Carlo Ancelotti: Secrets of Champions League’s mastermind coach (2024)

It is waiting for Carlo Ancelotti that makes you aware of his superpower. It’s not just the fine football mind, the subtle yet obvious gift for man-management. It’s his everyman quality. There’s Carlo, you think, as in the distance a well-groomed grey-haired gentleman emerges from a chauffeured car. But no. Oh, sorry, here he is, as an effortlessly cool guy of a certain age makes his unhurried way through the lobby. Wrong again.

Yet when it really is Carlo, you know, because three staff try to get the door at once, the restaurant manager is greeting him like an old friend, and word goes around the Rosewood Villa Magna that Don Carlo, the brilliant, popular, yet unaffected coach of Real Madrid, has entered the building. Don Carlo — he appreciates that name, the love and respect it delivers. “They think I am a sort of kind grandpa,” he muses. “Don Carlo, they call me — or Maestro.” He considers it a short while. “I’ve got to say, I really, really like that.”

They like him, too. On Saturday, Don Carlo — sorry, Ancelotti, but he does naturally inspire warmth — will take charge of a record sixth Champions League final, when Real Madrid face Borussia Dortmund at Wembley. His four wins as a coach in the competition are a record too, already one clear of Bob Paisley, Pep Guardiola and Zinédine Zidane. Ancelotti has won at least one Champions League trophy in each of the past three decades, to go with the two he earned as a player. And yet, unlike the majority of his contemporaries, you won’t find treatises and dissertations dedicated to his management style.

There is no Ancelotti way, no single Ancelotti blueprint. He is an old-school coach, Italian at root, who works with, and adapts to, what he has got; much as Claudio Ranieri did at Leicester City. Old school yet modern, otherwise — as he points out — he couldn’t survive in 2024. Ancelotti may ditch a goalkeeper because he doesn’t think he is good enough, but he won’t ditch him for not conforming to his one, entrenched, style of play. Ancelotti bends. His Real Madrid side do not play like his Chelsea side, who did not play like his AC Milan side. He coaches for the club, not for himself. It’s unique at the elite level of the modern game.

It was Ancelotti who suggested we meet for dinner at one of his favourite restaurants in Madrid. He likes his food, his wine. He grew up in a farming community, near Reggiolo in Emilia-Romagna, a time he remembers fondly despite the family’s poverty. “We were eating only what the land was able to do,” he says. “Cheese, a lot of pork meat, salami, prosciutto — every day. When I grew up and I heard that pork meat was not good for you I thought, ‘Oh, that’s not possible!’ ” He eats one meal a day now, because he put on weight and it was bad for his knees; but it’s a very good meal, with excellent red wine, and tonight’s feast is the perfect backdrop to the espousal of a football philosophy that is based on accommodation and acceptance, not dogma.

“When I started, I wasn’t like this,” he recalls. “I had one system that I learnt at AC Milan from Arrigo Sacchi. It was 4-4-2. And for this I refused to have Roberto Baggio at Parma because he wanted to play No10. I said, ‘No, I don’t play No10.’ He was one of the best players in the world at the time and I refused to have him because I just wanted to play with two strikers. Today, I would say, ‘Baggio, come to Parma, and we’ll arrange the situation.’ Instead I told him, ‘Listen, Roberto, there is no space for you’ — and he went to Bologna instead. It was a mistake and I tried to change my idea when I went to Juventus. I had Zidane, and he was No10. Should I put him right, or left? Impossible. Zidane is the most important player in my team and he has to be No10 and I have to adapt. From there I always took into account the characteristics of the players to build the system.”

It has fed the myth that nothing really alters with Ancelotti in charge. Yet Jude Bellingham’s role at Real Madrid has evolved across three stages in one season and he was still the club’s joint-top goalscorer despite having to take on more defensive responsibilities after a heavy defeat by Atletico Madrid. Ancelotti is smart. Evolution, not revolution, a tweak not a wild swirl of the wheel.

Chelsea had a famously difficult dressing room that could eat up a coach with a heightened ego or poor handling skills. Ancelotti did the double in his first season, and his dismissal after the second year remained Roman Abramovich’s biggest regret. His successor, André Villas-Boas, took on the senior professionals, lost and was gone by the first week in March. Knowing when to compromise is key. “There was a time at Juventus when Zidane was late, and we were on the bus waiting to go,” Ancelotti explained. “I said to the driver, ‘No more, let’s leave,’ but he was scared and wouldn’t move, and then [Juventus defender] Paolo Montero came down the bus to speak to me. I said to him, ‘Let’s get going, and then we’ll talk.’ But he said, ‘You don’t understand. Without Zizou, we’re going nowhere.’ So that’s when you think, ‘OK, I need to listen to this.’ So we waited.”

This is the Ancelotti we recognise on the touchline. Present but placid. In the opposition technical area a coach may be bent double, or screaming, contorted like Basil Fawlty. Ancelotti is calm. Occasionally, if the ball comes near, he reminds us that the great ones never lose it with a killer touch but, this aside, movement is restricted to one rogue eyebrow — which sits, quite naturally, slightly higher than the other — and an occasional understated gesture. “Do you think they listen more if you shout?” he asks. “No. The more you shout, the less they listen.”

At times, Ancelotti will glance along the line at the madness. “The key point is I have a lot of passion, but I’m not obsessed,” he says. “I’m not obsessed with my job. I never was, not about football. I really liked it, as a player, as a manager, but I don’t become crazy. I’m calm. It’s strange because before the game I am usually really nervous. The two or three hours before, I really don’t feel good. I have fast heart and I start to think bad thoughts, ‘They are going to score, what are we going to do?’ And when I am alone in the build-up, I try to sleep, but am not able to sleep.

“Then immediately when the referee blows his whistle — calm. Ah, we start the game, finally. Then I have no fear. The fear is before and when it starts — optimistic. It will go well. Quite strange. And my heartbeat goes from 120 to 90. Whether the game goes well or whether it goes badly, I am in control of myself. At the press conference, under control. And that is because I am not obsessed.”

He puts it down to nurture as much as nature. He is his father’s son. Giuseppe Ancelotti passed away while Carlo was the manager at Chelsea, but the pair spoke daily in a rural dialect that was so thick that urban Italians find it hard to understand. His father worked hard but in all other aspects of his life was imperturbable, tranquilo. “This is my character,” Ancelotti explains. “My father was like this. Very calm, very quiet, never worried, never complaining. The family where I grew helped me to have this, to control my emotions.

“My father was a farmer. It was him, my mother, my grandfather, my grandmother and my sister. We were six and [had] no money, at all. Money, for me, is not important because we grew up without it. I never heard my father talk about it, never to my mother. And I never heard my father or my mother disrespect my grandfather or my grandmother. It was a really good atmosphere in the family, but also a lot of problems because we didn’t have money.”

I remind him of a conversation when we first met, at Chelsea’s training ground. The back-breaking work shared by the family, and then the landowner — putting his stick in the harvested grain to indicate his half-share. Ancelotti said that as a child it made him feel resentful. “But he gave the land to my father, so my father never complained about this,” he continues. “He would say the owner gave him the opportunity to work. To me, at seven years old, that was not fair. My father did all the work, and then the owner takes half. But I saw he was happy, and really respectful to the owner. This was a really happy period in my life, too, until I left for Roma at 15. I don’t go to my little village very often now, but when I do I feel something special. And it’s hard, a real bad place. In winter, cold, fog, in summer, hot, humidity, and mosquitoes.” He makes a ferocious buzzing sound. “So it’s really bad, but for me — the best. I still have friends there.”

He has friends everywhere, it would seem. Sacchi still calls if he thinks Madrid’s midfield isn’t compact enough, former players he never even coached, such as Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, stay in touch. And certainly in Madrid, he is revered. His calmness coincides with a period of unlikely stability, despite the attempted Super League coup. Real have had two managers since March 2019, the same period in which Chelsea have had seven plus the present vacancy. I say his peacefulness has rubbed off on what was once the most volatile of environments. “And the president [Florentino Pérez] is 77,” he says. “He does not want it always changing. This is a well-run club. They got Bellingham, they got Vinícius Jr, Rodrygo, Federico Valverde, all at a young age. Now it is Endrick. They do these things very well.”

Ancelotti, for his part, then works with what is provided, like his father. If that is Kylian Mbappé this summer he will adapt again. If it is not, he will find another way. Madrid have been on a promise with Mbappé almost from the day Ancelotti arrived.

“To have only one identity of your team is a limit,” he adds. “We played a game in the Champions League against Shakhtar Donetsk. Very good team, Roberto De Zerbi was their coach. What he was doing with full backs, and different positions, really good. But I said to my players, they want you to press. Don’t press. If you press they will pass the ball around you. Don’t press, and they will give the ball to you. We didn’t press — and we won 5-0.”

He’s right, of course. Speaking with Nathan Aké of Manchester City recently, he told a story from his debut against Leicester City. Aké said he felt very comfortable on the ball, passing it right, passing it left, always with options — a 100 per cent completion rate, he felt. The next day Pep Guardiola called him in, started showing him his passes, asked him what he thought he was doing. Aké recalled: “He said, ‘My grandfather can do this too, you know, yes? Play to the left, play to the right. You’re not doing anything. You’re not going anywhere. You have to go to them, commit to them, wait until you are maybe one metre from them and then they will step out and there is space behind and we can make a triangle and go from there. So keep going forward. If you play like you are playing they will stand still.’ ” Ancelotti smiles. “But what if you don’t press?” he asks again. “Then they are not so sure, that’s when they give you the ball.”

“You see, there is no style for me,” Ancelotti insists. “No Ancelotti style. My style is not recognised, because I change. The style takes into consideration the preparation of the players. Against Manchester City [in the Champions League quarter-final] we played low block, strong defence. We have played that way this season one or two times, no more. We don’t play like that, we are more attacking. But I saw that as the way to compete and to win that game. This season, we lost Karim Benzema, but Bellingham arrived. We had two fantastic strikers, Vinícius and Rodrygo, but they play wide. So we start to play Vinícius and Rodyrgo with Bellingham behind, No10 — 4-3-1-2.

“We did really well at the beginning, Bellingham scored a lot of goals, but then in one match with Atletico Madrid they scored three goals from crosses because the right side was not covered. So we changed and put Bellingham to help defensively inside. We adapt without making the players uncomfortable. Vinícius does not want to play inside, so I won’t force him to play inside. He doesn’t show his best quality there, so I have to give him freedom. I spend a lot of time defensively, working with my team, working together. Offensively I give some information, but not too much. What can I tell them? Vinícius was always fantastic one-against-one but I have helped him to be more effective inside the pitch, not just wide. He is fast, he is really talented, but he has to beat two people from wide to have a shot. That movement in the middle of the pitch, with one touch he can score a goal.”

This will be Real Madrid’s 15th Champions League/European Cup triumph if they pull it off, more than double the second-most-successful club, AC Milan, though Ancelotti played a part in four of their seven wins as well — two as a player, two as manager. He believes embracing such glorious history is a vital part of Madrid’s success. “They never forget,” he says. “Wherever you go at the club, it’s [Alfredo] Di Stéfano, Di Stéfano. Come to the training ground, Di Stéfano there, Di Stéfano there.

“They say at the Bernabéu there is a God and he wears a white shirt, and who knows maybe that is true, but I think that this God punishes mistakes. If you make a mistake, the God in white punishes you.” Maybe he was watching when Thomas Tuchel took off Harry Kane in the semi-final against Bayern Munich, with the tie not yet won. Manuel Neuer spilt a shot, and it will be the team in white, once again, in the Champions League final.

Ominously, they haven’t lost one since 1981, and this will be their ninth visit from that date. “But Borussia Dortmund are a good team,” Ancelotti adds. “They work very hard. It will not be easy. But my players work hard, too. And humble. To be humble is the key point of this squad. We won the league this season because there is no ego here. Vinícius, no ego. Bellingham, no ego. Rodrygo, no ego. And the senior players are like that. Toni Kroos, Dani Carvajal, Nacho, Luka Modric. I don’t know what happens in the future but there is no jealousy between the young ones now. Humility is important. You must have that.”

And he would know. We finish the wine, we leave the restaurant, in the lobby a young couple ask for a selfie. The request begins, “Don Carlo…” He stops. He smiles. He told me earlier that when he retires he would like to stay in Madrid. It feels like his home now. And he is at home there, too. The farmer’s son in this biggest of football cities, who changes with the seasons, yet has never truly compromised an inch. Always himself. Don Carlo, El Maestro, what a guy.

Borussia Dortmund v Real Madrid

Champions League final
Saturday, 8pm
Wembley
TV TNT Sports 1
Radio talkSPORT/BBC 5 Live