CARLO ANCELOTTI IS a unique figure in the world of football management.

In what is a notoriously pressurised environment, even the best coaches tend to fall out with players, officials and supporters on occasion.

Yet in this tense atmosphere, in over 20 years of management, Ancelotti has managed to remain as loved as he is admired by virtually everyone in the game.

Ancelotti’s new book, Quiet Leadership, ghostwritten by Chris Brady and Mike Forde, highlights the 57-year-old coach’s unique style of management, drawing parallels with the business world and suggesting CEOs could benefit from adopting elements of the Italian’s approach to football coaching.

The book also contains interviews with a number of high-profile figures who have worked with Ancelotti, including David Beckham, Cristiano Ronaldo and Zlatan Ibrahimovic, all of whom unsurprisingly reserve glowing praise for the distinguished coach, who is the only manager to have won the Champions League three times.

The42 recently spoke to the book’s co-author, Professor Chris Brady, about working on the project.

Brady was well positioned to contribute to the book — in addition to being a former semi-professional footballer, he is also an independent commissioner on the Football Association’s Football Regulatory Authority as well as being one of Britain’s leading business school professors and the author of several books, including Rules of the Game, End of the Road, and the best-selling The 90 Minute Manager.

How did you come to write the book in the first place?

We knew each other from various events that we attended together and so on as colleagues and friends. We had a conversation about leadership in a general sense. Carlo didn’t always understand that he had a slightly different style. He’s a very humble guy and actually didn’t understand that he was one of the most impressive guys around.

He didn’t really understand how significant he was and how he was on the same level as Mourinho, Ferguson, Guardiola and all them in terms of stuff he won. He sort of knew that, but he didn’t think it was very significant..

I said ‘all these people have written leadership books and I’d say your style is very different’. It would be great if you could tell your story of how it works. We then spent about a year working out how we would do it, while trying to be slightly different from Fergie’s book or from the biographies.

It then took a while to convince publishers, as we didn’t want to do just a biography, which all the publishers said ‘oh yeah, we’ll pay for a biography’. Carlo didn’t really want to do that — he’d already done one and he wanted to do something different. He wanted to talk about leadership in more general terms. We were complimentary to each other — I have a lot of experience from leadership in business areas, but because I’d been a semi-professional footballer myself and was an A-licence coach, I suppose he could talk to me about football as well.

It was just a general friendship. We sat down for about two weeks together all day every day going through the different areas of reading the book — that got done relatively quickly. I convinced him that I needed to talk to people who’ve played for you and played for Mourinho and played for Guardiola and played for Ferguson. People like Ronaldo and Ibrahimovic and Beckham and all these people.

If I can talk to them, they can tell me what’s different about you because to be honest Carlo, you’re fucking useless at telling me. There’s a bit in the book where Ibrahimovic says he kicked something at him and split his eyebrow during a row in the dressing room. I go to Carlo and say ‘Ibrahimovic has told me that you split his eyebrow’ and Carlo goes: ‘Oh yeah, that’s true.’ I said: ‘Why didn’t you tell me, I need something for this bloody book.’

So it was really good to be able to go to the players — they’d tell me stories about Carlo, I’d then go back to Carlo, after all this work, and then he’d tell me the story himself. If I had not gone to the players, we wouldn’t have had a book. He’s so humble, he doesn’t understand anything’s really important.

It’s a measure of his popularity that all these star footballers were willing to contribute to the book.

David Beckham is among the high-profile figures to contribute to the book. John Locher John Locher

I said to Beckham, I assume if I’d asked for the interview, I’d have had zero chance and he went ‘yep, that’s right — actually probably less than that’.

I said I’d like to speak to these people and Carlo literally picked up the phone while I was in the room and rang Ronaldo and Ibrahimovic. He said: ‘Do you mind if this guy comes and talks to you.’ Not one of them said ‘no’.

Probably the most significant part of the whole book is that those people were willing to speak to a nobody like me at the drop of a hat.

Do you think he has traits in common with successful CEOs and that, if things had worked out differently, he could have led a business?

Even the notoriously difficult Jose Mourinho has a good relationship with Ancelotti. Steve Paston Steve Paston

I think if you look at the big four, Fergie, Mourinho, Guardiola and Ancelotti and if you want you can throw Wenger in there, they’ve all got different styles. In most of the books I’ve written about CEOs, they’re not all the same, they’ve all got different styles. He wouldn’t be the same style as a Philip Green, thank god. But the thing that really differentiates Carlo is how much he genuinely cares about everybody that plays for him.

He just looks after them, he really does. That was the theme that comes through from all of the interviews. The words ‘he looks after us’ or ‘he cares about us’ come up quite a lot. That sort of approach is probably quite a modern managerial approach in business. You have to look after talent, because otherwise they’re just going to walk off and go somewhere else. You can’t be the same dictatorial leader that you used to be able to be.

He’s probably more used to modern management now than he was 20 years ago, when CEOs were a bit more fruity, shall we say.

In working with him, was there anything that reversed your perception of him in any way?

Ancelotti and Ferguson are good friends. AP / Press Association Images AP / Press Association Images / Press Association Images

I was very surprised at how genuinely humble he was and how he listened to anybody’s advice. He’s a fantastic football manager and I’ve played with non-league players miles down the list, but when we talked about football, he would genuinely take an interest in what I was saying, and if someone else came along, some young dude asked for an autograph and started talking about football, he’d genuinely show an interest.

It wasn’t made up. He genuinely wanted to hear what anyone had to say. He was very learning intensive. He was always interested in other stuff. He’s invested a lot in the medical staff in America with heart specialists, mostly because he’s really interested in it. I think if he wasn’t a football manager, he’d have really loved to have been a doctor.

Most managers have enemies or at least people they don’t get on with, but Ancelotti seems like an anomaly in this regard. Is there anyone who doesn’t like him or vice-versa?

I had a good look but I just can’t find anybody who doesn’t like him. Him and Mourinho had a bit of a spat. I wouldn’t say they’re mates now, but they’re close enough. He’s very close with Ferguson, I don’t think he knows Guardiola that much, because they sort of missed each other. When he goes to Real Madrid, Guardiola had already gone to Bayern. But I’d imagine he might have been talking to Guardiola about Bayern.

I’d love to be able to say there’s this bloke over there that he really hates, but I couldn’t find anyone.

One person who he was slightly critical of in the book was Roman Abramovich, though he still manages to handle that situation quite well despite Abramovich seeming quite harsh and disrespectful towards him.

Ancelotti had an at times difficult relationship with Chelsea's owner Roman Abramovich. PA Archive / Press Association Images PA Archive / Press Association Images / Press Association Images

He’s very conscious of the rank structure and where he fits in the rank structure — I don’t know if that’s an Italian thing. If the boss, like Berlusconi, wants to come in the dressing room, it’s his dressing room, he owns it, he can do what he likes. He thinks: ‘My role is to take care of the team and to manage up to the boss.’ One of the things that Nesta said is how good he was at being the buffer between the boss and so-and-so.

So when Abramovich does x,y and z, Carlo sees it as a learning thing. He thinks: ‘He’s this type of owner, okay, that’s another thing I have to learn.’ The thing about Abramovich is, having spent eight years in Milan with Berlusconi, although Berlusconi was a bit wayward, he was always there, he was always supportive.

Abramovich would come in and go ‘I’m not happy with this’ the next day (after a defeat). Ancelotti didn’t find it bad, he just found it interesting. He didn’t say ‘this arsehole did so and so’. I said: ‘When Abramovich came in that must have pissed you off.’ He said: ‘No, it was interesting.’ I’d never learnt about that owner before, so I had to learn a new technique of managing.

So he was all about learning. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t happy with (Abramovich) and he wasn’t happy with the way they got rid of him, but he just sort of takes it all.

We did a panel with him during the launch and he calls it ‘the sack club’. He says every manager’s in ‘the sack club’ except for Guardiola, who hasn’t been sacked yet, but he’s young.

He just accepts it. He couldn’t have liked Abramovich, but it’s more to do with learning about this stuff. He loves The Godfather — and he got a lot of stick in Italy for saying it after we published the book — because this is not personal, it’s business. I’m in this business, this bloke’s the owner, and he doesn’t want me anymore. You and I might be devastated by getting the sack, but for him, it’s part of the business, it’s how it goes.

Does he have any regrets or weaknesses as a manager — perhaps players sometimes take advantage of his kindness?

Paris Saint Germain's then-coach Carlo Ancelotti, centre, celebrates their 2013 title with staff members after winning their French League One soccer match against Lyon AP / Press Association Images AP / Press Association Images / Press Association Images

I think he really wanted to stay at Paris St Germain to do a long project and build the club. It was a mess when he got there, and he built it up, but then suddenly he had to leave. I think that’s a genuine regret.

He would consider his own biggest fault, he would use the term ‘sometimes I’m lazy’. What he means is sometimes he’s too patient, he doesn’t make the decision early enough. That’s his description of his own fault. As he says in the book, the owners who sack him for being too nice with the players were the ones who hired him for being nice with the players. It’s like everything else, it’s yin and yang. What they consider your asset, when they want to sack you, it’s your liability. He is what he is.

He never regrets decisions, but he talks about regretting the consequences of the decisions. ‘I’ve made the decision with all the information in front of me as well as I could and at that time, I believed in the decision.’ It’s like ‘I’ve learned now from that, but if you take me back to that moment, I would have made that same decision.’

So he has a sort of zen approach to decision-making as well. You and I might keep going over a decision and say: ‘Why did I do that?’ He says: ‘I understand the consequences didn’t work out the way I wanted them to work out, but that doesn’t mean the decision is wrong.’

I’ve been a coach half my life. Certain things happened when I was with him in training where I would probably have ended up in a fight with one of my players, whereas he calmed everything down and was relaxed, and it’s a much better decision, which is why he gets paid £12million a year and I get paid £12.50 (for coaching).

One of the players who’s particularly effusive in his praise of Ancelotti is Zlatan Ibrahimovic. He actually says ‘he’s the best coach I’ve worked with,’ whereas normally players tend to be quite diplomatic when asked those sort of questions.

Zlatan Ibrahimovic had an excellent relationship with Ancelotti during their time together at PSG. AP / Press Association Images AP / Press Association Images / Press Association Images

What Zlatan said was interesting, he said: ‘I’ve had coaches who are slightly better at certain things, but he’s the best coach, because he’s the best at football and he’s the best man.’ Zlatan, as he says in his book, hates Guardiola, because he thinks he’s a coward. He thinks he doesn’t have any balls.

Ibrahimovic got in a row about why he got subbed in a game. Guardiola sent a lieutenant to tell him about it, he wouldn’t front up. Zlatan said to me: ‘Is this a man?’ And in his book, he calls him a spineless coward. But Carlo would explain why players were dropped, and was very open, and Zlatan really likes that sort of thing. He likes people being men.

He was the best person to interview, Zlatan. One question and an hour and 45 minutes later, he stopped talking. He was really good fun. My wife takes a lot of pictures of interviews and if you look at pictures of Zlatan, pretty much everyone is pissing themselves laughing. He just enjoys life.

Carlo was strong enough and also flexible enough to manage somebody with that level of ego. They love each other, and my missus thought Ibrahimovic was the best thing since sliced bread. He just said it as it was, and it was nice to be able to put it in the book as well.

Typical Carlo as well, I showed him all the interviews (with the footballers) and he just wrote back saying he’s really embarrassed, which is typical of the man.

Would it be fair to say Ancelotti has superior emotional intelligence to most top coaches? The likes of Mourinho and Guardiola come across as quite cerebral and really good tacticians, but Ancelotti has that warmth that the others arguably lack to a degree.

Pep Guardiola's style of management is considerably different to Ancelotti's. Anthony Devlin Anthony Devlin

That’s fair. I think that’s pretty well articulated, I think that would be the difference. Ibrahimovic would be very complimentary about Guardiola’s tactical nous and football, but he just didn’t like him.

Ronaldo mentioned that he sometimes didn’t think Carlo’s tactics sometimes were great, but his man management was the best.

One particularly interesting part of the book is when Beckham describes when Ancelotti is leaving Milan, and you have figures people think of as football ‘hard men,’ such as Gattuso and Nesta, in tears. Is there a legitimate comparison to be made between Ancelotti leaving Milan and Ferguson leaving Man United, given that both these big clubs have struggled to recapture their best form since their managers’ respective departures?

Gennaro Gattuso shed tears amid Ancelotti's AC Milan exit. AP / Press Association Images AP / Press Association Images / Press Association Images

We talk about emotional intelligence in books, but that sort of emotional connection is clearly there. Ronaldo played through the Champions League final injured. He said he wouldn’t have done it for anybody else. And of course, he did it again for Zidane, but when I interviewed Ronaldo, he said Zidane’s very much like Carlo — he learned from him being his assistant.

Zidane has the same sort of emotional connection with the players, which is why Ronaldo has blossomed again. (Ronaldo had a) high performance under Mourinho, a high performance under Ancelotti, he was down under Benitez, and up again with Zidane. He needs someone who’s going to massage his ego and take care of him.

Quiet Leadership: Winning Hearts, Minds and Matches by Carlo Ancelotti is published by Portfolio. More info here.

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