Years of bad blood can spur on Real Madrid to give Carlo Ancelotti chance at revenge against Bayern Munich
Carlo Ancelotti said he was on the “good side” of European football’s grandest rivalry and, on the eve of the Champions League semi-final second leg between Real Madrid and Bayern Munich, revealed the Bavarian club did not support him when he was coach.
The Italian, though, insisted he remained friends with Uli Hoeness and Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, the former president and chief executive respectively, and that the Bayern coach, Thomas Tuchel, would think he was on the good side too as the pair prepare for the most tense of ties, which starts level at 2-2. “Today, we enjoy; tomorrow, we will worry,” he said.
Over 34 years as a coach, Ancelotti completed the collection: four European Cups, leagues in Italy, England, France, Spain and Germany, all while working with the biggest footballers and toughest owners too, the game’s greatest egos.
There is a line of his that says a coach’s job is to keep president and players happy and on side, a task he must manage “gently”, which helps explain his success – that unique capacity to handle everyone from Cristiano Ronaldo, Marco van Basten and Zinedine Zidane to Silvio Berlusconi, Roman Abramovich and Nasser al-Khelaifi, Aurelio de Laurentiis, Florentino Pérez and the Bayern grandees.
Occasionally it doesn’t work, even for Ancelotti. Life has not always been perfect in Spain and he was sacked a year after delivering Real Madrid’s 10th European Cup, which had come to obsess them.
But he is back, wildly successful again, and these are the games you coach for, he said. He is happier in Madrid, where he intends to retire, than Munich where he lasted only 14 months, sacked after defeat by Paris Saint-Germain in September 2017 amid reports of divides in the dressing room
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