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.
Didnt relaize he wss crippled, did they stop in lourdes on the way home , ffs 12 years later and still going on about it
@ger gavin: The Kiwi’s make a much bigger deal out of it than even the Irish do. It’s because they know they were in the wrong, but because they won’t apologise for it they just keep denying any wrongdoing.
@Dave Barry: the kiwis make a big deal out of it as it’s their national sport. They admit openly it was a bad tackle but to say it was intentional is hard to believe. As an ex rugby player, it’s very difficult to tackle someone nevermind intentionally hurt them.
Just another All Black ‘accident’. All respect done for these thugs who seem to not be able to win big games anymore without these ‘accidents’ After the Irish game where the last 3 ‘accidents’ happened, World Rugby came and strengthened the rules. Why? If they were just accidents.
@Range Rover: My reading of it at the time is the same as it is now. They went out to target O’Driscoll, not to injure him, but to “lay down a marker.” I know any kiwi will deny it, but he was the captain, it was two minutes in and he was barely involved in the ruck. We weren’t born yesterday. The thing that left a bad taste in my mouth wasn’t what happened on the pitch, it was the lack of response from the authorities. Accidental or deliberate, a spear tackle is illegal. The IRB were, as always, deaf, dumb and blind where their golden boys are concerned however.
Let’s stop calling these guys the all blacks. They are new Zealand. Calling them the all blacks puts them up on a pedestal. The Australians never defer to them like that. I’m no lover of the lions but Nz need to be beaten. When they put on that Jersey the kiwis think they are above the law. They spear tackle o Driscoll and it galvanised them! Piss off
@Paul K Murphy: not sure about that, whatever the scenario calling them New Zealand is a step down from the All Blacks. Which tells it own story about the deliberate mystique perpetuated over the ages about this team with supposed superhuman qualities.
Anything that eats into that illusion is a good thing for me. They get enough psychological advantage from the haka, what we call them then is our own choice and the more down to earth the better
@Paul K Murphy: the problem is that rugby at test level to use the old cliche is a game of incredibly fine margins. So any advantage no matter how small is worthy of serious consideration. Enough for Australia and the lions in 2005 to decide against calling them the All Blacks anyway.
How effective those bans were is debatable. The lions obviously got blown away but you would have to say Australia excelled against them in the 2015 WC final. And who knows in that moment in time in the build up to the final maybe that was of some psychological help for them
@Aaron Buckley: they’re a bunch off shameless cheats….let’s just turn them over first
It was wrong. But I think people should stop whinging about it now. If someone brought up a similar incident from the Heineken Cup from 12 years ago they would be told to stop being a little b*tch and move on.
@Ned Flanders:
It’s not the tackle or the players which concerns fans, it was the cover up afterwards.
This was never addressed and continues today. The all blacks in Dublin last should have got two red cards (tackles on Zebo and CJ) and a red/yellow for Henshaw.
An all black has not got a red card since 1967.
It is not just Ireland every team gets this, SA and Aus complain continually about this
@Jack Dermody: and the crucial point with the BOD tackle is no one was even cited for it afterwards. Two big men picking another man up without the ball and piledriving his neck and head into the ground from a height is the most dangerous thing you can do possibly in any sport. It was only BOD twisting himself to take most of the impact to his shoulder that saved him.
Shockingly illegally took out the lions skipper and the two boys played on the series not a bother
@Jack Dermody:
there is no doubt they are reffed differently. The refereeing of 2011 WC final was for me the biggest scandal in rugby.
@Jack Dermody: I think the simple act of NZ captain, Umaga, and Mealamu, going over to BOD while he was being stretchered off to say a straightforward “sorry, mate” might have partly defused the negative reaction afterwards. They didn’t have either the respect or the balls to do so, which immediately deleted my regard for them as persons, notwithstanding their status as players.
The only way to deal with that tackle was to wallop the bejasus out of mealemu and umaga on the pitch. They should never have walked off it. In this that lions team failed miserably. Similarly with nz in Dublin last November. If ref isnt going to take action then act yourself and fight fire with a firestorm. Lions & Ireland were too effin nice.
You got to love the All Blacks. Even after all this time there is no regret or even an admission of partial responsibility. The end justifies the means. This is why they are perennial winners and we only ever surpassed them once.
It was malicious, vindictive and almost criminal. Try to picture two men doing that to someone on the streets. It’s about the most dangerous thing you could do to someone and the fact that two were involved, not one, defeats any argument that it wasn’t deliberate. The All Blacks also wreaked havoc in Lansdowne Road and that was the last time I left a comment on the Journal. What disappoints me the most is that the management and players didn’t see it coming and didn’t know how to answer them. They’re a proud nation, the New Zealanders, but we’ve got to wise up to their pre-planned strategy of winning at all costs. I agree that the last two major tackle changes in World Rugby have come about because of New Zealand thuggery. The next time we play them, and the Lions, let’s not be naive and match them for physicality. Bob Dwyer still maintains that Duncan McCrae did nothing wrong in 2001. It’s not as if we can’t see it coming anymore. Oh, and an apology is what’s required from the All Blacks, not trying to justify the unjustifiable to this day. If they had done so, we wouldn’t still be talking about it. I won’t hold my breath.
Their tough, physical guys….other players will have to be tougher and tackle twice as hard….all them south Africans are massive men but they have to be willing to break their gut!!