Carlo Ancelotti: The Beautiful Game of an Ordinary Genius

by Aleesandro Alciato

  I had never seen Kaká play, even on video. So I was worried, more than a little. One day, during a press conference, someone asked me about him, about his gifts and skills, about what we expected from him. And they wanted more: human interest, details, anecdotes, and future prospects. It was an in-depth interview on a subject I hadn’t studied in the slightest, about which I knew nothing. It was an exam that I could only hope to flunk. I did my best to muddle through, recycling stories I’d heard from others, and one-size-fits-all generalities: “He has two legs, he wears football boots with studs and heels, he’s a soccer player by vocation and profession …”—that kind of stuff. It was awkward. “He’s a good midfielder, he can play in a more attacking position, too. You might call him slow, he has a nice personality. In short, he reminds me a little of Toninho Cerezo.” I had played with Cerezo, and, from the descriptions I’d heard of Kaká, the comparison might hold up. I just took a stab in the dark, but nobody seemed to have caught on. That’s the way it always is at press conferences: you fake it, you spout blatant nonsense, and everybody nods wisely. Even the people who work with you.

  At last, one fine day, Kaká showed up for training. For orientation. The first thing I wanted to do was ask him, “Now, have you told your mother and father you won’t be going to school today?” Milanello security would certainly have had fair cause to ask to see his driver’s license before letting him in. But what happened next is this: still groggy from jet lag, he got onto the field, and I heard a heavenly choir and the sound of trumpets. He was a heavensent genius, truly sent by heaven. So, if I may: thank you, Lord. Thank you.

  Once he got the ball between his feet, he was incredible. I stopped talking, because there were no words to express what I was feeling. There were just no words in my vocabulary for what I was seeing. Truly superior stuff.

  In his first clash as a member of A. C. Milan, Kaká found himself face-to-face with Rino Gattuso, who gave him a violent shoulder block, massive but not sufficient to make Kaká lose control of the ball. Rino took it with admirable calm, enlightening us with a profound observation about that little encounter: “Aw, go fuck yourself.” In his way, he had just put the team’s seal of approval on his new teammate. That teammate, after holding onto the ball, gave it a tremendous smack, easily thirty yards, to the frustration of Nesta, who completely failed to block it. Now, hold on for a second, this doesn’t make sense. Give me that remote control, I want to watch the replay. I had TiVo, I just didn’t know it yet. My dear Moggi, maybe it’s because I’m a congenital overeater, but I like Kaká. I really like him. A lot. He takes off his glasses, puts on a pair of shorts, and he becomes something I never would have expected: a world-class player.

  After every training session, Galliani and I would talk on the phone. I’d tell him everything that was going on, the things that had happened, and he would give me his thoughts and impressions. It was an uninterrupted daily relationship. That day, I called him: “Signore Galliani, I have some news for you.”

  “Good news or bad?”

  “Good news. Excellent news.”

  “Carletto, are you quitting?”

  He felt like joking—always a positive sign. “No, I’m staying, and one of the reasons is that we have just acquired a phenomenon.”

  He might not be at Zidane’s level, but he was close. He was the second greatest player I’ve ever coached, and certainly the most intelligent. He understands things on the fly, he thinks twice as fast as the others; when he receives the ball, he’s already figured out how the play is going to end. The following training sessions were just like the first. The third, the fourth, the fifth: they were all the same—a spectacle with a happy ending.

  I wasn’t the only one who was impressed with Kaká; he’d also made quite an impression on his teammates. All of them. And you can imagine how many magnificent footballers they’d seen passing through. He’d even made a strong impression on Maldini, who, to mention just one name, had played with Marco van Basten. From the swan of Utrecht to the young preacher of Saõ Paulo. Kaká immediately made friends with Gattuso. They became very close, and soon they began kidding around. Oil and water—or, perhaps, devil’s oil and holy water—they made an unlikely but magnificent pair. (Just to make clear what a character he was, Gattuso once ate a live snail at Milanello during a training session.)

  Over the last few years, the scenario has pretty much remained the same. Kaká runs toward Gattuso. Gattuso runs toward Kaká. They seem to see one another at a distance, and then move inevitably closer, like a shootout in a Western. They may not have holstered pistols, but they start their duels with mockery. In general, Ricky is the first to speak: “You uncouth southern peasant.” Rino doesn’t say a word, but he chases after him, catches him, and swings a straight-armed slap at the back of his head. Kaká must have been head-slapped a thousand times since he arrived. A normal person would be completely dazed and dizzy, but it is Kaká’s good fortune that he is normal only in terms of manners and appearance. Otherwise, he does things on a regular basis that others frequently have a hard time even thinking.

  Pato made quite an impression on me the first time I saw him play, too, but nothing like what happened with Kaká. I got to know Pato over time, one training session after another, but with Ricardo it was a bolt from the blue—a sudden and total conversion. What immediately struck me about Pato was his sheer speed; he’s a hundred-meter sprinter on a soccer field. What struck me about Kaká was, simply, everything. Every single thing. My Lord, what a soccer player You sent down to us here on earth. The day he arrived, he completely changed A. C. Milan, for the quite reasonable fee of eight million dollars. A dream, at a bargain-basement price.

  In a fairly static team—Rui Costa and Rivaldo generally played with the ball between their feet—we tampered with the speedometer. Now we were traveling much faster than the machine was designed to go. Kaká was extraordinarily dynamic, although we were bounced out of the 2003–04 Champions League when we lost a disastrous match at La Coruña, in the Italian championship season we basically had no rivals. It was a stroll in the park. We were the champions of Italy, thanks to a player I’d never heard of. And there is one thing for which Kaká never forgave me: “Coach, I have to ask, had you lost your mind that day? You compared me to Cerezo …” And indeed the two players have absolutely nothing in common, but that day at the press conference, I couldn’t know that yet. All of the strongest soccer teams on earth have always followed Kaká, and rightly so: there are no other players like him on the circuit. The sheikhs want him. So do the merengues. So does Chelsea. A universal object of desire, and, as such, he is now expensive—very expensive.

  When Kaká joined Milan, he immediately helped us win the Scudetto. Immediately. Galliani celebrated, but he didn’t take the Italian tricolor cup to bed. He’d left his heart in Manchester; he could never forget his night of passion with the European Cup, because the Champions League is more important than anything else. There’s only one class of people who would disagree with me: those who haven’t been able to win it.

  CHAPTER 22

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

  That evening, May 25, 2005, there was excitement in the locker room at Atatürk Stadium in Istanbul. It was a joyous half-time. The first half of the Champions League final had just come to an end, and we were beating Liverpool, 3–0: we had played flawless soccer. One goal by Maldini, two by Crespo; here comes the cavalry. Just forty-five more minutes, and we would become the champions of all Europe, the highest peak of that season. Give us back the European Cup, and we’ll take it home with us. Add a place setting for dinner, we have a new girlfriend. The players started urging one another on, aloud: “Come on, we can win this”; “Let’s go boys, this is happening”; “We’re winning, we’re winning, we’re winning.”

  They were clapping and cheering. We weren’t counting our chickens, we were just getting revved up, filled with positive energy. That happens. In the little dressing room next door,
the players I had sent up into the stands were putting on our victory shirts under their team uniforms. Our victory—a victory that, however, remained to be won.

  The air was sparkling and cool, which seemed appropriate. A. C. Milan, ready for the bubbly. So I let the team vent and applaud for a few minutes, then I told them to calm down: “Look, when you’re playing against Brits, a match is never really over, so let’s be careful here. Let’s make sure they don’t seize control at the beginning of the second half. We can’t, and we shouldn’t, collapse. Let’s manage our control of the ball and our control of the game. Go! Go, Milan!” That was my speech. Nothing more, nothing less.

  That evening, Liverpool had begun the match with a single striker, Baroš which is why I would have expected Cissě to come onto the field at the beginning of the second half. It didn’t happen. Strange tactics Rafa Benítez was employing. And, in fact, everything looked great for us when the game resumed; we came close to ratcheting the score up to 4–0. Then, the unforeseeable happened: a six-minute blackout. The impossible became possible. (“Impossible is nothing” is a slogan that I’ve always hated, because it turned ugly on us that day.) We were our own worst nightmare. The world turned upside down. The second and minute hands of my watch started twirling in the wrong direction: ladies and gentlemen, we’re running on disaster time now. We were hurtling into the dreamworld of the English bookmakers, and well beyond. If we had bet against ourselves, we would have become richer than we already were. The score: 3–1; 3–2; 3–3. I couldn’t believe it. This couldn’t be happening. I was paralyzed, and I didn’t even have time to react. I was baffled; nothing made sense. Who could have kept their senses? In the course of just 360 seconds, destiny had changed the direction of the match, twirling it 180 degrees. A complete change of course, an inexorable and continuous decline. The light had gone out, and there was no time to change the bulb. It was moving too fast, there was no chance to run for shelter. A perfect piece of machinery in an irreversible nosedive. Incredible but true.

  People often ask me what went through my mind during Liverpool’s recovery. The answer is simple: nothing. Zero. My brain was a perfect vacuum, the vacuum of deep space. I did my best to focus, to concentrate. We went into overtime and finally started playing like the team we were, the team we believed we were, the team that still could, and had to, beat Liverpool. Even then, deep down, I still hoped to pull it off. Right up to the very last minute, when Dudek made a miracle save against Shevchenko. Andriy headed the ball toward goal, and we were already celebrating sweet victory, but the goalkeeper managed to block the shot. Andriy regained possession of the ball, and Dudek blocked it again, just as he was getting back up from the ground. Corner kick. Ouch. It was then, and only then, that I began to see ghosts—not until then. My brain began functioning again, and I managed to put together a complete and coherent thought: “This is starting to look bad.”

  In the meantime, the match had gone into a penalty shootout. I looked my players in the eyes, and I saw that something had gone wrong. They were overthinking it all. And right before you’re about to kick from the penalty mark, that’s never a good attitude to have. At that point, I was practically certain we were done for. And to think that the designated penalty kickers, unlike what had happened at Manchester against Juventus, were our good ones: Serginho, Pirlo, Tomasson, Kaká, and Shevchenko. When I saw Dudek dancing before each one of our penalty kicks to try to shake our concentration, I was reminded of the final that we, Roma, lost to Liverpool in a penalty shootout. There, too, Grobbelaar, on the goal line, had done a creditable imitation of a hysterical belly dancer. One no better than the other, him and Dudek. In the locker room after the game, I had very little to say: “In moral terms, we won that game. If we do our best, someday we’ll have this opportunity again …”

  I never watched that match again, and I never will. Not so much because of the pain, but simply because there is no point to it. I feel no need to watch it again. Now I think of the disaster of Istanbul as a loss like any other. My depression has lifted. Of all the players, Crespo is probably the one who took it the hardest; he’d never won a European Cup, and that evening in Turkey he thought his time had come—a feeling that only grew during the game, after he scored not one but two goals. For his effort and his gifts, he really deserved to go home with a major piece of recognition. Even today, he lives with the regret that he was unable to hoist that Champions League cup; he deserved it more than all the others.

  Crespo had begun that season as a cadaver, and he ended it as a hero. He had improved vastly, and all credit was due to him. When we acquired him in the summer from Chelsea, he was another man: ungainly, slow, depressed, he no longer seemed like a soccer player at all. (I still don’t know what they did to him.) He couldn’t even score; he didn’t get his first goal until November, in the Italian Cup games. He worked like crazy to recover, and, in the end, he succeeded. It was the old Crespo again, the one I’d known from my time at Parma. My prize student, my good close friend.

  One step down, in the ranks of despair, was Gattuso, who was ready to leave A. C. Milan after the match against Liverpool. Some kind of psychic sinkhole had opened up inside him, sucking him down into darkness.

  Then, all together, we came to a conclusion, even though it took us some time: we would return in triumph precisely because of that crushing defeat. Just when that would be, we still couldn’t say. We couldn’t possibly know. First, we had to gather up all the shattered pieces of us, ourselves, and our team, and reassemble them. It was the most complicated puzzle I ever faced. It was in that period that I went back to find the thesis I had written for my master’s degree at Coverciano to become a fully accredited, first-class soccer coach. I flipped through the pages, going directly to the chapter on psychology:

  … one outcome of this lack of results is that the player begins to feel a waning enthusiasm, with the risk of calling into question the effectiveness of the work that he is being asked to do. The coach—with the support of the club, of course—must have faith in his ideas, must keep from wavering, must remain confident in his convictions, but, above all, must be aware that he has a group of players that is following him and approves his choices and decisions. If you are sure that the group is on your side, then that is the time to insist on the work that must be done.

  Another one:

  … you must take care to avoid creating anxiety in the pursuit of results at all costs; this is harmful and counterproductive, if you wish to obtain a high level of performance. If the group manages to overcome this series of difficulties, then it becomes more cohesive and much more powerful. At that time, a coach knows that he can count totally on players who are united, highly motivated, and determined. When you can count on a group of people with these characteristics, the work will be less tiresome and the results will certainly be more noteworthy.

  I may have been a bad writer, but apparently the prescription for the team’s crisis was always clear to me. Tragedy can only produce better performance. Either you emerge, all rowing in the same direction, or you’re done for.

  The process of psychological reconstruction is a lengthy one, perhaps even too long. It took us the entire 2005–06 season to complete it. We didn’t win a thing that year—an unusual situation for our group of players and one we’d never experienced before.

  While I’m on the subject, let me say something about a notion that is of interest to many people I’ve spoken to: perhaps the decline of Alberto Gilardino—who had just joined the team—began at this very point. Alberto is a somewhat fragile personality, and it wasn’t the dream of his life to be acquired by a club like A. C. Milan in the midst of such a troubled period. He was crushed by the ensuing pressure.

  In any case, we emerged from the ordeal stronger. I may be crazy, but I think that the defeat at Istanbul wasn’t completely negative. It had its reasons and its value. We were ready to start over from scratch. All together, hand in hand, into the eye of the hurricane. The hurricane of the Ita
lian soccer scandal: Calciopoli.

  CHAPTER 23

  An Impatient Pinocchio

  The nose. It’s long—incredibly long. In the summer of 2006, Pinocchio had come to terms with us; he was practically a member of the A. C. Milan team. We even had his uniform ready. Ready for Zlatan Ibrahimović, the perfect striker, arriving from the distant shores of Juventus. Perfect in and of himself, and perfect for my team. An assault weapon in my hands, with the ammunition clip entrusted to Kaká. In my imagination, I was already training him, the tempered-steel tip of our little Christmas Tree.

  The problem was that Ibra lacked the strength of character to wait patiently. Haste makes waste, but Massimo Moratti pays good money; so one more world-class soccer player went to Inter. It disappointed me. This was the first sting of the Calciopoli scandal, and, more than ointment, I needed a suit of armor to deal with what followed. In the summer of 2006, Ibra had been our major designated purchase, but we didn’t yet know whether we would be playing in Serie A or Serie B. He certainly didn’t want to drop down a ranking. So we asked him to give us a little more time until it became clear. He didn’t have any more time to give us, apparently. He changed his plans and his colors without changing his city. Too bad. He wanted to win the Champions League; we could have served that to him on a silver platter just a year later.

  I was to console myself over our loss with a new acquaintance, Warrant Officer Auricchio, the great discovery of that period. Every day I read sensational new reports in the daily press; from time to time, the versions would change, usually for the worse. A. C. Milan in Serie A; Milan in Serie B; it could even go down to Serie C; Milan won’t be penalized; Milan will be penalized; Milan is going to compete in the Champions League; Milan out of the running for the European Cup; Milan guilty; Milan very guilty. I was ready at this point for anything, even the revelation that Galliani had assassinated JFK. It was the end of the world.