Quiet Leadership: Winning Hearts, Minds and Matches

by Carlo Ancelotti

  I say Carlo is the best and I have worked with the best. To compare them, let me take you through them one by one. Mourinho is the disciplinarian. Everything with him is a mind game – he likes to manipulate. Such tricks were new for me – all the time doing one thing to get another thing, all the time triggering me. I like these games and it worked for me; I became top scorer under him and we won the league. As long as it works and as long as we win, it’s all good with me.

  The way Mourinho prepared for games was also new to me. I would get pumped up, believing the story he would feed us. I went through a lot of adrenaline when I played for him. It was like nothing was ever good enough. He gave and he took. José Mourinho knows how to treat a footballer, but Carlo knows how to treat a person.

  After Mourinho I went to Pep Guardiola, the big brain in football. He had all these solutions for every team we played against, knowing exactly what we needed to do to win, exactly how he wanted it achieved. We could be winning 2–0 at half-time, but he would say, ‘We’re not finished here – we continue. I want three, four, five, six, seven.’ He was like a machine.

  As a person, however, he was something else. I told you that I don’t judge a person if I don’t know them, and I base these opinions on what I went through with him. As a coach, he’s fantastic, but as a person, we didn’t see eye to eye on many things. I wrote about our problems in my own book. It was like a school and we, the players, were the schoolboys. This type of environment does not suit me.

  Even after Guardiola, when they lost so badly to Bayern Munich, 7–0, in the Champions League, nothing changed. Because they’d had such success for the ten years before that game they treated it as a one-off. They are so strong and confident that they believe in themselves and just follow the system all the time. This works for them but not so good for me.

  Barça have always had a world-class team, but under Guardiola the system stayed the same. Outside of this system, and outside of his huge footballing brain, I cannot agree that Guardiola is the same quality as Carlo.

  So, later, after I have had this experience with Guardiola, I meet Carlo. I get a complete person and a coach. Often with a coach the game is all we have in common, but with Carlo, when I have a problem at home I can talk to him; when I need advice I can talk to him – whatever it was, I knew I could lean on him. But it wasn’t only me – it was the same for the whole group. He is who he is with everybody.

  I remember the game against Porto in the Champions League, because there was a lot of pressure. It was win or lose his job. I felt for him because we had been winning everything, and then because we had just lost, suddenly it was chaos. Quietly, he said that the competition was not finished. ‘You do not win the trophies now,’ Carlo said. ‘You win them in the end of the season.’ But there was still chaos everywhere because a small club doesn’t know how to handle setbacks when they arrive. A big club knows that bad times are inevitable and they know how to handle them because they’ve been through it. However, no matter how much chaos there was, Carlo handled it. He knew what he needed to do because of his experience. The chaos was never allowed to reach the team.

  The training ground was small, so we could hear the noise that would go on at the club, but Carlo would never agree with the owners if they criticized the players. He would always protect us. He would say that the players had done everything he had asked of us.

  He protected the team in many ways. If someone was late to training because they had been out the night before, he would call them into his office and ask what had happened. He would listen and then say, ‘Don’t do this again. This is between me and you, but don’t repeat this mistake. Be professional.’ He had a sense of humour with it too, when it was appropriate, and he might add, ‘Next time you invite me along.’

  Because he was like this, sometimes it was hard to tell if he was really angry or just playing angry. Even when he kicked the box and hit me in the head with it, I wasn’t sure – nobody had done anything like that to me before – but, as it was Carlo, and I looked at him and saw that the eyebrow was up, I knew it was serious, so I just put my head down. One day he was wearing a beautiful Italian suit and he went crazy, screaming at everybody and then swearing in Italian. Nobody knew what the problem was so we all just sat in silence. The next day, it was hugs. He would say sorry for being angry.

  One day in training I approached him and said, ‘Coach, Coach, I need to talk to you.’ It was like he was pretending he didn’t hear me, so I prodded him with my pointed finger and said, ‘Coach.’ From nowhere he turned to me with a very serious face and said, ‘Never put a finger on me.’ I was in shock. ‘Are you serious?’ I asked. ‘Yes, I’m serious – never put a finger on me.’ Then two seconds later he started to laugh. I said, ‘Carlo, don’t surprise me like this, because I don’t recognize you.’ He has that glint in his eye. He has the feeling for every person.

  The day after the game he would make it a point to talk to everybody. He would say if somebody had a bad game and talk to them about it. Before we played away against Barcelona in the quarter-final of the Champions League, everybody was pumped. Carlo said, ‘Ibra, I need to talk to you.’ When he speaks in a certain serious tone you know that it’s important. We sat down and he looked uncomfortable when he said, ‘I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. We will do things differently in this game. I’ve decided to put you on the bench.’

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘It is a tactical trick we will play,’ he said. ‘When everybody is tired in the last twenty minutes, you will come on.’ I was devastated, but I also wanted him to know that I could be professional about it. ‘OK,’ I said.

  ‘I’m joking with you,’ he said, smiling. ‘Go have your lunch.’ All the tension disappeared after that. He could really help you relax before a big game.

  In another game Carlo explained his tactics: ‘We will park the bus in front of goal and Ibra in front of the bus. Everybody is expecting us to play tika-taka football, but I say we’re here to win.’ He will always do what needs to be done to win the game.

  Mourinho is like this too. He was always well informed about opponents, going through their every weakness and every quality and then the way he wanted the game to be. If he wanted to kill the game, he’d kill the game; if he wanted the game to be open, it would be open. For Mourinho, it was all about winning. In Italy, where I played for him, it’s more important not to concede a goal than to score a goal, and Mourinho adapts very well to every country. He knows that winning is the only thing, though it seems that his third season at clubs often presents a problem for him. In Madrid it was perfect for Carlo to come after Mourinho – he’s the only one that could succeed with a team after Mourinho. The players need the calm after the fighting.

  I hear that the president at Madrid complained that some of the players began to take advantage of Carlo’s good nature. This is wrong. Maybe the president was jealous because he didn’t have the same relationship with the players that Carlo did. I don’t understand this criticism.

  I understand how people who don’t know what it is like to be in a high-performance team can mistake a good relationship for weakness, but it is, in fact, the opposite. The atmosphere must be comfortable for the players. I remember when we were out for dinner at an Italian restaurant, a group of seven or eight of us from the team. It was quite late, about eleven o’clock, and someone suggested calling Carlo. Some of the guys said that he would not even answer, others thought he wouldn’t expect us to be out so late, but we called him anyway. Ten minutes later he joined us, had a drink, chatted and joked with us and then he left after one hour. Tell me any other coach that would have done this. Who else but Carlo has such confidence?

  When you have a person who is comfortable within these kind of limits, you would do everything for him. The confidence he gives you and the confidence he gets in return – you would kill for him. In football, to take orders from the general you have to believe in him.

  He is not afraid to
speak to individuals in front of the group. There were many situations when he criticized me in front of everybody. He would make a point of criticizing the big player – the towers of the team – to show that nobody is too important to be above criticism.

  The sign of a big player is that they’re able to accept this. The smaller players, they feel that they need to defend themselves – they do not yet have the confidence to admit their faults. But if they see the towers of the team accepting their mistakes, they will be more able to do the same – and this is the only way to learn. Carlo would say to the team, ‘We conceded a goal – what happened there?’ The big players would say, ‘My fault.’ Then it’s done. He does it this way because it gives the responsibility to the big players. He needs to trust them.

  There was a situation with two players in the same position, each with equal quality. They were playing alternate matches, so, out of curiosity, I asked Carlo, ‘How are you playing this game with them?’ He said, ‘I go to the first one and tell him he will be my right-back. Then I go to the other one and say exactly the same thing. So now it’s up to them who will do it on the pitch.’ You never know if he is joking, of course, but I think he is always on the edge with his methods, which the confidence and respect he’s built up allow him to use. He has this feeling about things – either you have it or you don’t.

  Carlo’s way of working, the training sessions and the like, is pretty old school and very Italian. Tactics are important for him. I’ve played in Italy and I know how it works in Italy – always very tactical the day before the game. Carlo would have us out on the training pitch for a tactical brief, which isn’t always easy as a player – you need to be stimulated all the time instead of standing still and shivering in the cold, but he believed strongly in it. Whichever way he approached the training, the coaching was successful. Don’t forget he was a football player once, who won trophies. Not many coaches have done this; he has it all in his locker, which he can pull out at any time.

  I’m just happy and lucky that I worked with him and I’m sorry that it didn’t last longer. When I speak to him now he says, ‘Ibra, where do you want to go next? Which team?’ I tell him that if he’s at a team I don’t need to think about it, I’ll be there. ‘Anywhere but Russia.’

  When we played away to Lyon towards the end of the season, we knew that, if we won, we would be champions. I remember before the game, his eyebrow was already up in the morning because he was nervous. I had not seen this before. I said to him, ‘Carlo, do you believe in God?’

  ‘Yes,’ he replied. So I said, ‘That’s good, because you can believe in me.’ The eyebrow went up even more. ‘Ibra, you’re such a bastard …’ he said, and after that we won and were champions.

  He helped me to mature both as a player and as a man. At the beginning I was like a lion, on and off the pitch. I would throw things when we were losing. Paris Saint-Germain was too relaxed for me, but Carlo used this. If the game had gone maybe ten minutes with nothing happening, he would call to me on the pitch, ‘Ibra – time to wake up the team.’

  Carlo saw me as the leader. I think being a leader isn’t something you choose – it’s something you become. Either you’re a leader or you’re not. When I arrived in Paris Carlo said, ‘You will be my captain,’ and it is the only thing I have refused with Carlo. I said, ‘Carlo, I don’t know how long I will stay here, because I come, I do my job and I leave. A captain should be just like you – a person for this project for a long time.’

  He tried to persuade me, but I told him to make Thiago Silva captain. I think that he still sees me as a leader, with or without the armband. Either you are or you are not. Having the armband doesn’t mean that you are a real captain, though Thiago Silva is both the captain and a leader. I hope I help him in that.

  Carlo is a natural leader. His style isn’t ostentatious – it’s quiet. He is not pretending; there’s nothing false about it. You have many out there whose style is to pretend, to show off, but in the end they will lose – people will see through them. Carlo is always true to himself. If he weren’t, I would not say these words about him. I am not a man to mince my words.

  The club that Paris Saint-Germain is today is not thanks to the people coming in now, it’s thanks to Carlo, who was here at the beginning. It’s the guys at the start, who had all that hard work to do, who people should be saying thanks to, not the people here dancing and enjoying it now that everything is nice. When he left, I was not sure I wanted to stay, because I had a very good relationship with him. Even if we hadn’t won the league, I would still believe in him. I believe he was the right person for this project, but not for two years. Ten years would have been right and that was his vision too.

  He believed in it so much, and he believed too that he was the right person to bring it to fruition. I was very sorry when he left, both for professional and personal reasons. He called me and explained everything and I said, ‘I don’t want you to leave – maybe this will be my last year as a football player and I would like to spend it under you as a coach.’ He said, ‘No, we go our separate ways. I have already chosen Real Madrid because it has become bad for me here at PSG.’ I knew Real Madrid’s players would be happy because I knew what they were getting, just as I knew what we had lost.

  ‘From now on, you don’t call me Coach,’ he said to me. We all called him Coach or Mister Ancelotti. ‘This is an order,’ he continued. ‘You don’t call me Mister any more – you call me by my name, because I consider you a friend. Listen to what I’m saying because you will offend me if you call me Mister.’

  I’ve never had a relationship with a coach like I had with him. I know how it is in football. We are friends today, my teammates and I, but if I leave the team next year, how many will I speak to? I don’t know. You never know, because these are football friends, workmates. How many do you keep close to in any walk of life? I have Maxwell, my friend at the club who I will probably keep in touch with for the rest of my life, and also there is Carlo. I still talk to him today – he is my friend.

  3. Hierarchy

  Managing Up

  The arrangements between the ultimate boss – the owner or president of the club – and the governance and management structure that sits below can be labyrinthine. These complex structures are not necessary, because football clubs aren’t massive businesses. In financial terms they are mid-sized at best. What complicates things is that, unlike in more regular businesses where roles are marked out and the end product less readily open to constant feedback, everyone involved is so passionate about football. Everyone has an opinion. It is said that in academia the arguments are so fierce because the issues are so trivial; it is the same in football.

  In my mind the distinction between the boss – for me, this is the president – and what I call the general director – in business terms, the CEO, but it comes with various names in football – is an important one to make. After this chapter, my old boss at Milan, general director Adriano Galliani, speaks eloquently about how he sees the demarcation of duties, but for me, my job remains to try to handle them all in a calm, influential and pragmatic style. ‘Managing up’ is a reality in all businesses.

  People ask how I dealt with Silvio Berlusconi at Milan, Roman Abramovich at Chelsea, Florentino Pérez at Real Madrid or Nasser Al-Khelaifi at Paris Saint-Germain. I’ll tell you: For me, it’s not so important. I don’t spend a lot of time with the president. Mostly I spend time with the general director and it is he who spends time with the president. Basically, we do the same jobs but at different levels. He tries to protect me from what my friend Alessandro Nesta calls the ‘presidential noise’ and in turn I try to protect the players from anything from above that might distract them. I can’t control the direction of the president; I can only hope to influence him, and the best way to do that is by winning. Of course, I understand that if he is happy, I am happy, and if he’s not happy, then I do not have a job and I cannot protect the players.

  With Berlusconi I learned,
very quickly, that since he owned AC Milan, my job was to please Berlusconi. The tradition at Milan is to play an attractive style of football – which is different from Juventus, where the most important thing is to win. So, I built a team for Berlusconi to enjoy. I built an attacking team with Pirlo, Seedorf, Rui Costa, Kaká and Shevchenko all playing at the same time. I learned that no system is more important than the club president. If Berlusconi wants to come in the dressing room to tell his jokes, then I have to understand that it is his dressing room. I even allowed him into the dressing room before we played Juventus in the Champions League final in 2003. He’s the boss, so he can even listen to the team talk if he wants.

  Everyone thinks that Berlusconi pushed me, but this is not really true. He was affectionate. He would actually push me when we were winning, but when things were going wrong he would support me. When we were doing well, he would tell me, ‘No, we have to play with this striker. We have to play with more attacking football. This is not my opinion – I am telling you that this is what I want.’

  I would reply, ‘We have two strikers. Shevchenko in the side, we have also Kaká playing with him.’ ‘No,’ he would say. ‘Kaká’s not a striker, Kaká is a midfielder.’ It was just to put his two cents’ worth in when everything was going well. Rumour had it that he tried to pick the team by sending me team sheets before games. This is simply not true. The teams were always my teams. Sometimes, after a game when we had won, he liked to add his opinion and would tell me who and how he would have played, but it was always after the game and after we had won.

  Ultimately, you could say my role at any club is to keep the president happy. How do I do that? I do not go to the president, but I have to be ready to answer any questions that he asks me when he comes to me. My time at Chelsea certainly taught me the importance of this. My regular meetings are with the general director, who reports back to the president, and we meet usually once a week, but it often isn’t scheduled and it differs at every club – there are no set rules. At Paris Saint-Germain I would meet every day with Leonardo, but at Madrid and Chelsea it was different.