Rewind to the Bernabéu. Time is
running out against Manchester City,
a place in the Champions League
final is slipping away, City have a
two-goal advantage and Real Madrid
have shown little sign of cutting it
back. The pressure mounts;
elimination looms.
At that point, according to Tony
Kroos, who has already been subbed
off, the manager, Carlo Ancelotti,
turns to him and other players and
asks what his substitution policy
should be. This may, indeed, appear
extraordinary: Real are right up
against it and here is Ancelotti
revealing to senior squad members
that he isn’t sure what to do. “The
coach himself had a few doubts,”
Kroos said.
Now, it is one thing to harbour
doubt — which cannot be unusual —
but quite another to expose your
uncertainty to your team. After all,
you are the one paid to come up with
solutions and make them look
convincing. And then it is quite
another thing altogether to actually
turn to your players and ask them for
the answers instead.
There are few managers or coaches
in any sport who would be prepared
to reveal such a soft underbelly of
uncertainty. Kroos explained, though,
that this is not atypical Ancelotti
behaviour. In doing so, he wasn’t
trying to undermine his manager by
suggesting that he never knows what
he is doing. Quite the opposite.
“It’s outstanding,” he said. “We [the
players] have all seen a few football
games ourselves. That allows you to
exchange ideas a bit. In the end, he
decides, but of course he’s interested
in our opinion.”
The hierarchy of a sports team is
too rarely the one that Ancelotti likes
to create. Increasingly, it is “the cult
of the manager” that dominates. We
admire football teams that are an
expression of their manager’s artistic
vision. The City team that collapsed
in that Bernabéu semi-final is your
case in point.
Yet when you have 20-plus football
brains in your squad, the smart guy
here is Ancelotti, who is content with
the idea that 20 brains may be more
effective than one.
Thus, he explained this week how
he was preparing the team for
tonight’s final. “It’s about me asking
them to explain how to prepare,” he
said. “I don’t have to teach them
anything.”
Or again, before that City semi-
final: “I’ve done no more than give
them confidence.” His reluctance to
accept acclaim when, say, just giving
them confidence is just what is
required, is just part of his allure.
Elsewhere, the autocracy of the
football manager is deeply embedded.
It takes self-confidence and perhaps
an illustrious record like Ancelotti’s to
let control go in this way. In his book,
Leading, Sir Alex Ferguson recounts
how it was Bill Shankly who taught
him to let go.
In 1972, he went to watch Liverpool
in an end-of-season game against
Derby County and was being
entertained before the match by
Shankly. Five minutes before kick-off,
he asked Shankly if he shouldn’t be
with his players, at which point
Shankly said: “Son, if I’ve got to be
with my players for the deciding game
of the season, there’s something
wrong with them.”
They then went down to the tunnel,
where Shankly says to Tommy Smith,
the captain: “Tommy, take them
home, you know what to do.”
Ferguson reflects: “That one sentencesaid everything about Shankly’s style
of leadership.”
The confidence for leaders to share
ownership in this way is also a subject
in Sydney Finkelstein’s business book,
Superbosses. He says: “As a group,
superbosses believe their people are
fully capable of arriving at solutions
themselves and that their experience
of doing so supports their
development.” He namechecks BillWalsh, who won three Super Bowls
with the San Francisco 49ers, but
goes outside sport for a clear example:
“When facing big decisions, Ralph
Lauren would ask even the
receptionists’ and cleaning staff’s
opinion.”
It is not as if Ancelotti has always
been this kind of a superboss. His
prime football education was at
AC Milan under the tutorship ofAND WILL HE BE ENJOYING ANOTHER CELEBRATORY CIGAR TONIGHT?
In recent months we have
seen top football figures
such as Pep Guardiola,
Zlatan Ibrahimovic and
Carlo Ancelotti, pictured,
celebrate title wins with a
cigar. These have produced
iconic images that show
that the symbolic power of
the cigar is alive and well —
as it has been for decades.
We have had multiple
figures in football buy
cigars from us, from José
Mourinho to John Terry. It’s
a luxury culture, and it’s a
great way to celebrate if
you’ve achieved something.
Smoking cigarettes is not a
particularly good look, but
smoking a cigar is.
These players and
managers are not regularsmokers, they’re top
athletes. Having a cigar and
a drink in your hand is not
like going to the pub to
drink a load of shots or
pints. Drinking a glass of
whisky and having a cigar is
a way of unwinding after a
significant moment.
These photos havedefinitely had a positive
effect on our sales. More
people are willing to be seen
with a cigar in their mouth
— they see it as something
to aspire to because they’re
so expensive. A Cuban cigar
would range from £20 to
£1,000.
The shots of Guardiolashowed him smoking a
Partagas Series D No 4 cigar.
The photos tend to show
players with Partagas or
Cohiba brand cigars as
Cohiba is an iconic, very
expensive brand. The
Partagas that Guardiola
smoked is £28, and a same-
size Cohiba cigar is £60.
With Guardiola, the culture
in Spain is also to celebrate
big moments with a cigar.
I’m looking forward to
more celebratory photos
after the Champions League
final tonight. Carlo likes a
cigar, but I’m not so sure
about Jürgen Klopp — there
are plenty of Germans who
do, however.
Laurence Davis is the
owner of Sautter CigarsHumble man with Midas touch
the times | Saturday May 28 2022 1GG 9
thegame
1989 AC Milan
Arrigo Sacchi, where success was built
upon the foundations of discipline,
structure and game plan and where
he was long considered one of the
real brains making the system work.
Over his decades in management,
he has gradually morphed away from
Sacchi, from autocracy to democracy.
This hasn’t always worked. When he
was at Bayern, his team yearned for a
stricter game plan, possibly because
he had inherited the team from Pep
Guardiola.
Other players just relish the culture
under Ancelotti, where you are
encouraged to think for yourself. No
surprises that Andrea Pirlo was one
such disciple. The title of Pirlo’s
autobiography — I Think Therefore I
Play — makes that clear. He describes
Ancelotti, in his period as AC Milan
manager, as “a father and a teacher”.
He also emphasises that though
Ancelotti was comfortable seeking
opinions, he would never be forced
into corners he didn’t want to go. In
the days of the Milan ownership of
Silvio Berlusconi, Ancelotti had to
stand his ground. “They’d debate
tactics,” Pirlo says, “but the final
decision always lay with the coach. If
you’ll pardon my French, Ancelotti
had massive balls. A big guy with a
big personality.”
A big personality, indeed, but not
one who seeks the foreground. That is
not to say that other managers —
Jürgen Klopp, for instance, his
opposition on Saturday — actively
seeks the foreground himself.
However, like Guardiola, Klopp likes
to keep tight control of it.
For this reason, perhaps, Klopp and
others — Guardiola — are credited
with influencing the way that football
is now played at the highest levels
and not so much Ancelotti, even
though Ancelotti is the one who has
won more Champions League
trophies and is unique in winning
league titles in Europe’s five biggest
leagues.
Yet, it is not possible to spell out
exactly to what extent Ancelotti’s
style is responsible for Real Madrid’s
extraordinary feats of survival in this
season’s Champions League. In three
successive knockout rounds, against
PSG, Chelsea and City, Real pulled off
three incredible escapes.
It is not as if Ancelotti had a
regular plan B to resort to that
accounted for all three; in each case,
was it the substitutions he made, and
how much were those decisions
guided by the opinions he sought? Or
was it the fact that he has given his
players that mindset where they have
to find a way through these
challenges themselves? Probably a bit
of both, plus the extraordinary way
that Real can harness momentum. Is
that him too?
In this sense, tonight’s Champions
League final has a bit of the
pragmatist versus the ideologue about
it. Whatever happens, though,
Ancelotti won’t be managing his
players like puppets on string.
“I have to manage people, not
players,” he said in a fascinating piece
of self-assessment in The New York
Times recently. “They are not players;
they are people who play football.
I am not a manager; I am a man that
works as a manager. I think this is an
important point.”
It is an important statement about
how he operates. When he sets to his
task this evening, as a man working
as a manager, he will have no issue
asking the players, who are people
playing football, what they should all
do. And they will all be stronger for it.Real Madrid manager
Carlo Ancelotti is happy
to let his players take their
share of responsibility,
writes Owen Slot
1990 AC Milan
2003 AC Milan
2007 AC Milan
Milan
Milan
2014 Real Madrid