certainly happier than Yuri, who was by now tethered, a hostage, to his subhuman yodel. Čech wanted to put on his helmet to protect his ears. Malouda was the wildest, whistling and howling and stamping his feet as if he were possessed by the devil. It was a three-ring circus. I looked around for a red nose I could strap to my face, but I couldn’t find one—no clowns, boys, not tonight. Zhirkov still hasn’t fully recovered from the trauma. But thanks to people like him, and like me, like all the others, and like Bruno Demichelis (who is a genuine psychologist and a refined tenor, and who sang Nessun Dorma on that unforgettable evening), we became the team that went down in English soccer history by winning the Double, the Premier League and the FA Cup—not forgetting the Community Shield at the beginning of the season against Manchester United. For a long time, I thought that was my favorite trophy, if only because it’s shaped like a plate. And on that plate you can put what you like: I piled it high with passion, with the discovery of a world I knew nothing about. London, England, Chelsea, Abramovich, Stamford Bridge, the Blues, the Queen. Another step in my life, another tile in this incredible mosaic, this splendid adventure. It began with that monstrosity sung by Yuri and it ended with Volare, that extraordinary poem set to music that I sang together with my team in front of the thousands of people who invaded Fulham Road, standing atop a double-decker bus, the day after we won the FA Cup final at Wembley against Portsmouth. A corner of the city had become our own immense universe. Untouchable, invulnerable.

  It was all very nice, even if it was tough at the beginning. I didn’t speak English well, and so the club sent me to take an intensive course in the Netherlands (in secret; and, at the same time, it sent all its top managers to study Italian—I don’t know if that was a gesture of respect or because they knew I’d be a useless student). One of the reasons I fit into the locker room was thanks to the fundamental role played by Ray Wilkins, my number two and my friend, because it’s one thing to translate words—plenty of people can do that—but translating feelings is the gift of only
a select few. Ray is one of those select few, always present, noble in spirit, a real blue-blood, Chelsea flows in his veins. His heart beats in two languages, and that helped me. Without him, we couldn’t have won a thing, and in particular we wouldn’t have started the year at supersonic speed. The first game and the first trophy: the Community Shield against Manchester United, and we beat them in a penalty shoot-out: Ancelotti 1, Sir Alex 0. I had never been to Wembley before and it was a moving experience—maybe I was more curious than moved, but I still knew how it was going to end. We had trained too hard and too well to lose, I had absolutely no intention of embarrassing myself in front of my new players, and they had no intention of putting on a bad show in front of the new coach from Italy. I said to the team in the locker room: “We are a first-class group of players, but we don’t understand that yet. We need to attack, impose our style of play, be recognized for what we do. I am going to learn a lot today.” One thing, in any case, had already become clear to me in the preceding weeks: John Terry is the captain of all team captains, he was born with the captain’s armband on his arm. Even without the band, it’s as if he wears it anyway, and that’s how it ought to be. He’s different from all the others, Chelsea is his home, it always has been, ever since the youth squad. One word from him, and the locker room holds its breath. He’s the first one to sit down at meals, the first one to stand up. Outside, he is the first, in the absolute sense of the term. Being part of this club is his mission, that’s how he was made. He pays close attention to the performances of the youngest players in the youth team, he keeps up, he knows all the scores, he misses nothing (although he often loses at ping-pong in the dining room—and when that happens, watch out). He works twice as hard as everyone else, he has the sense of responsibility of someone who runs a company, a people, a philosophy that above all has to win. There is no room for second place; there can only be room for us.