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.
Book review: Get to know football’s ‘diva whisperer’ Carlo Ancelotti
Book review: Get to know football’s ‘diva whisperer’ Carlo Ancelotti
What We Are Reading Today: The Thinking Machine
- It explores Huang’s leadership style—described as single-minded and relentless—and his ability to defy Wall Street skepticism to push a radical computing vision, making him one of the wealthiest and most influential figures in Silicon Valley
Author: Stephen Witt
“The Thinking Machine” is the story of how Nvidia evolved to supplying hundred-million-dollar supercomputers.
It is a biography that dives into the rise of Nvidia and its CEO, Jensen Huang, focusing on their pivotal role in the AI revolution.
The book highlights Huang’s bold vision, particularly his early bet on AI over a decade ago, which transformed Nvidia from a maker of video game components into a powerhouse supplying massive supercomputers for AI applications like hyper-realistic avatars, autonomous robots, and self-driving cars.
It explores Huang’s leadership style—described as single-minded and relentless—and his ability to defy Wall Street skepticism to push a radical computing vision, making him one of the wealthiest and most influential figures in Silicon Valley.
Through unprecedented access to Huang, his friends, his investors, and his employees, Stephen Witt documents for the first time the company’s epic rise and its single-minded and ferocious leader, now one of Silicon Valley’s most influential figures.
Witt is an American journalist and author known for his narrative-driven, deeply reported works on technology, culture, and innovation.
Witt’s style is noted for its clarity, wit, and ability to make dense topics accessible without sacrificing depth.
What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Evolution of Imperfection’
Author: Laurence D. Hurst
If we start with the presumption that evolution is a constantly improving process, some aspects of our evolution just do not make sense. We have a high rate of genetic diseases, for example, and much of our DNA seems to be pointless.
In “The Evolution of Imperfection,” Laurence Hurst explores our apparently rotten genetic luck.
Hurst, a leading authority on evolution and genetics, argues that our evolutionary imperfections proceed directly from two features: the difficulties of pregnancy and the fact that historically there are relatively few of us.
In pregnancy, natural selection can favor chromosomes that kill embryos in species (including ours) that continuously receive resources from the mother. Most fertilized eggs don’t make it, and incompatibilities between the fetus and mother can lead to lethal disorders of pregnancy.
The historically small population size enhances the role of chance, which in turn leads to both accumulation of unnecessary DNA and more mutation.
REVIEW: Kuwaiti Palestinian author looks at women and disability in a transformative, speculative memoir
JEDDAH: Kuwaiti Palestinian writer Shahd Alshammari’s new speculative memoir “Confetti and Ashes” is a bold departure from her previous work “Head Above Water,” which was longlisted for the Barbellion Prize in 2022.
Alshammari’s layered meditation on the disabled body as both a site of loss as well as endurance is propelled forward by sharp observations and a quiet brilliance that had me turning pages well into the night.
Her first memoir, “Head Above Water,” offered an unflinching look at navigating multiple sclerosis as an Arab woman teaching literature in Kuwait. Her latest, however, ventures into a realm where memory and personal narrative intersect with poetry, imagination, and otherworldly presences.
The voices of ghosts and Zari, her qareen — the jinn-companion assigned to each person in Islamic belief — transform Alshammari’s personal narrative. It becomes a dialogue, a captivating dance between the seen and unseen worlds.
This inclusion shakes up the conventional memoir structure to broaden the scope beyond Western frameworks of storytelling. It also offers readers a visceral look at the ways living with disability and chronic illness can disrupt and reshape an individual’s perspective and worldview.
The dreamlike and omniscient voice of the qareen also mirrors the disorientation and internal struggles that come with living with chronic illness and disability.
Alshammari astutely draws parallels between the disabled body and the female body in the social and cultural context of Kuwait. In a world of able-bodied norms, she reflects on their intersecting experiences of marginalization, scrutiny, and resistance.
She rejects predictable storytelling, and not just in her writing, but also in life. Her body rebels, yet she defies societal stigmas — including concerns voiced from other women with MS.
She explores holistic wellness practices and eventually takes up squash, expanding her social circle and pushing her limits to build her mental and physical endurance.
In capturing her dual journeys of illness and wellness, the author invites readers to reflect on the disabled body not as a burden, but as a site of poetic possibility.
In “Confetti and Ashes,” Alshammari presents a profound reclamation of the self and cements herself as a vital voice in reimagining the female disabled experience.
What We Are Reading Today: ‘Whale: The Illustrated Biography’ by Asha De Vos
Whales are the majestic giants of the ocean, yet much of their world remains a mystery to us. The routes of their vast oceanic migrations are largely elusive, as are the intricacies of their behavior and social dynamics.
This narrative biography takes you out beyond our shorelines and into the depths, providing an up-close exploration of the life of the whale.
Written by internationally acclaimed expert Asha de Vos, “Whale: The Illustrated Biography” blends engaging profiles of the best-known species with stunning illustrations to tell the story of these magnificent creatures in all their diversity and complexity.
What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Measure of Progress’ by Diane Coyle
The ways that statisticians and governments measure the economy were developed in the 1940s, when the urgent economic problems were entirely different from those of today.
In “The Measure of Progress,” Diane Coyle argues that the framework underpinning today’s economic statistics is so outdated that it functions as a distorting lens, or even a set of blinkers.
When policymakers rely on such an antiquated conceptual tool, how can they measure, understand, and respond with any precision to what is happening in today’s digital economy?
