Source: Telegraph
Carlo Ancelotti: uncovering the truth about new Chelsea manager
At their very first meeting, more than a year before he moved to Stamford Bridge, Roman Abramovich spelt out to Carlo Ancelotti what any prospective Chelsea manager needed to build at the club: identity. Like Manchester United and their romance, Liverpool and their passion, or his beloved Milan.
'They all have a clear identity,' Ancelotti recalls the Russian saying. 'Chelsea don't.'
Six years and £600 million after he inverted the world of football by turning Stamford Bridge from outpost to empire, Abramovich, the man who gave Chelsea almost everything, found himself unable to craft a personality for his team. In his view, they are still searching for a trait which will become synonymous with their name. Or rather, they are searching for one which satisfies him.
To many, as pride is to Barcelona, or power to Real Madrid, wealth is to Chelsea. That is their defining, lasting characteristic.That is not enough for Abramovich. Under Jose Mourinho and, to an extent, Avram Grant, Chelsea were rich and successful. Not enough. Abramovich's passions have changed since 2003.
Where he once collected footballers, now his status symbol of choice is art. He wants more than success, he wants beauty. Luiz Felipe Scolari, charged with combining the two, delivered neither. Scolari's promises of samba and sol were empty; in his stead, Ancelotti has been tasked with delivering style and sophistication straight from Europe's fashion capital.
Abramovich had done his homework. Ancelotti possesses the perfect grounding to survive and prosper in Stamford Bridge's graveyard of reputations. His CV glitters: two European Cups as a player, two Champions Leagues as a manager. Serie A titles as player and manager, four in total. Off the pitch, too, he brings experience.
Chelsea's internecine power-struggles eventually subsumed Mourinho, Grant and Scolari. Ancelotti has spent seven years at the beck and call of Silvio Berlusconi, owner, boss, Prime Minister. Peter Kenyon and Frank Arnesen will be child's play.
'There is pressure at all big clubs; in Italy, in England, wherever, and Chelsea are a big club, with an owner who is not afraid to spend money,' says Filippo Galli, now the director of the Milan's youth system.
'Carlo is ready for that, because there is more pressure at Milan than most teams. There you have to be very careful how you behave with people, with journalists, because our president is Italy's Prime Minister. We feel we are ambassadors of Mr Berlusconi, but we also feel we are ambassadors of Milan.'
It is a role Ancelotti played to perfection, although Galli insists he and Berlusconi were not close, unlike his predecessors, Arrigo Sacchi and, particularly, Fabio Capello.
'Friendship is a big word,' he says. 'Milan, for me, is like a family, and Berlusconi is the boss of that family, so he likes to have constant contact with the manager and a number of people at the club. He's very busy with politics now, of course, so he doesn't have so much time to spend with us, but he would call Carlo on the phone for information. There was a great mutual esteem between them, but that is all.'
That esteem was no doubt enhanced by the fact that Ancelotti is quintessentially Milanese, born and bred in Emilia-Romagna, but infused with the ethos of a club and city which are inherently contradictory.
Football clubs are a product of their environment — it is apt that Abramovich bought Chelsea, a side who became the standard bearer for west London's evolution into Moscow-on-Thames — and it is only Milan, where fashion and industry meet, that could have given rise to the oxymoron that is AC Milan; only AC Milan that could have produced Ancelotti.
He is the boy from the pig farm who won the respect of the Prime Minister. He is il mister and Carletto, the formal and the diminutive. He was a player of delicate majesty and supreme skill, whose favourite part of the game was tackling, the top-flight professional who enjoyed a midnight feast.
Friends insist he never stops smiling, that he 'laughs off pressure', while Paolo Maldini remembers 'he only ever made us cry in the dressing room because we couldn't stop laughing.' Yet he once single-handedly destroyed a dressing room after a defeat, and David Beckham admitted his anger could be fearsome.
His most artistic side, a piece de resistance built around Manuel Rui Costa, Andrea Pirlo and Clarence Seedorf, won arguably the most mind-numbing Champions League final in history against Juventus in 2003. In Istanbul, he lost another final to Liverpool despite possessing by far the superior team and a 3-0 lead; two years later, he gained revenge against Liverpool and the biggest prize in club football once more, after being outplayed in Athens.
As a player and a manager, his greatest successes came at a club run ruthlessly, as a business, by one of the world's most powerful men, but one which retains its sense of intimacy and tradition by employing a raft of former players in background roles. Such an environment has proved a remarkable finishing school for coaches who have flown from Milanello, Milan's training base, across Europe.
'There is a definite Milan mentality,' says Demetrio Albertini, who played alongside, instead of, and under Ancelotti in his 14-year spell at San Siro. He remembers him as a 'charismatic' player, someone 'who you listened to when he spoke' but, perhaps, not a natural candidate for management.
'But the team was a factory for great managers. Ruud Gullit, Marco van Basten, Frank Rijkaard, Dejan Savicevic and Roberto Donadoni have all managed at the highest level, while others are coaching at Milan and other clubs. That side won everything over 10 years, everything.
''It was an almost unique spell of success, and it was because we spoke every day about our communal objectives. That was to improve every day, to remain the best. That is the spirit of Milan.'
It is a spirit engendered, to an extent, by Capello — with whom Ancelotti never saw eye-to-eye — but to a far greater level by Sacchi. 'When Mr Sacchi arrived, we were used to working with Nils Liedholm, a good coach, but Sacchi had a different way of looking at football,' says Galli.
'His team was perfectly organised, he taught us how to be tactically perfect. That is why so many went on to coach, to pass on his way of teaching. I took my job with the youth team because I want to keep winning.Carlo was very much like Sacchi at the start of his career. It has become more difficult in recent years because he does not have the players around him. But when he sketches his tactics in the dressing room, you can tell who taught him.'
It was Sacchi who first turned Ancelotti's thoughts to management, offering him a role as his assistant at the 1994 World Cup. The Chelsea manager admits he had never so much as considered coaching before that moment.
Sacchi's judgment, as in so much, proved flawless. His school can scarcely have produced a better pupil. Like Sacchi, Ancelotti prides himself on the style with which his teams play. Berlusconi, clearly, demands little else.
In a secluded, wooded part of Lombardy, stands Milanello, an outwardly unremarkable warehouse of success, where Sacchi, Capello and Ancelotti fashioned teams to dazzle the world. Widely recognised as one of the best, most cutting-edge sporting facilities on the planet, its gates are dominated by a board displaying the logos of Milan's sponsors: kit-makers adidas, online gaming firm Bwin, broadcaster Sky Italia and Dolce & Gabbana, the Italian couture house beloved of the glitterati.
They provide Milan's off-pitch wear, dressing staff and players for official club duties. Presentation, ostentation, is at the core of Berlusconi's philosophy, as entrepreneur, owner and politician; every aspect of Milan, and Milanello, bears his unmistakable stamp. The lawns are always perfectly manicured, the car park shaded by trees. Journalists chat to players over an espresso at the centre's coffee bar.
Berlusconi, of course, knows the benefit of a good press. Milan are built in the image of a man obsessed with image. It has left an indelible mark on Ancelotti. Friends admit his 'mentality has come from the organisation, from the way Berlusconi structured the club'.
He is the disciple of the fanatic and the statesman. Chelsea have found a man with substance and style.
