Quiet Leadership: Winning Hearts, Minds and Matches

by Carlo Ancelotti

  Take Ibra, who has played under Carlo for a number of years. Everyone knows Ibra is one of the greatest footballers in the game, but he’s also one of the hardest workers. He gets respect in training because it doesn’t matter to him whether he’s playing in a World Cup or a five-a-side game, he wants to win – and Carlo is exactly the same. Carlo will accept a certain amount of joking around, and as long as you’re doing things in a professional way, then he will be fine with that, but I think he shows his frustration. His team might be winning, but he won’t always be happy if the attitude isn’t right, and he looks for professionalism even in players stretching and warming up.

  Of course, he can lose it, like all of us, I suppose. But it never seems to affect the way the players feel about him. I think the only time I saw him lose it was in the last game of the season when I was at Milan and we were going for a Champions League place. We were winning the game but playing like crap. I couldn’t tell you what he was angry about because when he does lose it, he says it in Italian. It’s great and unexpected to watch, but it’s kind of scary. Thankfully, I’m not fluent in Italian.

  I’ve been lucky to play for great club managers and I couldn’t rank them – they all had different styles. But there’s one thing they all have in common: they’re winners. Every manager has their own way of managing a team and individual players. Sir Alex Ferguson commanded respect and Carlo automatically gets it because he knows everything about the game. He treats the players with great respect, but only if he gets that respect in return.

  I clearly remember Carlo’s last game at AC Milan. I saw in the changing room just how much love the players had for him – and that’s not too strong a word. They didn’t just love him as a manager, they loved him as a person. To those players, his leaving was like losing a father. Carlo gave a speech in the changing room and he was emotional, but even more emotional were the players who had been with him for years. I’d only played under Carlo for six months at that time and he was talking in Italian and I could only understand part of it, but even I was moved.

  Players like Paolo Maldini, Gennaro Gattuso, Filippo Inzaghi and Alessandro Nesta were in tears because they knew that the club was going to change, all because this one man – this one man who has brought so much success to AC Milan – was leaving. As Ibra said later, at PSG, ‘Now he’s gone you’ll recognize how good he was.’ Unfortunately, that happens a lot. It’s often only when a great manager like him leaves a club that everyone realizes just how influential he was when he was there.

  5. The Workplace

  There is a great deal of mystique surrounding the inner sanctum of the dressing room, but it has the same dynamics as any workplace. An awareness of the sensitivities of specific environments is an essential part of any leader’s toolbox and acclimatizing quickly to these intense environments is something that I have had to do throughout my managerial career.

  On the first day at a club, the players and staff show me respect for what I have achieved, as a player and as a manager. After that, they are looking, watching you every day: What you are doing? How easy is your behaviour? Are you serious, are you professional? These are the questions going through the players’ minds, and it is like sitting an exam every day. If they don’t think you can add value to them, the players don’t care who you’ve played for, who you’ve managed. It works the other way too. If they think you can add value, they don’t care whether you’ve played or not.

  It’s all about what you can do for them, because talented people are very selfish. They want their talent to be nurtured. To the players, it’s all about helping them get better, and if I can’t then I’m no use to them.

  Dressing Room Leaders

  When I arrived at Chelsea I thought that settling into a new environment, away from the comfort of my home country, would be my biggest challenge. Admittedly, all the organization was in place to help me assimilate, but would the dressing room present a different challenge? Although there were many foreign players at the club, there was also a very strong English presence there who formed the core of the club and would need to be on board if I was to be a success. As it turned out, this actually made my job easier than it might have been. I found excellent English players there – John Terry, Frank Lampard, Ashley Cole. They were professional in training and on the pitch, with the right attitude and great intensity, and this all made for a pleasant surprise. When you add in players like Petr Cech, Didier Drogba and Michael Ballack, you have a central group of clear leaders – different styles of leadership, but all strong characters – and a great example for the others.

  I set about creating relationships with each of these players separately. I like to speak with players not only about tactics, but also about personal things, and to joke around. Everything should not always be so serious at work. The personal interest is important to me for its own sake, in that I am interested in and care about each individual player, and it also helps to build the relationship for when the hard decisions have to come later in the season. It’s important to do this early in a job. With some people it is easier to build this bond, while with others it can be more difficult. Drogba was not so easy at the beginning because he was a little wary and didn’t have a lot of confidence in me.

  It is always important to have great leaders in the team. They do not need to be like me; instead, they need to complement me and be respected by the rest of the team. Ideally, there should be more than one leader. At Chelsea, there were a rare number of leaders in the dressing room and at Madrid there were the likes of Ramos, Ronaldo and Pepe.

  Leaders can only lead if followers believe in them. It doesn’t matter why they believe in them. It could be their personality, like Ibrahimović or John Terry, or it could be their example, like with Franco Baresi, whom I played with at Milan, or Ronaldo. It can be both. This is how I like to think of the leaders, as either personality leaders or technical leaders. A personality leader uses his strength of character to lead. He is always a talker in the team, speaking to his teammates a lot, often shouting across the pitch, helping everyone out. He should be positive and fearless and he will always step forward when the occasion demands it.

  A technical leader will not speak as much, but lead by example. Such players are always very professional, someone for all the youngsters to aspire to be like. The technical leader is the player who has the most knowledge on the pitch. They train hard and play hard and behave correctly off the pitch too, in the spirit of the culture of the club. I’ve found it is effective to have a combination of these types of leader, while being aware that the qualities are not mutually exclusive – a player can be a strong personality and set a great example. There might also be what I call a political leader – a player who is seen as a leader by the press and the fans as a figurehead for the club, but these leaders are rarely viewed as such by their teammates.

  Sometimes players of Ronaldo’s stature are not interested in the rest of the team, just themselves, but this is not true of Cristiano. He is a technical leader – so serious, so professional in everything he does.

  At Milan I was lucky to have Paolo Maldini, a personality leader and a technical leader, an idol for the club, who, like Ramos at Madrid, was a strong character, never scared, never worried, always positive and talked to his teammates a lot. There was Andrea Pirlo, who was a bit of a loner, a little bit timid, but such an example in his play – a technical leader. Alessandro Nesta was also a good example – a different style to Maldini – and Gennaro Gattuso, another. Andriy Shevchenko was both a strong personality and strong technically, but he was very focused on his own game. He was a striker – what can you do? It was the same with Hernán Crespo, great for the team simply because he was so driven to score.

  Of course, where there are so many strong people there are always going to be clashes, and these must be dealt with quickly. One time at Chelsea there was a fight between Michael Ballack and Joe Cole after Ballack was really strong in the tackle with Cole during training. He made co
ntact and Joe reacted – they started to front up. In football sometimes you make contact, the other guy gets angry and reacts and the whole thing escalates over silly things. When there is a fight it is usually because one or both players are a little bit hot and overreact – it’s rarely a big deal.

  Before I intervene in such matters, I wait to see if they will work it out between themselves. If that doesn’t happen then I send them to the dressing room. Sometimes, if it’s really bad, I will follow them into the dressing room after a short while to make sure they haven’t taken things too far, but usually by the time I get there it is already solved and I walk away. If not, I will speak with them together and then individually, and maybe the day after, when the argument has been settled, I will reinforce this with the group: ‘Yesterday there was a fight. Let’s not let it happen again because we are teammates and we need to be together if we’re going to achieve anything.’ With Cole and Ballack, I spoke with them together, they shook hands and it was done.

  Maybe I have been lucky in that I have never had long-running feuds like the one I was told about between Andy Cole and Teddy Sheringham at Manchester United, but Sir Alex dealt with that in his way and the team’s success wasn’t affected. There are always going to be players in the dressing room who have closer relationships with some than others, but they all must understand that they cannot let bad relationships affect the game. That is in nobody’s interest. It applies to me, too. I don’t have the same personal relationship with all the players – with some I am more comfortable than others – but in the dressing room all are the same. They must know that I treat them all the same because I am a professional. Any hint of favouritism can be deadly.

  The Captaincy

  Sometimes too much is made of the captaincy in football, but it can be important. Some players want to be captain and grow even more if you give it to them. Others don’t want, or need, to be captain – they are natural leaders. When I offered Ibrahimović the captaincy at Paris Saint-Germain, he refused it, saying he was not sure how long he would stay at the club so to be captain would be wrong. But that didn’t stop him being a natural leader through his personality.

  In my own playing career, I was only ever captain for a short time, at Roma. It was a little bit strange because, to be honest, I didn’t want to be captain. Sven-Göran Eriksson was the manager and the captain was midfielder Agostino Di Bartolomei. When Di Bartolomei was sold to Milan, it was usually the way that the most senior player would become the captain. This was Bruno Conti, a World Cup winner. He also didn’t want the role, and there were still other players in front of me – I was only twenty-five, twenty-six years old – but Eriksson decided that I would be his captain. He asked the other senior players if it was a good idea to appoint me and everyone said, ‘OK.’

  I was a little bit surprised to get it, but it was an honour. As things turned out, it was to be for only one year. I went to Milan, where Franco Baresi was the captain. He wasn’t about to step aside for anyone, let alone a newcomer. Baresi was a technical leader. He didn’t speak a lot, but he was really serious – and very strong. His strength came from the example he set, with his values as a professional and his work ethic. Maldini learned a lot from Baresi.

  In my short time as captain I never encountered any real problems, but that is because the figure of the captain was not as important then as it is now – in those days it was more of an honour than a job. Now, the captain is more involved, speaking with the manager and referees and playing a more important role in the squad, as a reference for the players and the owners. Because squads are bigger now there is more responsibility on the captain to set an example to the players who are promoted from the academy.

  Sometimes, as a manager, when you arrive at a new club you find a captain already in place, like John Terry was at Chelsea, and that takes care of itself. Sometimes, however, like it was at Paris Saint-Germain, you have to change the captain. When I arrived in Paris the captain was Mamadou Sakho, who was only twenty-one years old. I kept him in place until I could get a more suitable player in, and when Thiago Silva arrived he was made captain. I took this decision not because Sakho was not good in the role – he had a lot of qualities – but because there was a lot of pressure on him. He was from Paris, bred from the academy and very young, so by taking the responsibility away from him I took away a little bit of pressure. Thiago didn’t speak a lot but, like Baresi, he was a role model for the other players.

  Although as manager I must have a particularly close relationship with the captain, it has to be a professional relationship, not a personal one. There has to be some distance between me and all the players, even the captain. I learned this from Maldini at Milan. He helped me a lot when we were teammates and I thought that it would be the same when I was the boss, but Maldini changed his behaviour more than me when I became his manager. I still looked at him as if he were my teammate, but he treated me as ‘the boss’. I could not have made that change so easily, but when Maldini made it clear that we must have a new, professional relationship I understood why. I was grateful to him.

  It is not always the captain who is the main leader. At Madrid, Ramos was not the team’s captain – that honour belonged to Casillas – but Ramos was the leader, especially because Casillas was not playing all the games. Casillas was the captain because he had been brought through the academy and had played a lot of matches for the club, but Ramos was the strongest leader.

  In Madrid it’s a strange setup. The club has one captain and three vice-captains, and it is this group who speak with the president as representatives of the players about such things as bonuses. In my time the captain was Casillas and the vice-captains were Ramos, Marcelo and Pepe. They were the senior players, the ones with the most time at the club. If you see the team pictures, you will see the president in the centre; above the president there is the manager; then, flanking the president you will see Casillas, Ramos, Pepe, Marcelo.

  So, at Madrid it was a fluid setup. You had the captain, but there were other leaders, Ramos chief among them, while at Chelsea the main leader, John Terry, was also the captain. The benefit of having a strong and secure captain is that other players have the opportunity to lead in their own way.

  Players like Terry, Maldini and Ramos show personality in every moment – when they speak before the game, when they speak with their teammates, when they speak on the pitch, in their attitude in training. The captain is important, but having leadership throughout the team is critical. If you can get the balance right and have both, then you have the best chance to win.

  Dressing Room Rules

  The dressing room today is the same dressing room as when I was playing, twenty, thirty years ago. The relationship between the players hasn’t changed. What has changed is what goes on outside the dressing room. Players now have to deal with commercial pressures from sponsors, agents and a range of other external sources. These pressures also come from within the club, but outside the dressing room. Inside, it is the same as it has always been.

  Of course, in the top division you have the cream of the talent – the superstars. As I have said throughout this book, it’s very important to communicate with this talent, to have a professional relationship – and for them to have this relationship with their teammates. The superstar player must know that, while his salary might be many times that of other players in his own team, he cannot expect privileges. He is subject to the same rules as everyone – it really is a team game. This is and always has been a law of the dressing room.

  Players have to understand that we need flexibility and equality for the good of the group, and it is my job to convince them to abide by this principle. The problem is that players often feel that they know what is best for them – or they believe their agent when he tells them how special they are.

  These laws of the dressing room are encoded in the same way as any workplace – people know what is acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. It all harks back to culture. The difference be
tween culture and climate is that we want the former to be permanent but we know that the latter can be changeable. It is the same with implicit and explicit rules of the workplace. Explicit rules are changeable, but implicit rules represent the underlying, accepted culture.

  Implicit rules are difficult to manage because they go to the heart of what you always hope to be the unspoken code of the players and the club. I only have one implicit rule and that is to be professional, but I cannot always control this because I can only control what happens on the pitch and at the training ground. I can control the professionalism of the players when I am with them, but I cannot hope to control them when they are at home or away from the club. It is for this reason that the communication within the relationship is so important. You have to communicate what is expected of the players at all times, even when they’re away from the team, not only with words but also by showing them. I can tell the players that they have to be professional – eat properly, sleep properly – but I cannot force them. I can’t monitor them every day, so I have to convince them through influencing and through trusting them. I do this by referencing those players who are the best professionals.

  At Real Madrid, there was a problem in training one day when one of the players suddenly left the pitch and returned to the dressing room without my permission. I went to see him afterwards. I said to him, ‘You have to train. You don’t want to be known for this kind of reaction.’ He complained that another player wasn’t working hard enough in the session, that he was cheating his teammates.

  I said, ‘But today there were sixteen players out there and you focused on one player that didn’t train properly. The other fourteen players trained well. Why do you have to speak to me about the player who doesn’t run, doesn’t work – why do you pick that one player? Why don’t you watch the players who are world-class professionals on the pitch? Don’t be focused on the one player who has bad behaviour today, because this is just an excuse for you. You think that because there is one player who doesn’t work properly, you can do the same. This is not what great players do.