Legends & Lessons

The Diva Whisperer: What Carlo Ancelotti Can Teach Every Leader

Before a Champions League tie against Manchester City in 2024, Jude Bellingham caught Carlo Ancelotti yawning on the bench and asked if he was tired. Ancelotti told him to go out and excite him. Bellingham described the effect afterwards: “As a man, he just fills you with calmness and confidence.” Real Madrid drew City in the second leg, held the reigning champions across extra time, and won on penalties.

That exchange is Carlo Ancelotti man management in a single sentence. No tactics lecture, no theatrics, just a coach who has handled Cristiano Ronaldo, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Andrea Pirlo, Kaka and Luka Modric telling a 20-year-old to relax and enjoy himself minutes before one of the biggest games of his life.

Ancelotti has been doing some version of this for thirty years, across AC Milan, Chelsea, Paris Saint-Germain, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich and Napoli. He has won league titles in England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain, and lifted the Champions League a record number of times. Players who clashed with almost every other manager they worked with became loyal and productive under him. The reasons are worth understanding, because most of them have very little to do with football.

Lesson 1: Manage the Person, Not the Role

The foundation of Carlo Ancelotti man management is almost embarrassingly simple: he spoke to his players every day, about them, not about tactics.

At the Globe Soccer Awards in December 2024, Ronaldo put it plainly: “Man management is very important and Carlo Ancelotti is one of the best at it. It’s not a coincidence that he’s extremely successful.” Nine years earlier, speaking to ESPN in 2015, he had described his old manager in warmer terms. He admitted he had expected Ancelotti to be tough and arrogant and found the opposite: “He’s like a big bear, I can say. He’s a cute guy, such a sensitive person. He spoke with us every day. Not just with me but with all the players. He had fun with us.”

Kaka, who played under Ancelotti at AC Milan for six seasons, told Sky Sports in 2020 that the man management was the thing that set him apart: “You have a squad of 25 players and you can only put 11 on the field. What are you going to do with the others? How are you going to keep them motivated? He knew how to do that.”

Ancelotti manages the person and lets the role follow. He works out what someone needs before deciding how to handle them, which is why the approach that works on Ronaldo would have driven Pirlo out of the room. The most talented people in any organisation are also the easiest to lose to someone who treats them better, so the daily, individual attention is not a soft add-on. It is the thing that makes every other decision land.

Lesson 2: Deliver Hard Feedback Yourself, Never Through Someone Else

When Andrea Pirlo arrived at AC Milan in 2001, he was an attacking midfielder. Ancelotti decided he was in the wrong position and moved him to the base of the midfield, building the deep-lying playmaker role, the “regista”, that Pirlo made his own. In that position Pirlo won the Champions League in 2003 and 2007 and the World Cup with Italy in 2006, and became one of the defining midfielders of his generation.

Pirlo’s verdict, given to La Gazzetta dello Sport in 2015: “It’s like rediscovering your father again. He changed my career, putting me in front of the defence. We shared some unforgettable moments.” To reach that point, Ancelotti had to tell a professional footballer, recently signed from a rival club, that the role he had played for years was not the one that suited him. He had built enough trust first that Pirlo took it as a gift rather than a demotion.

At Real Madrid, Ronaldo wanted to play wide on the left. Ancelotti thought he was more dangerous through the middle, but adjusted the system to let Ronaldo play where he wanted and worked with him from there. He disagreed with his best player and still chose the relationship over winning the argument.

Set that against Ibrahimovic’s account of Guardiola at Barcelona. After a row over a substitution, Guardiola sent an assistant to explain the decision rather than fronting up himself. Chris Brady, who co-wrote Ancelotti’s book Quiet Leadership, interviewed Ibrahimovic about the contrast: “What Zlatan said was interesting. He said, ‘I’ve had coaches who are slightly better at certain things, but he’s the best coach, because he’s the best at football and he’s the best man.’ Carlo would explain why players were dropped, and was very open. He likes people being men.”

Deliver hard feedback yourself. Not through HR, not through a colleague, not in an email. Sending someone else to do it tells a high performer that your own comfort matters more than their dignity, and that is the fastest way to lose their respect for good.

Lesson 3: The Cardboard Box

Composure is central to Carlo Ancelotti man management. Players describe his touchline manner as almost detached, and he rarely raises his voice.

The exception came at PSG in 2013. The team were playing badly, and Ancelotti walked into the dressing room at halftime furious, swearing in Italian, and kicked a cardboard box that flew across the room and hit Ibrahimovic in the head. Ibrahimovic brushed it off and played better in the second half.

His former assistant Paul Clement told the Daily Mail how it landed: “It was like slow motion. It flew through the air and hit him. And Zlatan just brushed it off. There are times when some players do want that bit of anger. Zlatan liked it when the box hit him. He respected that. You wouldn’t have guessed it from the look on his face, but yes, he loved that.”

A leader who is always calm can eventually lose the room, because composure with no variation starts to read as indifference. When someone who is almost never angry finally shows it, the room pays attention. Ancelotti losing his temper once across hundreds of matches carried weight precisely because it was so rare. A founder who runs every meeting at the same high intensity trains the team to discount it, so the urgency that should signal a crisis gets filed under normal. Being calm by default and showing real feeling once tells people that this moment, specifically, matters more than the others.

Lesson 4: Take the Blame in Public, Give Away the Credit

Ancelotti has been sacked by Chelsea, Bayern Munich, Napoli and Everton, and has also won titles in five different countries and returned to Real Madrid to win more. His pattern after matches does not change with the result. After defeats he takes responsibility and keeps players’ mistakes out of the press. After big wins he moves into the background and talks about the squad, the staff and the club. When Real Madrid won La Liga and the Champions League in 2022, his press conferences were about the players rather than his own tactics.

Pirlo again: “Carlo is a friend, a great person. He’s an outstanding coach, who treats his players well and is well-liked inside the dressing room.”

Players perform for a manager they believe is on their side, and nothing removes that belief faster than a boss who takes the credit when things go well and points at others when they do not. Both moves are obvious to everyone in the building, and both are remembered longer than any single decision.

Lesson 5: Build the System Around the People You Have

Carlo Ancelotti man management has no signature system attached to it. Ask what Ancelotti football looks like and the honest answer is that it depends entirely on the players he has.

At AC Milan he built around Pirlo’s ability to run the game from deep. At Chelsea he adapted to the directness of the English game. In his first Real Madrid spell he played a 4-3-3 so Ronaldo could operate from the left, even though he believed Ronaldo was more dangerous centrally. In his second spell he built something different again around Vinicius Junior and Bellingham, using Bellingham as a goalscoring midfielder pushing off the front line, a role Bellingham had never played before and turned into 23 goals in his debut season.

Guardiola has a system, and players who cannot fit it tend to be sold. Ancelotti has people, and the system fits around them. Both approaches win trophies. One of them produces more players who talk about their manager the way Pirlo, Ronaldo, Kaka and Ibrahimovic do.

The common mistake at a growing company is to hire talented people and force them straight into structures built before they arrived. The instinct to systematise is sometimes right, but the better move is to watch and understand first. You earn the right to reshape someone’s role by showing you understand what they can already do.

The Real Reason “Go Out and Excite Me” Worked

“Go out and excite me” worked on Bellingham because of everything that sat behind it. It worked because every player had been spoken to individually, as a person rather than a position. It worked because they had watched him take blame in public and hand out credit in private, because he delivered hard news to their faces, and because in a career of hundreds of matches he had lost his composure so rarely that the one flying cardboard box became a story players tell fondly.

When someone who has earned your trust tells you to relax, you relax. When someone who has not tells you the same thing, you hear noise. That is the quiet engine of Carlo Ancelotti man management, earned over decades, one relationship at a time.