Quiet Leadership: Winning Hearts, Minds and Matches

by Carlo Ancelotti

  That was part of why I was so surprised and disappointed in Paris when I was given the ultimatum from the president and Leonardo to win the next game against Porto or be fired. To come from the president, of course, this happens. But I had been meeting with Leonardo every day, explaining the training, the injury situation, our planned tactics, strategies. For him to say out of nowhere ‘win this next game’, when we’d already qualified, it made no sense to me. We’d been talking every day.

  So, the general director is the conduit between the president and me, passing on my messages to the president and vice versa. Naturally, it is very important for me to have a good relationship with the general director, as we spend a lot of time together and he can influence how the president sees me. Another useful function of the general director is to act as a buffer between the president and me. When either of us might become angry or annoyed, it is the general director who can act as peacemaker. Galliani played this role a lot at Milan.

  At Chelsea it was difficult at first because the chief executive, Peter Kenyon, left shortly after I arrived. In that first year it was the sporting director, Frank Arnesen, who played this role. There was still a chairman and other board members and, of course, the owner was always very interested in what was happening, which is as it should be. But then Arnesen left and there was a vacuum between me and the owner. There was no conduit, no buffer, so the conversations with him became unpredictable and I wasn’t always prepared for them. Perhaps this would have been fine as a temporary measure, but the Arnesen role was not replaced and there was confusion about the reporting structure. It wasn’t that there was nobody doing that job – it was that everybody was trying to do it.

  At my other clubs this hierarchy was always very clear. At Milan there was Galliani; at Juventus there was Luciano Moggi, of the infamous Calciopoli scandal which saw Juventus stripped of two Scudettos and demoted a division; at Paris Saint-Germain there was Leonardo, of course; and at Real Madrid there was José Ángel Sánchez, who is the ultimate politician and survivor at the club. He was hired by Pérez but then worked for Ramón Calderón when he became president of the club and then went back to working for Pérez in his second term, while I was at Madrid. He is a powerful lieutenant for Pérez.

  This kind of structure isn’t normal for English clubs, although I understand that it is becoming more so. Tradition fights against it, but British managers who resist it are putting themselves under unnecessary pressure to be all things at once to the club. Football clubs are now too big a business for one person to manage.

  It’s important that the manager sometimes doesn’t speak about certain things and isn’t responsible for every detail. With the players, for example, it is not the best idea for the manager to always be the one to speak with them about disciplinary matters. Suppose one player arrives back late after the winter break or for preseason. The player must be fined, but should the manager have to be the one to take that responsibility, which might cause bad blood and resentment from the player? No – it surely has to be the club, so that the manager can be distanced from the decision and continue to do his job without any bad feeling.

  At Madrid, we had some players who went out partying until four o’clock in the morning. I could say to them, ‘What are you doing? You know this isn’t right.’ But it is up to the club to fine them or suspend them – it doesn’t have to be the manager. This is important, this balancing of responsibilities between player, coach and club, because damage can be done to the relationship between the coach and player if it is not handled well.

  When the club behaves correctly and fairly with all players, with no favouritism, it can only add to the manager’s authority. The manager has power only if the players see that the club always protects the manager against the players and their agents. When the players see that the club doesn’t protect the manager, that’s often it for them – they’re dead. However, sometimes when the club does not back the manager it can actually create a stronger bond with the players if the relationships have been built well enough. At Paris Saint-Germain the players knew the situation between me and the club because I had told them about the ‘win or go’ conversation with Leonardo and the president, and this did indeed make the relationship between us even stronger. Of course, it could have weakened me if the players had taken it a different way, but we already had built the right spirit of unity to survive it. Under normal circumstances, I would usually try to keep this type of ‘presidential noise’ away from them, but I felt I had no choice at the time. It helped galvanize us as a team and we won the next game.

  At Madrid we had a different kind of noise and it did adversely affect what happened on the pitch. I’ve already mentioned the saga of the medical statistics which said we had a low number of training hours. The president latched on to the stats and said that we were not working hard enough. I tried to explain to him that it wasn’t the amount of training but rather the intensity that was important; we could train three hours slowly, but it’s better to train thirty minutes fast and hard. He wouldn’t listen. If the president had waited he would have seen, when the blood-test results arrived twenty-one days later, that we actually needed to ease off a little.

  Methods in football can look bad to those not embedded in the game itself – even to presidents and general directors. When you lose a game and then you have a day off afterwards, many people ask, ‘What are you doing?’ Their reaction is to get the players in and push them after a bad result, but this is wrong. The reverse is true. When you lose, of course you have to analyse what went wrong and how to address it next time, but you have to put that game behind you. You have to try to forget the defeat as soon as possible so you’re in the right frame of mind for the next game. It is at times like this that the president and the press will begin to say, ‘You’re too weak, you’re too nice. The players aren’t performing so you have to show them the whip.’ Every time we lose, that’s what they say. The same was true at Milan, Chelsea and Paris Saint-Germain, as well as Real Madrid. It is normal in football and part of the deal you must make with yourself before you take the job. You have to let it wash over you and be confident in your own approach.

  My opinion is that players do their best when they are comfortable, not when they are uncomfortable. I have a story I like to tell about this. Two people have a horse each and they have to get their animal to jump a fence. The first owner stands behind the horse and uses a whip to force the horse and the horse jumps the fence. The second owner stands in front of the fence with carrots in his hand to invite the horse over and his horse jumps over it too. They both jumped the fence this time, but if you use the whip, sometimes the horse will kick back instead of jumping. That’s the problem.

  When I talk of players being comfortable, I do not mean in their playing – I mean in their minds. They must understand that I am always trying to make them and the team better. The comfort is in the trust built by the relationship. In the end, everyone has to respect the rules and that enables a friendly relationship to exist, even if my decision is that the player has to go on the bench. On one such occasion, when I left a player out of the team, he said to me, ‘But we are friends.’

  ‘Yes, of course we’re friends,’ I explained, ‘and for that reason you can see why you don’t play – because we’re friends and I can be honest with you. You must be treated the same as any other player.’

  Sometimes presidents question whether, when I have developed a strong relationship with players, I give them more game time than their form demands. I do my very best for this not to be the case because it would upset the team ethic, but maybe – and it is only a maybe – I can be too patient with players who have served the team well and have been loyal to me.

  I was asked this about Sergio Ramos, when he’d had some bad games for Madrid but was still playing. My answer was quite simple. Ramos was the most important player in the squad. He was a leader, the player with the most personality, the most character. Of course, sometimes he made mist
akes, but I definitely did not pick him more than I should have done because of my relationship with him. He was playing because he was so important to the team. You must look back in these situations, take in the bigger picture. We lost games when Ramos was injured. We put in younger players but they were not adequate replacements.

  When it came to changing his position, playing him in midfield for a while to help the team in my second season, Ramos was worried because it was so new for him, but he agreed and did as I asked because he trusted me. If I hadn’t built such a relationship with him he might have been reluctant to play in midfield. In my first year at the club I played him at right back for a game, but we hadn’t yet built this relationship – he didn’t know me well. He told me after the game, ‘That’s the last time I play right back.’ But the next year was different. So, when he didn’t play that well in a match in his new and unfamiliar position in midfield, he was only one among others in the team that didn’t play well, so why, then, would I single him out? He was doing what I had asked for the good of the team and it is up to me to protect him for this. This is my view of managing up – to protect the players and to manage expectations. The first is easy, it is natural, but the second is very hard.

  In football, especially at the top clubs, the expectation is always there, whether it’s to deliver ‘La Décima’, as it was for me at Madrid, to provide a certain style of play, as at Milan, or to win a specific game. It never stops. The general director will always keep me informed of the expectations from above and I will always do my best to manage these so that they do not have a negative impact on the players.

  My way, as in all things, is to be constantly building relationships, to have a working understanding with the conduit to the president, the general director, and to have the confidence of the players. I invest heavily in building relationships around the club, while being pragmatic about knowing where the ultimate power lies. If the president believes he is being ‘managed’, then I have failed in that relationship.

  HIERARCHY: THE QUIET WAY

  Manage expectations from above to protect those you lead from the ‘presidential noise’.

  Never be afraid to delegate; nobody’s good enough to do everything.

  Don’t be perceived as ‘managing’ relationships above you. Owners and presidents have egos; treat those egos carefully.

  Don’t play favourites – this is a business.

  The quickest and most effective way to keep your owner or board happy is to win. To win you need to nurture and build the best relationship with your talent. The real relationship with your board will be built on this foundation.

  Take your owner on the journey with you. Make them understand they are a part of the story. Overcommunicate on the key issues that drive success and manage the ‘noise’ they can create around the other areas.

  In Their Own Words … The Boss

  Adriano Galliani on Carlo

  I have been at AC Milan for thirty years. I am the CEO at the club and I was Carlo Ancelotti’s boss for eight years. It is hard to explain the role of CEO at a big football club, but this is how I see it. The CEO of a football company should industrialize the game of football.

  As a game, football has existed for a long time, but if somebody didn’t come along and industrialize it, football would have remained a game played by boys on a beach or a field. They started to introduce rules – offsides and the like – and coaches started to teach people how to play the game properly. Then somebody started to plan how this game could become a serious business. Football starts with people going to stadiums, then, thanks to sponsorship and TV money, it becomes a multimillion-dollar phenomenon – a global industry. The chief of a football company, what can he do? He industrializes the game for his company.

  The football industry is similar to the American movie business. A football match lasts ninety minutes, like a film, and it’s exploited in the same way. The stadium is the movie theatre; its exploitation is in television and home viewing, exactly like in the cinema industry. You can spend a lot of money producing bad films and games, or less money and get successful films and games. You can’t guarantee it. The roles are the same as in the movies: the players are the actors, the coach is the director and the president or CEO is the producer. Carlo was my director at Milan.

  I first met Carlo Ancelotti in August 1987. The club had appointed a new coach, Arrigo Sacchi, who arrived in Milan the month before. In Italy it is the coach who trains and proposes what he needs for the team and it is the CEO or president who decides whom to buy and how much to pay and does the negotiation, because they are the people who put the money in. In England I understand the role is different and that the manager is both a coach and the person who buys and sells players.

  So, let’s begin at the beginning because it’s a nice story. When Sacchi needed a new midfielder and asked for Ancelotti, Silvio Berlusconi and I were worried because he had suffered serious injuries to his knee, but we decided to go for him all the same. We started courting Roma, whose president, Dino Viola, didn’t want to sell him at the opening of the transfer market, but on the very last day said yes. I rushed to Rome on the evening before the last day and, in order to stop the press getting wind of it before we could unveil it all, we had booked a hotel room to have the meeting. Carlo got there at about eight o’clock, took the first room key and went up, and a little while later I arrived and asked for my room key at reception. The hotel receptionist gave me a funny look, if you understand what I mean, and handed me the key.

  Carlo and I got along very well immediately – we talked about football and many things besides. I invited him for dinner at the home of my then fiancée, who is from Rome. The following day he underwent our medical examinations and our doctor expressed misgivings about the knee and advised us not to buy him. Sacchi pressed Berlusconi and me and we decided to buy him anyway, for about five or six billion lire, which was no little amount for a player who was already twenty-eight and had big problems with his knee. Because the market was closing at 7 p.m., we had to rush the contracts in our private jet to the league headquarters. This was thirty years ago, remember, before electronic devices. In those days it was the jet then motorcycle courier to register the paper contract at the league. So began Ancelotti’s five-year adventure in Milan as a player.

  He spent his first four years with Sacchi as his coach and the last under Fabio Capello. It was a splendid adventure. We won the 1987–88 league championship in his first year, then we won two European Cups, in 1989 and 1990. In 1991–92 we won the championship again and in the last match, against Verona, Carlo scored two goals. Altogether in that period we won two league championships, two Champions Leagues, two Super Cups, two Intercontinental Cups (the ‘world championship’ for clubs) … a lot of trophies. It was incredible.

  When he hurt his knee again, at the age of thirty-three, he decided to quit as a player. And what happens? The never-ending story continues because Arrigo Sacchi, who had left Milan in 1991 to become the coach of the national team, summons Carlo to be his assistant at the 1994 World Cup. With these two Milan old boys at the helm and seven or eight Milan players as regulars in the team, Italy got to the final against Brazil, where they lost on penalties.

  In 1995 he went to coach Reggiana and won the second division championship, then moved to Parma, a medium-sized club, where he had two very good seasons, finishing second in one of them. I always watched his progress and stayed in contact, even when he started coaching our main rivals in 1999. The Juventus fans didn’t love Carlo because he had been a player for Roma and, most importantly, for Milan. When he arrived at the San Siro with his Juventus team in 2000, the Milan fans applauded Ancelotti, while the Juventus fans whistled him.

  Juventus is a big club. He had done very well with Parma so it was natural he would go there. Milan already had a successful coach at this time, in the form of Alberto Zaccheroni, who won the championship in his first year and was with us for three years. At that moment Milan didn’
t need another coach. But it is natural that coaches move on. All over the world coaches move. Marcello Lippi, an extraordinary coach, was doing well at Juventus before Ancelotti, but sometimes you need a change. Changing coaches is in the life of a club – it’s normal.

  Ancelotti’s Juventus twice finished in second place in the league, when they could have won it. He almost won it and that was when Ancelotti got the reputation for being a good loser – a nearly man. Being the runner-up may be OK at some clubs, but not at Juventus, and the club dismissed him.

  So, in the summer of 2001 he was a coach with a contract and a salary from Juventus, but he wasn’t coaching. We hired a Turkish coach at Milan, Fatih Terim, who stayed for six matches and then, the night we lost to Torino, we dismissed him. Carlo had always stayed in our hearts – it is a relationship that will never be broken – so I immediately called him. I knew he planned to sign for Calisto Tanzi, president of Parma, but I wasn’t sure if he already had. ‘Not yet,’ he told me, ‘but what can I do? I have already given my word to Tanzi.’

  ‘Do not sign,’ I said. ‘I’m coming.’ I dashed to Ancelotti’s home where I played on his affection for Milan, on his relationship with the club. Carlo said yes and his second adventure at Milan began.

  At Ancelotti’s home we had Lambrusco wine – not the kind they drink in England, but real Italian Lambrusco – culatello, prosciutto crudo and parmigiano. At Ancelotti’s home you always eat well. He gets his ingredients from Parma which is, for Carlo, the European food capital. Last time I was with him in Madrid, he cooked, preparing everything personally, and it was delicious.