Book review: Get to know football’s ‘diva whisperer’ Carlo Ancelotti

In “Quiet Leadership: Winning Hearts, Minds and Matches,” Ancelotti reveals how to handle superstar players.

Carlo Ancelotti is considered one of the most successful football managers of all time. He won the UEFA Champion’s League a record five times, twice as a player and three times as a manager. He has coached some of Europe’s top clubs, including Juventus, AC Milan, Paris Saint-Germain, Real Madrid and Chelsea and is now in charge of one of the strongest German teams, Bayern Munich. In “Quiet Leadership: Winning Hearts, Minds and Matches,” Ancelotti reveals how to handle superstar players, difficult club presidents and demanding media outlets.
Chris Brady, a professor of management studies, and Mike Forde, a former director of football operations and executive board member at Chelsea FC, interviewed Ancelotti around the world for more than fifty hours. The co-authors have also included interviews with those who have played for him such as Cristiano Ronaldo, David Beckham and Zlatan Ibrahimović.
“The ‘quiet way’ has been with me from my childhood with my father and in football ever since I became captain of Roma as a player, continuing when I joined Milan, where the players looked to me as one of the leaders in the dressing room, and then throughout my time managing not only that club but also teams including Chelsea, Paris Saint-Germain and Real Madrid,” Ancelotti says in the book.
He has been nicknamed the “diva whisperer” because of his unique ability to nurture deep relationships with his players and has been described as the ultimate diplomat because of the way he handles authoritarian club presidents such as Silvio Berlusconi at AC Milan and Roman Abramovich at Chelsea FC.
“The average tenure of a FTSE 100 CEO is 5.18 years; for English Premier League managers it’s just 2.36 years (if Arsene Wenger is excluded from that equation, the average drops to 1.7 years) ,” writes Chris Brady. During the 2014-2015 season of the English professional leagues, 47 managers lost their jobs. The lifespan of a football coach is compressed into a single season and it is related to the results of that season. Ancelotti describes this process as the leadership arc.
“First comes the courtship, when the club identifies you and tries to acquire your services. Then comes the honeymoon period, when everyone — the players, the staff, the fans — give you the time to establish yourself, but which unfortunately, as always in life, never lasts long. Next comes success and stability, should you be able to achieve it… Eventually, this stability plateaus and then the… cracks in the relationship… Finally comes the breakup, the inevitable parting of ways.”
Pep Guardiola and Hungarian coach Bela Guttmann have said that three years is the natural cycle for managers and Ancelotti agrees. However, some managers, like Sir Alex Ferguson at Manchester United and Arsene Wenger at Arsenal, have stayed much longer.
Carlo Ancelotti spent the longest period of his career as a coach with AC Milan. When he arrived at the club in November 2001, he faced problems with the composition of the team. The transfer of Alessandro Nesta, the 27-year-old who was in his prime, was going to cost 30 million euros ($35 million) but Ancelotti was convinced that his presence on the team was a necessity. He decided to speak directly to Berlusconi and told him: “President, everyone wants to win the Champions League, but if you don’t buy Nesta, we won’t win it. Give me Nesta, and I will give you the Champion’s League.” Berlusconi bought Nesta and AC Milan won the UEFA Champion’s League in 2002-2003 and did so again in 2006-2007.
The AC Milan team had fantastic players like Kaká, Rui Costa, Andrea Pirlo, Gennaro Gattuso, Filippo Inzaghi and Rivaldo but players did not always get to play.
When Rivaldo was asked to go on the bench, he reportedly said “no, no, Rivaldo doesn’t go on the bench,” got up and went home. After the club and his agent spoke with him, he came back and stayed on the bench during a small game. This is when Ancelotti decided to speak to Rivaldo, saying: “Listen, it’s for you, not for us. You don’t have to be worried because it can happen today, it can happen in the next game and it can happen to any player. We have a lot of games and it means you can be more fresh when you play in the next match.”
AC Milan went on to win the Champion’s League. The players were united in the belief that they were a great team and understood that there would be times when they would play and times when they would not.
Nurturing relationships
Ancelotti is reputed for his unique ability to build strong relationships with his players. One player, Zlatan Ibrahimović, is particularly grateful. He acknowledged that if he had met Ancelotti before he wrote his memoir, he would have written a whole chapter on him. He played under Ancelotti when he and Thiago Silva joined the Paris Saint-Germain in 2012. Zlatan, with his talent, experience and unique personality, became the star of the team.
“He is one of the most unselfish players I have ever met which is of massive value to the team,” Ancelotti said of Ibrahimović.
Ibrahimović is grateful that Ancelotti helped him mature as a player and as a man.
“At the beginning, I was a lion, on and off the pitch. I would throw things when we were losing. Paris Saint-Germain was too relaxed for me but Carlo used this. If the game had gone maybe ten minutes with nothing happening, he would call to me on the pitch… ‘Ibra time to wake up the team’.”
Cristiano Ronaldo trained with Ancelotti when he coached Real Madrid. He played in the Champions League final in 2014 despite being injured a month before the game. Ancelotti told Cristiano: “If you don’t feel good, just let me know. It will be tough on me because even if you are only fifty percent you’re still our most important player.”
Ronaldo decided to take part in the game. He did not play shockingly well but was able to score a penalty.
It was “my seventeenth goal in the Champion’s League that season, a record, and we won the competition. I wasn’t fully fit, but I made the sacrifice for Carlo,” he said in the book.
“Even when you maybe feel that you haven’t got the strength to last the whole 90 minutes, or you feel that you can’t run any more, then you need to do it for the coach. I will do for him, because he deserves it as he has always taken care of me. Most of my teammates feel the same — players admire him and will hurt for him,” Ronaldo added.
Ancelotti wants his star footballers to give their utmost and play with the same passion that fired up his ambitions as a player and as a coach.
“Football is my life, my passion, my hobby and I never really ‘leave’ football. As the Eagles say about ‘Hotel California,’ you might be able to check out, but leaving isn’t an option. Switching off is my checkout time from football, but I’ll never leave,” Ancelotti said in the book.
In this great read, Ancelotti gives rare insight into his unique quiet style of management. He is probably the only top manager who has forged lifelong friendships with the players he has coached. This touching memoir reveals the inside workings of the beautiful game and offers readers a chance to get to know world-famous players.