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
Book Review: ‘America’s View of the East, Cinematically’ by Abdulmohsen Al-Mutairi
Saudi journalist, filmmaker and cultural commentator Abdulmohsen Al-Mutairi launched his long-anticipated book — “America’s View of the East, Cinematically” — at last month’s Saudi Film Festival.
Cementing his reputation as a vital voice at the intersection of cinema and Arab identity, the book is a natural progression from his award-winning documentary, “Memories From The North,” tackling Western portrayals of the East with the same precision, intellect and emotional clarity.
Al-Mutairi drew wide attention for his documentary, which offered a poetic look at the Gulf War of 1990-91 and was named best short documentary at the 2022 festival.
“The documentary looks to me like a chapter in a book, because both memories and the war look like chapters to us. To me, the war is a timeline, there is a beginning, middle and an end,” Al-Mutairi told Arab News at the time.
“America’s View of the East, Cinematically” continues that mission, serving as both critique and chronicle of how Arab and Eastern identities have long been distorted by the cinematic lens of the West.
“This encyclopedia will be a building block added to what the Saudi Film Festival has started since its launch in 2008 and an effective tributary in the path of Saudi cinema, reinforcing what the festival organizers believe in and what they seek to achieve by emphasizing that the film industry must be accompanied by a knowledge industry directed at those working in the local and Arab cinema field,” according to its introduction.
More than critique, the book offers a kind of cinematic reclamation.
What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Book of Alchemy’ by Suleika Jaouad
In “The Book of Alchemy,” Suleika Jaouad explores the art of journaling and shares everything she’s learned about how this life-altering practice can help us tap into that mystical trait that exists in every human: creativity. She has gathered wisdom from one hundred writers, artists, and thinkers in the form of essays and writing prompts. Their insights invite us to inhabit a more inspired life.
What We Are Reading Today: Pico Iyer’s essay ‘The Joy of Quiet’
Pico Iyer’s essay “The Joy of Quiet” dissects modern life’s paradox: the louder our world grows, the more we crave silence. The essay was first published in 2012 in The New York Times.
With the precision of a cultural surgeon, Iyer — a travel writer famed for his meditative prose — exposes how digital noise erodes human connection, leaving us drowning in a sea of notifications yet thirsting for meaning.
But this isn’t a diatribe against technology; it’s a forensic examination of our collective burnout.
He maps a silent counterrevolution emerging in the unlikeliest corners: Silicon Valley CEOs fleeing to Himalayan monasteries, Amish-inspired “digital sabbaths” trending among younger generations, executives paying to lock away their phones and nations like Bhutan trading gross domestic product for “Gross National Happiness” as radical acts of cultural defiance.
Iyer’s genius lies in reframing silence as an insurgent act of self-preservation. A Kyoto temple’s rock garden becomes a “vacuum of stillness” where fractured minds heal; a tech mogul’s secret retreats — funded by the same wealth that built addictive apps — mock his own industry’s promises of liberation.
The essay’s sharpest insight? Our devices aren’t just distractions but “weapons of mass distraction,” systematically severing us from presence, empathy and the sacred monotony of undivided attention.
Critics might argue Iyer romanticizes privilege (not everyone can jet to a Balinese silent retreat), yet his message transcends class: in an age of algorithmic overload, solitude becomes not a luxury but psychic armor.
He anticipates today’s “attention economy” battleground, where mindfulness apps monetize the very serenity they promise to provide.
His closing warning: “We’ve gone from exalting timesaving devices to fleeing them,” feels prophetic in 2025, as AI chatbots colonize conversation and virtual reality headsets replace eye contact.
Less self-flagellating than Orwell’s colonial reckonings, “The Joy of Quiet” offers no easy answers.
Instead, it dares readers to ask: When every ping demands obedience, what revolution begins with a silenced phone? What if reclaiming our humanity starts not with consuming more but with the radical courage to disappear?
What We Are Reading Today: ‘In Asian Waters’ by Eric Taliacozzo
In the centuries leading up to our own, the volume of traffic across Asian sea routes—an area stretching from East Africa and the Middle East to Japan—grew dramatically, eventually making them the busiest in the world.
The result was a massive circulation of people, commodities, religion, culture, technology, and ideas.
In this book, Eric Tagliacozzo chronicles how the seas and oceans of Asia have shaped the history of the largest continent for the past half millennium, leaving an indelible mark on the modern world in the process.
Book Review: ‘Hope in the Dark’ by Rebecca Solnit
In an era of climate collapse and political upheaval, Rebecca Solnit’s “Hope in the Dark,” first published in 2004 and later updated in 2016, redefines hope not as naivete, but as a radical act of defiance.
Part manifesto, part historical corrective, the book resurrects forgotten victories to prove that progress is often invisible, nonlinear, and collective.
Solnit, a historian and activist, dismantles the myth of powerlessness by spotlighting movements that reshaped history despite seeming futile in their moment.
The Zapatista uprising of 1994, she argues, redefined revolution not as a single explosive event but as a “slow conversation” across generations. The fall of the Berlin Wall — unforeseen by experts — she wrote exposes the fragility of oppressive systems when met with sustained dissent.
Her 2016 update weaves in Black Lives Matter and the Standing Rock protests, framing them as modern iterations of this “subversive hope.”
Central to Solnit’s thesis is the metaphor of darkness, rejecting apocalyptic fatalism: “The future is dark … like the darkness of the womb.”
Hope, for her, is the audacity to act without guarantees, a lesson drawn from anti-nuclear campaigns of the 1980s and post-Katrina mutual-aid efforts like the Common Ground Collective.
Stylistically, Solnit merges lyrical prose with critical urgency. She chastises media narratives that equate activism with failure if immediate victories are not won, noting that the eight-hour workday and abolition of slavery were once deemed impossible.
Her chapters unfold as interconnected essays, blending memoir (her 1980s anti-nuke protests) with global dispatches (Chile’s democratic revival, Ukraine’s Orange Revolution).
Critics may crave more policy prescriptions, but Solnit’s goal is philosophical: to reframe activism as a practice of storytelling, where every protest rewrites the dominant narrative.
The book is not a roadmap but a compass, guiding readers through despair with historical proof that “the impossible is inevitable.”
