He is 64 years old, but he seems, in many moments, like just another player on a team accustomed to winning. He gets into the celebrations, jumps with them, poses with dark glasses or smoking a cigar. But on the training pitch, on the bench and when making statements, he is very clear about his role as leader.
Carlo Ancelotti is still as cheerful as in his best years. Nobody has played more Champions League finals than him. Nor is there anyone who has earned more than him.
The Italian coach had already celebrated a new League title last weekend, in advance, and now he once again put Real Madrid in the Champions League final: on Wednesday, the white mystique appeared again to transform a 0-0 1 at home against Bayern Munich in a 2-1, with a double from one of the lowest cost players in the squad, but with the highest profit, Joselu.
“Ancelotti finds a way for many of us to play freely. There are teams that are more structured in their style and in their playing patterns, that is very interesting to see, but one of our greatest strengths. “He is a man who makes you feel calm and confident before the game,” recognized the Englishman Jude Bellingham, who arrived in Madrid this season and has been one of the key pieces of a season that they hope to crown with the fifteenth European title.
Jude Bellingham and Carlo Ancelotti
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This is how Ancelotti’s love affair with the European Cup began
Ancelotti has already completed 29 years as technical director. But before that he had a respectable campaign as a footballer, which he began in Serie C with Parma, in 1976. From there he jumped to Roma in 1979, with which he won Serie A four years later. Thus he had the experience of reaching a European Cup final in 1984. He could not play in it due to injury, and his team ended up losing against Liverpool. The defeat was in the Olympic stadium in Rome. “We thought that by playing at home we had won and we were wrong,” he recalled.
The coach’s jersey debuted with Reggiana in the 1995-96 season, in Serie B. The following year he returned to Parma to replace a legend, Nevio Scala, the coach with whom the club obtained its greatest achievements.
After two seasons he went to Juventus, with whom he won the Intertoto Cup in 1999, and from there he returned to Milan, where his glorious period as a coach began: He spent eight seasons at the club and won the Champions League twice (2012-13 and 2016-17), in addition to a Serie A, a Cup and an Italian Super Cup.
His talent as a coach is undeniable and his showcase is full: He is the only coach in the world who has won the five major European leagues: In addition to Italy, he was champion of the Premier League (with Chelsea, in 2010), in Ligue 1 (with Paris Saint-Germain, in 2013), of the Bundesliga (with Bayern Munich, in 2017) and of the Spanish League (twice with Real Madrid, in 2022 and 2014).
Carlo Ancelotti celebrates the Ligue 1 title with PSG in 2013.
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His return to Madrid, after passing through Bayern Munich, Napoli and Everton, was accidental. The one chosen to reach the white bench was his compatriot Massimiliano Allegri, but he had personal problems.
“Everything was ready, everything, everything. But in the end, with death in her heart, she decided not to. It was a painful act for both of them. She did it for her family, her son and his personal situation. He did not sign for another club that offered him more, but rather he chose to stay in Italy because two things coincided: a problem at home and Juventus’ offer to return. They both got married and he preferred not to leave Turin,” Allegri’s businessman, Giovanni Branchini, told the Relevo portal.
Branchini also has a lot to do with Ancelotti’s career. He was the one who took him to Bayern Munich and at the time he was also an intermediary in the arrival of James Rodríguez to that club, whom the Italian knew from his first time at Real Madrid. The Italian recalled, in that same talk, that Carletto’s return to the white club was not a unanimous or quick decision.
Carlo Ancelotti
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Ancelotti has known how to update himself and adapt to the different media in which he directed and that is why he has continued to be successful. This is how Fabio Capello remembers it, who was his coach at Milan and with whom, curiously, it was the beginning of the end of his career as a footballer.
“The most complicated thing is to leave Spain and go to England, to Germany… You can’t do the same thing you do in Italy, where the mentality and style are different. And he always knows how to get used to it, he has a lot of adaptability, he has a great gift. He is not one of those who take his truth as a dogma, but assume that truth can also be in the middle,” Capello declared to Relevo.
Besides, An addition to his coaching staff has been key to his evolution as a coach: the arrival of his son, Davide, 34, as an assistant.
Carlo and Davide Ancelotti celebrate Real Madrid’s passage to the Champions League final.
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t and already at Bayern Munich she began to be his first assistant, as well as at Everton. In addition to having a Uefa Pro license, Davide speaks five languages, which makes it easier for him to communicate with the group.
The journalist Enrique Ortego, who was Real Madrid’s press officer, wrote a book about the club’s 14th title in the Champions League: The fourteenth, the Champions League of comebacks. And it included an interview with the two Ancelottis, in which both recognized the importance of the other in the recent achievements of the merengue team.
“Davide, professionally, has had to live a lot with the fact of being my son. Little by little he has learned to it, he has gotten used to it. He has helped him, he has motivated him, he has helped him stay focused on his work. It is correct that he has no advantage because of his last name, but it is also correct that he has no disadvantages. He has to be judged for who he is. And nothing more”, Carlos said.
The Ancelottis share a surname, but not always the same ideas, and that is why sometimes the discussions within the same coaching staff are long.
“The obligation of the technical staff is to question Carlo, to make him think, not to say ‘yes sir’ to everything. At least that’s what I would like to happen to me when I become head coach. If you have a coaching staff that always agrees with you, you stagnate, you don’t evolve, in the end it’s like being alone. We all get into Carlo a lot, not just me. “Everyone has their task,” Davide explained.
“Every day we have to prepare for training, for games. They propose one thing, I another. It is discussed, it is talked about every day. We talk a lot about party strategy. When we have to press above, when we have to wait on a lower block… I like to argue. Everything that concerns the technical aspect is done by them, I intervene more in the tactical aspect when we play eleven against eleven, or at a certain moment when a more tactical situation arises,” added the youngest of the Ancelottis about his work.
Carletto adds a good dose of histrionics to this family teamwork. “In Milan he arrived to training by helicopter. He lived in Parma and his wife knew how to pilot. He looked like James Bond. “If anyone knew how to live in style, it was Carlo.” recalled Brazilian Alexandre Pato, who played for the Italian club.
But Ancelotti himself has his pilot’s license for these devices. “I took it out for traffic reasons. Nowadays it is much more comfortable to travel by helicopter,” he once said.
His wife at the time was Luisa Gibellini, from whom he separated in 2008. He remarried in the middle of the 2014 World Cup, on July 6, two days before Germany’s historic 1-7 win over Brazil. He did it in a private ceremony, with the Canadian businesswoman of Spanish origin, Mariann Barrena McClay, in Vancouver, his partner’s hometown. He met her when he was Chelsea manager.
His vocation as an actor is not free. He even had a couple of scenes in a 1983 film, Don Camilo, directed by and starring Terence Hill, who played a priest. Ancelotti appeared as a footballer, but in a very different role than the one he played on the field: he kicked and got into several fights. Other players appeared on that same tape, such as Roberto Boninsegna, scorer of Italy’s goal in the 1970 World Cup final against Brazil, and Roberto Pruzzo, another of Roma’s historic players.
Only in one club did this factor of being so close with the players not work: Bayern Munich. “Ancelotti had five players against him,” said then club president Uli Hoeness. And it is precisely the club that he has just eliminated. Ancelotti took the weight off his shoulders: “There is a captain here and his name is Florentino Pérez. The rest of us are sailors. “He has been able to create this great generation of footballers,” he said. Now he is going for another Champions League.
JOSÉ ORLANDO ASCENCIO
Sports Deputy Editor
@josasc
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