Why football's top managers should follow Ancelotti's 5-step plan
Pep Guardiola (young cleric suffering a crisis of faith), Jose Mourinho (embittered Vietnam veteran), Jurgen Klopp (deranged trawlerman shouting at the sea).
THIS WEEK WAS another gruesome one when it comes to the mental torture of football managers.
The pain endured by Arsene Wenger and Unai Emery as their teams endured appalling Champions League exits made one wonder about the psychological carnage of these nights.
Unsurprisingly, the cameras didn’t cut to Carlo Ancelotti too often as his Bayern Munich team destroyed Arsenal, given that he reacts to all results, good and bad, in the exact same manner: with the arching of the world’s first sentient eyebrow.
His famously philosophical approach has long seen Ancelotti regarded as the most well-adjusted of all high profile football managers, but that wouldn’t be hard.
The rest of them seem to suffer so visibly when things go wrong, whether it’s Pep Guardiola (young cleric suffering a crisis of faith), Jose Mourinho (embittered Vietnam veteran), or Jurgen Klopp (deranged trawlerman shouting at the sea). Even Antonio Conte, ten points clear at the top of the Premier League, is never far from the volcanic outburst of a man who’s just seen some youths stealing his hubcaps.
It’s time for Ancelotti to give his fellow managers some guidance. Having released two autobiographies in recent years, the 57-year-old Italian is no stranger to the publishing world, so he’ll know that so-called ‘life-coaching’ is where it’s at now.
So if you’re a big-time football manager who’s stressed out, gripped by paranoia and a sense of your own impending doom, here’s the Carlo Ancelotti Five-Step Plan for Managerial Happiness.
Nick Potts
Nick Potts
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1. Location, Location, Location,
The first secret of the Ancelotti Plan is to manage incredibly rich and already quite successful football clubs. This does tend to relieve the pressure a little.
After serving his apprenticeship at Reggiana, Ancelotti has managed Parma (when they were really good), Juventus, AC Milan, Chelsea, Paris Saint-Germain, Real Madrid and Bayern Munich. Not too many fixer-uppers in there.
Of course Carlo’s tactical nous and man-management helped to get the most out of some great players, but by his own admission his skill was often in just getting out of their way. Only at newly-minted PSG did he have to build something, and even then the club’s owners simply handed him Zlatan Ibrahimovic to play with.
2. Dont be an arsehole
Unlike many managers who have the personal qualities of Sauron, tales abound of Ancelotti’s soundness, and he is much-loved by former players in particular. This is mainly because he cuts them a lot of slack and likes to get involved in dressing room japes (Paolo Maldini once described him as “an unparalleled comedian,” putting the Richard Pryors and Lenny Bruces of this world in their place).
“I say Carlo is the best and I have worked with the best,” said Ibrahimovic of Ancelotti. “Jose Mourinho knows how to treat a footballer, but Carlo knows how to treat a person” — which, in Zlatan’s case, was as a minor deity.
Michel Euler
Michel Euler
3. Don’t have a philosophy
There’s a special kind of rage that afflicts managers like Guardiola and Klopp when things go wrong. That’s because they have ‘philosophies’, which they feel are like the assembly instructions on flatpack furniture. They’ve followed them exactly and yet the drawer doesn’t open and there’s a spare Pablo Zabaleta lying on the floor.
Ancelotti used to have a philosophy too. He turned down the chance to sign Roberto Baggio for Parma because he wouldn’t fit his plan, but when Baggio scored 22 goals for Bologna the following season, Ancelotti quickly realised how stupid he’d been. Since then his only philosophy has been to get the best players into the team, or more precisely, whoever the owner or president thinks are the best players — which leads us to….
4. Accept the existence of a higher power
Ancelotti gave a colourful description of his attitude to working for some of football’s most demanding owners in his 2010 autobiography.
“There are times when I stand up in front of a full-length mirror and act like a contortionist,” he wrote. “I twist my neck and I stare at my ass. My fat butt cheeks aren’t a particularly edifying spectacle but… over time it’s taught me a lesson: my ass is earthquake-proof.”
Point being: he’s worked for Silvio Berlusconi, Roman Abramovich and Florentino Perez, among others; been sacked by most of them and still came up smiling. This season he negotiated a sticky patch in his early tenure at Bayern by keeping onside with their council of elders.
“For the first time, I have a working relationship with presidents who really know their stuff,” he said brown-nosingly of Uli Hoeness and Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, the Bayern legends who run the club. He also said that he and Bayern went together like “schnitzel and potatoes,” but just like the humble spud, Ancelotti is nothing if not versatile.
DPA / PA Images
DPA / PA Images / PA Images
5. Eat yourself fat
Finally, like all life-coaching gurus, Ancelotti has diet tips for you.
“Only once in my life have I felt like I needed a psychiatrist,” he wrote in 2010. “I was looking at Yuri Zhirkov and all I could see was a rib-eye steak.”
He really said this. The original Italian version of that autobiography is called Preferisco La Coppa, a pun on trophies and the name of his favourite Italian cured meat.
Elsewhere he dubs himself “the fat boy with a bowlful of Emilian tortellini.”
Yes, he loves his grub, which, unlike many of his peers, means he has something else to obsess about other than winning football matches. Losing a 3-0 lead in a Champions League final is a pisser, but nothing a plate of osso bucco and a nice bottle of barolo wouldn’t sort out.
So managers, try the Ancelotti plan: you’ll still get sacked, but at least you’ll be happier, and definitely better fed.
Why football's top managers should follow Ancelotti's 5-step plan
THIS WEEK WAS another gruesome one when it comes to the mental torture of football managers.
The pain endured by Arsene Wenger and Unai Emery as their teams endured appalling Champions League exits made one wonder about the psychological carnage of these nights.
Unsurprisingly, the cameras didn’t cut to Carlo Ancelotti too often as his Bayern Munich team destroyed Arsenal, given that he reacts to all results, good and bad, in the exact same manner: with the arching of the world’s first sentient eyebrow.
His famously philosophical approach has long seen Ancelotti regarded as the most well-adjusted of all high profile football managers, but that wouldn’t be hard.
The rest of them seem to suffer so visibly when things go wrong, whether it’s Pep Guardiola (young cleric suffering a crisis of faith), Jose Mourinho (embittered Vietnam veteran), or Jurgen Klopp (deranged trawlerman shouting at the sea). Even Antonio Conte, ten points clear at the top of the Premier League, is never far from the volcanic outburst of a man who’s just seen some youths stealing his hubcaps.
It’s time for Ancelotti to give his fellow managers some guidance. Having released two autobiographies in recent years, the 57-year-old Italian is no stranger to the publishing world, so he’ll know that so-called ‘life-coaching’ is where it’s at now.
So if you’re a big-time football manager who’s stressed out, gripped by paranoia and a sense of your own impending doom, here’s the Carlo Ancelotti Five-Step Plan for Managerial Happiness.
1. Location, Location, Location,
The first secret of the Ancelotti Plan is to manage incredibly rich and already quite successful football clubs. This does tend to relieve the pressure a little.
After serving his apprenticeship at Reggiana, Ancelotti has managed Parma (when they were really good), Juventus, AC Milan, Chelsea, Paris Saint-Germain, Real Madrid and Bayern Munich. Not too many fixer-uppers in there.
Of course Carlo’s tactical nous and man-management helped to get the most out of some great players, but by his own admission his skill was often in just getting out of their way. Only at newly-minted PSG did he have to build something, and even then the club’s owners simply handed him Zlatan Ibrahimovic to play with.
2. Dont be an arsehole
Unlike many managers who have the personal qualities of Sauron, tales abound of Ancelotti’s soundness, and he is much-loved by former players in particular. This is mainly because he cuts them a lot of slack and likes to get involved in dressing room japes (Paolo Maldini once described him as “an unparalleled comedian,” putting the Richard Pryors and Lenny Bruces of this world in their place).
“I say Carlo is the best and I have worked with the best,” said Ibrahimovic of Ancelotti. “Jose Mourinho knows how to treat a footballer, but Carlo knows how to treat a person” — which, in Zlatan’s case, was as a minor deity.
3. Don’t have a philosophy
There’s a special kind of rage that afflicts managers like Guardiola and Klopp when things go wrong. That’s because they have ‘philosophies’, which they feel are like the assembly instructions on flatpack furniture. They’ve followed them exactly and yet the drawer doesn’t open and there’s a spare Pablo Zabaleta lying on the floor.
Ancelotti used to have a philosophy too. He turned down the chance to sign Roberto Baggio for Parma because he wouldn’t fit his plan, but when Baggio scored 22 goals for Bologna the following season, Ancelotti quickly realised how stupid he’d been. Since then his only philosophy has been to get the best players into the team, or more precisely, whoever the owner or president thinks are the best players — which leads us to….
4. Accept the existence of a higher power
Ancelotti gave a colourful description of his attitude to working for some of football’s most demanding owners in his 2010 autobiography.
“There are times when I stand up in front of a full-length mirror and act like a contortionist,” he wrote. “I twist my neck and I stare at my ass. My fat butt cheeks aren’t a particularly edifying spectacle but… over time it’s taught me a lesson: my ass is earthquake-proof.”
Point being: he’s worked for Silvio Berlusconi, Roman Abramovich and Florentino Perez, among others; been sacked by most of them and still came up smiling. This season he negotiated a sticky patch in his early tenure at Bayern by keeping onside with their council of elders.
“For the first time, I have a working relationship with presidents who really know their stuff,” he said brown-nosingly of Uli Hoeness and Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, the Bayern legends who run the club. He also said that he and Bayern went together like “schnitzel and potatoes,” but just like the humble spud, Ancelotti is nothing if not versatile.
5. Eat yourself fat
Finally, like all life-coaching gurus, Ancelotti has diet tips for you.
“Only once in my life have I felt like I needed a psychiatrist,” he wrote in 2010. “I was looking at Yuri Zhirkov and all I could see was a rib-eye steak.”
He really said this. The original Italian version of that autobiography is called Preferisco La Coppa, a pun on trophies and the name of his favourite Italian cured meat.
Elsewhere he dubs himself “the fat boy with a bowlful of Emilian tortellini.”
Yes, he loves his grub, which, unlike many of his peers, means he has something else to obsess about other than winning football matches. Losing a 3-0 lead in a Champions League final is a pisser, but nothing a plate of osso bucco and a nice bottle of barolo wouldn’t sort out.
So managers, try the Ancelotti plan: you’ll still get sacked, but at least you’ll be happier, and definitely better fed.
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