Carlo Ancelotti | Real Madrid manager

Bosnian_fan

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No. He is one of my favourite managers, maybe my favourite after Sir Alex actually. The man is just the perfect mix of cool and dignified.

Having said that, he is perfect in a very specific setup. He needs to be at a club where tactical input is limited to big games and the main requirement on his man management and establishing the perfect environment. AC Milan of the '00s and Real Madrid are the perfect examples of that. Chelsea when they were still playing with the blueprint of Mourinho were also perfect that. A group of veteran winners who have very high pedigree and who need a gentle hand to guide them through it. But put him in an environment where he needs to build a tactical foundation and coach a team to play in specific patterns and not since his days at Parma in the '90s has he displayed any excellence in doing that. In fact, just remove the pedigree side of it with clubs who are used to CL success and he does underwhelm like he did at Bayern, Napoli and Everton. Maybe he would have been perfect for us right after Sir Alex when we still had winners and veterans in the squad and our success was recent enough that we still commanded the required pedigree and personality. But now we need a lot of work from the ground up and he is just not suited to that.
But his Real Madrid of today is hardly a group of veteran winners. He's actually transforming the club with the help of Florentino, he is changing old guard one by one with younger and more exciting players. He's practically made Vinicius, Rodrygo and a few others a world class stars, they were hardly in that bracket before him.
 

Eddy_JukeZ

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No. He is one of my favourite managers, maybe my favourite after Sir Alex actually. The man is just the perfect mix of cool and dignified.

Having said that, he is perfect in a very specific setup. He needs to be at a club where tactical input is limited to big games and the main requirement on his man management and establishing the perfect environment. AC Milan of the '00s and Real Madrid are the perfect examples of that. Chelsea when they were still playing with the blueprint of Mourinho were also perfect that. A group of veteran winners who have very high pedigree and who need a gentle hand to guide them through it. But put him in an environment where he needs to build a tactical foundation and coach a team to play in specific patterns and not since his days at Parma in the '90s has he displayed any excellence in doing that. In fact, just remove the pedigree side of it with clubs who are used to CL success and he does underwhelm like he did at Bayern, Napoli and Everton. Maybe he would have been perfect for us right after Sir Alex when we still had winners and veterans in the squad and our success was recent enough that we still commanded the required pedigree and personality. But now we need a lot of work from the ground up and he is just not suited to that.
Perfectly put.
 

Iker Quesadillas

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But his Real Madrid of today is hardly a group of veteran winners. He's actually transforming the club with the help of Florentino, he is changing old guard one by one with younger and more exciting players. He's practically made Vinicius, Rodrygo and a few others a world class stars, they were hardly in that bracket before him.
A good chunk of the squad is under 25. Not veteran winners by any stretch of the imagination.
 

Iker Quesadillas

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It doesn't make much sense really. If the perfect environment is "Chelsea when they were playing under Mourinho's blueprint" then why wouldn't Bayern Munich post-Guardiola be an equally perfect environment? Those players had more pedigree than Chelsea's. It's obviously more than that.

The drop in results for Ancelotti came after appointing his son Davide as assistant manager, Davide was probably too young and inexperienced at the time to do a good job but he's grown into it.
 
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Theonas

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@Bosnian red and @Iker Quesadillas You do have a point about current Real even though I can argue that they still have plenty of seasoned veterans who understand the club and do for Real what Ramos, Casillas and co. used to do. I think what I am trying to convey here is that Real are not a club that play with a specific culture of playing style. Their most successful managers this century have been Del Bosque, Zidane and Ancelotti and there is a clear pattern among the three. The culture comes from the president and the name of the club, it's a winning culture pure and simple and a manager with a strong playing identity almost disrupts that for them. They need managers who facilitate rather than impose and there is no one better in world football than Ancelotti at that.

My argument about Chelsea is that they also at the time were a club where they needed a manager with minimum tactical input of their own, hence the relative success of Grant, Hiddink and Di Matteo and abject failure of the ones who tried to have a pro active way of playing like Scolari and Villas-Boas. At Bayern, the noises at the time complained that he is too laissez-faire with basic simple training when it was a team that was accustomed to the exact opposite under Van Gaal and Pep who are the ultimate micro coaches. I realise this might be not the most coherent explanation but my point is that the likes of Ancelotti work within a specific environment in terms of club culture whereby it is dictated by forces other than him whereas it's veteran players or just a club that is vastly bigger than any manager. Ask him to build or build on a rigorous regimented playing style and he just hasn't shown any inclination to do that since the '90s with Parma.

You can argue why can't we do what Real do and who said we need to follow in the footsteps of City, Liverpool and Arsenal who have a very different profile of manager. To that, I say that I believe Real are unique. No club can attract the calibre of players they can. Other clubs buy world class players. Real have dibs on the ultmate game changers in the game. No other club can have the ego and confidence that comes with winning 14 CLs and English clubs don't have the luxuary of playing in La Liga with one competitor each season. For all these reasons, I just feel it's foolish to try and replicate them. Only Real can do what Real do to that level of success which is why you see the pattern of their most successful coaches this century from Del Bosque, Zidane and Ancelotti and all of them share a lot of similarities in their track record. They're three of the best coaches ever in my opinion but they also have a specific set of skills that makes them far from the perfect fit for a lot of other jobs. Jobs at the highest level are more about the fit than some all encompassing evaluation of overall quality in my view.
 

Bosnian_fan

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@Bosnian red and @Iker Quesadillas You do have a point about current Real even though I can argue that they still have plenty of seasoned veterans who understand the club and do for Real what Ramos, Casillas and co. used to do. I think what I am trying to convey here is that Real are not a club that play with a specific culture of playing style. Their most successful managers this century have been Del Bosque, Zidane and Ancelotti and there is a clear pattern among the three. The culture comes from the president and the name of the club, it's a winning culture pure and simple and a manager with a strong playing identity almost disrupts that for them. They need managers who facilitate rather than impose and there is no one better in world football than Ancelotti at that.

My argument about Chelsea is that they also at the time were a club where they needed a manager with minimum tactical input of their own, hence the relative success of Grant, Hiddink and Di Matteo and abject failure of the ones who tried to have a pro active way of playing like Scolari and Villas-Boas. At Bayern, the noises at the time complained that he is too laissez-faire with basic simple training when it was a team that was accustomed to the exact opposite under Van Gaal and Pep who are the ultimate micro coaches. I realise this might be not the most coherent explanation but my point is that the likes of Ancelotti work within a specific environment in terms of club culture whereby it is dictated by forces other than him whereas it's veteran players or just a club that is vastly bigger than any manager. Ask him to build or build on a rigorous regimented playing style and he just hasn't shown any inclination to do that since the '90s with Parma.

You can argue why can't we do what Real do and who said we need to follow in the footsteps of City, Liverpool and Arsenal who have a very different profile of manager. To that, I say that I believe Real are unique. No club can attract the calibre of players they can. Other clubs buy world class players. Real have dibs on the ultmate game changers in the game. No other club can have the ego and confidence that comes with winning 14 CLs and English clubs don't have the luxuary of playing in La Liga with one competitor each season. For all these reasons, I just feel it's foolish to try and replicate them. Only Real can do what Real do to that level of success which is why you see the pattern of their most successful coaches this century from Del Bosque, Zidane and Ancelotti and all of them share a lot of similarities in their track record. They're three of the best coaches ever in my opinion but they also have a specific set of skills that makes them far from the perfect fit for a lot of other jobs. Jobs at the highest level are more about the fit than some all encompassing evaluation of overall quality in my view.
Yeah, good points there, I do agree with all this.
 

giorno

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The drop in results for Ancelotti came after appointing his son Davide as assistant manager, Davide was probably too young and inexperienced at the time to do a good job but he's grown into it.
To expand on this, his son was in fact one of the main points of stress between Ancelotti and the players at both Bayern and Napoli. The bigger problem in both cases though, came from who he followed - Guardiola/Sarri - how good those two had been, how beloved they had been by the players, and how different Ancelotti was from them in terms of training methods. Napoli are also constantly a bad game or bad interview away from internal disfunction because of their president - at Napoli the definitive and fatal break that cost him the job was caused by De Laurentiis himself

It's frankly a riot that of his last 4 clubs, Real Madrid is the least disfunctional :lol: