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The first reaction, outside the madhouse that is Real Madrid, is one of incredulity. Carlo Ancelotti, the manager who won the Champions League last season and might retain it next month, has a fair chance of being sacked by the president, Florentino Pérez. What?! Why? And how?
Welcome to the impossible-to-fathom world of Pérez who has taken expectation levels into a whole new orbit. He appointed Ancelotti at the beginning of last season but, after what had been a fight to get the Italian from Paris Saint-Germain, the impression quickly formed in Madrid that Pérez preferred the chase to the reality of the working relationship.
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He began to chunter behind the scenes and, when that happens, the headlines follow and the manager comes to live a do-or-die existence. Ancelotti’s role in the Copa del Rey final triumph over Barcelona in April of last year barely seemed to register with Pérez and he went into the Champions League final against Atlético Madrid knowing defeat would have spelt the end. Sergio Ramos’ injury-time equaliser kept him in the job before Real eased to the trophy in extra time.
As Ancelotti prepares for the first leg of this season’s Champions League semi-final – against Juventus, the club he once managed, in Turin – the mood music has not changed. If anything the volume has been turned up. Before the quarter-final second leg against Atlético last month there were reports that Ancelotti would be sacked if Real lost. In March there were similar stories 10 days before the league game at Barcelona.
Pérez called a press conference after the pre-clásico controversy to deny the reports, meaning those in attendance were treated to the sight of a president attacking journalists he had surely briefed over a manager he no longer truly believed in. It summed up the contradictions of Pérez’s tenure which have left even the battle-hardened Ancelotti baffled.
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It should be said Real did lose the clásico and Ancelotti remained in situ although it is at the end of the season when his fate is expected to be decided. Zinedine Zidane, the coach of Real’s second team, Castilla, is a leading candidate to take over. At that wacky press conference, Perez said that Ancelotti would stay no matter what happened against Barcelona but he did not say for how long.
Ancelotti’s team finished three points behind the league champions, Atlético, in third place last season – which was considered as abject failure – while they currently sit second, two points off the leaders, Barcelona, with three matches to play.
t is far from inconceivable Ancelotti will win the title and even add another Champions League. Yet uncertainly clings to his prospects.
Ancelotti is hardly a stranger to the cut-throat world of elite-level club football. His dismissal, for example, by Juventus at the end of the 2000-01 season stands as a monument to brutality. The story goes he was sacked during half-time of the final game of the Serie A season, against Atalanta, while the club retained hopes of overhauling Roma and winning the title. In the end they fell short.
Everybody inside the stadium was talking about it but Ancelotti maintains the news was not given to him that day. The bullet was fired 24 hours later when he was informed Marcelo Lippi was on his way back to the club as his successor.
Ancelotti would go on to Milan and achieve his revenge when he beat Lippi and Juventus in the 2003 Champions League final. It was the first of his three Champions League titles as a manager – the second also came with Milan, in 2007 – while he won two as a Milan player in 1989 and 1990.
He was never popular among a section of the Juventus support, who resented him for having been in opposition to them as a player and his two-and-a-bit seasons at the club were testing. “I did have some problems with some fans but what can I say?” Ancelotti said here on Monday night. In Italy, he has long been identified with Milan.
Ancelotti worked under Silvio Berlusconi at Milan and Roman Abramovich at Chelsea – the latter notoriously fired him in a corridor at Goodison Park less than an hour after the final game of the 2010-11 season against Everton. He had won the Premier League and FA Cup double the previous season. Ancelotti, though, has been shocked at how things work at Madrid. Perez has routinely complained about his style of football but there is the sense, from Ancelotti’s side, that there is just no pleasing some people. Or, more precisely, one person.
Part of Ancelotti has had enough and another part of him wants to stay. This Madrid squad, after all, is supremely gifted. But either way the 55-year-old is phlegmatic and he seldom betrays frustration in public. It was no different here. “This is the Champions League,” he said. “If you have courage, you win. If you have fear, you lose.”
Winning is the only thing he can do.
