Advertisement League of Ireland Horse Racing TV Listings GAA Fixtures The Video Review Behind the Lines Sportswriters discuss their careers and the work that inspires them. Rugby Weekly Extra Dive into all the news and analysis 3 times a week The Football Family Weekly insights from the week’s big talking points Advertisement More Stories Carlo Ancelotti, head coach of Real Madrid, gestures during the UEFA Champions League 2024/25 League Round of 16 First Leg match.Alamy Stock Photo In a world of Amorims and Guardiola imitators, why is Europe's most successful coach still underappreciated? Despite the most trophies in Champions League history, Carlo Ancelotti remains underrated. 10.36pm, 4 Mar 2025 Share options Paul Fennessy IT IS almost 14 years since arguably the peak of one of football’s great teams. The impact of Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona, leading to a dazzling 3-1 triumph over Man United in 2011 Champions League final, cannot be overstated. Football historians may perceive the ensuing decade and a half as the ‘Guardiola era’. The Catalan coach’s dogmatic style, which was itself heavily indebted to Johan Cruyff and his ideas about the game, changed the face of football. You can see his influence everywhere nowadays. In the Premier League, it is particularly palpable. While it would be an exaggeration to describe the likes of Ruben Amorim, Ange Postecoglou and Arne Slot as copying Guardiola, the current Man City boss paved the way for many of his rivals’ hallmarks and insistence on a very specific, non-negotiable style of football. Even some of the weakest teams in the English top flight have tried a very adventurous, somewhat Guardiola-esque approach. Yet teams like Ipswich and Southampton have been accused of being naive and overly ambitious by expecting results while adhering to such a pleasing aesthetic. Guardiola himself has started to struggle of late. After years of magnificent success and four successive Premier League titles, this season at Man City has been an unmitigated disaster. The Etihad outfit are facing a fight to secure Champions League football next season following a series of indifferent Premier League results. And unusually, Guardiola and co were forced to watch Europe’s premier club competition from their sofas tonight, as the team that easily beat them in the last round, Real Madrid, took on Diego Simeone’s Atletico. Some pundits might have expected Barcelona and Guardiola to dominate European football after that unforgettable 2011 triumph. Yet manager and club alike have only won one Champions League trophy since then. If anything, Barcelona’s 2011 win seemed to galvanise their great rivals Real. In the ensuing period, Madrid have won the Champions League trophy six times, taking their tally to a record 15 overall. Advertisement Ancelotti has been Real manager for three of those triumphs, and his additional two victories with AC Milan make him the most successful manager in the history of the Champions League/European Cup. The current incarnation of Ancelotti’s Real feel like the antithesis to that Barca 2011 side. In comparison to the midfield of Xavi, Sergio Busquets and Andrés Iniesta, Real tonight had a much more physical central duo of Eduardo Camavinga and Aurélien Tchouaméni. The more wily and creative Luka Modric tends to be reduced to cameo roles these days owing to his age (39). Guardiola’s teams at their best tend to dominate big games, whereas that is not the case with Ancelotti’s Real. Tonight, against Atletico was a prime example. After a blistering start and a brilliantly taken Rodrygo goal, they sat back. Atletico looked the better team for long spells, particularly during the first half. But after Julian Alvarez’s equaliser, a sublime Brahim Diaz effort out of nothing put Real back in control of the tie. It was not one for the purists, but the Spanish giants got over the line as they usually do. Real Madrid take the lead against the run of play 📈 Brilliant footwork from Brahim Díaz opens up the angle for a brilliant curling effort 👏 📺 @tntsports & @discoveryplusUK pic.twitter.com/aDCdVLeaDe— Football on TNT Sports (@footballontnt) March 4, 2025 Ancelotti showed his underrated tactical nous, bringing on the veteran Modric in the dying minutes to give Real more control in midfield and see out the win. Based on their performances this season, Real deservedly are among the favourites to prevail, and secure what would be a remarkable sixth trophy for Ancelotti. Given his unprecedented success in football’s biggest and best competition, it seems pertinent to ask why it has been Guardiola rather than Ancelotti who has by far been football’s most influential figure in the last 10 years. Perhaps it is because it is possible to replicate Guardiola’s style if not his brilliant players. In comparison, Ancelotti, to put it bluntly, has no definitive style. He is the anti-Guardiola in that sense. He picks his team based on the situation and the capabilities of his players, rather than demanding to always play a certain way. Ancelotti summed up his philosophy ahead of last year’s semi-final clash with Bayern Munich. “The most important role is never that of the coach,” he said. “I am very clear that there are two types of coaches: those who do nothing and those who do a lot of damage. I try to be in the first group. The game belongs to the players and you can tell them a certain strategy, convince them, but then the determining factor is their quality and commitment. A coach has to focus on making the group understand the importance of teamwork.” Many coaches such as Guardiola are footballing obsessives who impose their style on players and teams. Ancelotti, by contrast, is perhaps the closest thing in football to an ego-free manager working at the top level. There were traces of a more dogmatic boss in the younger version of Ancelotti. He was initially influenced by another great Italian coach, Arrigo Sacchi. But at Parma, his Sacchi-inspired, rigid 4-4-2, failed to properly accommodate and get the most out of creative players like Gianfranco Zola, Hristo Stoichkov and Roberto Baggio. His relative lack of success there — Parma were one of the few clubs where he failed to win a major trophy — seems to have had a seminal effect. At his next team, Juventus, Ancelotti changed his favoured system to a 3-4-1-2 system in order to accommodate a young Zinedine Zidane in the playmaker role. This more pliable style has served Ancelotti well to put it mildly, given that he is still managing at the elite level more than a quarter of a century later, even if the Juve stint itself was not an unequivocal success. The laidback tendencies have sometimes worked against Ancelotti, admittedly. Particularly at Milan, there was tension between owner Silvio Berlusconi’s demands for attacking football and the manager’s more pragmatic instincts — that partly explains why he was on the wrong end of one of the most famous Champions League finals ever, surrendering a 3-0 lead against Liverpool in 2005, which remains the only climactic match in the competition that Ancelotti has lost, reaching a record of six showdowns. The fact that he is the only manager to win league titles in all of Europe’s top five leagues is another indicator of his still somewhat underappreciated greatness. But perhaps the most instructive spell of Ancelotti’s career has been at easily the worst team he has managed in recent seasons. Between 2019 and 2021, the Italian was in charge of Everton. He presided over 12th and 10th-place finishes with the English club. In three seasons since his departure, the Toffees have come 16th, 17th and 15th, suggesting they were overachieving under the prestigious coach. Ancelotti’s relative success at the Goodison Park outfit was not because he revolutionised the style of football and drastically changed the way Everton played. Instead, he adapted to this somewhat unfamiliar situation relatively seamlessly, like the great football chameleon he has proven himself to be throughout his career. Perhaps there is another lesson there for the Ruben Amorims of this world. 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