Carlo Ancelotti to Brazil is confirmation of Italy’s peerless coaching heritage

Maybe it won’t truly sink in until Carlo Ancelotti slips his feet into the warm sand of Ipanema, a cigar — perhaps the same brand he once shared with Vinicius Junior — smouldering as the sun sets over Rio de Janeiro.

Over the past two decades, Ancelotti has become a global figure of the global game, to the point where it’s easy to forget his origin story — a tale that feels almost 19th-century in nature: the son of a farmer from Reggiolo, Italy, setting off to build a better life in South America.

That’s what Vicente Feola’s family did, too. The father of Brazil’s first World Cup-winning coach in 1958 came from Castellabate, a beautiful hilltop village down from the Amalfi coast. He left, as many other Italians did, for Sao Paulo, the city with the largest population with Italian ancestry in the world.

The cultural ties between Italy and Brazil are profound and yet, in football terms, whenever they have played one another, the game has been framed as a clash of civilisations. In the football canon, they are supposed to be polar opposites — winning ugly versus the beautiful game. Success by different means.

This year, old and already outmoded stereotypes have been turned on their heads.

It began with Ajax appointing Roberto De Zerbi’s former assistant, Francesco Farioli, as coach. Not enough was made of that at the time. Ajax — the club of Johan Cruyff, who identified himself as diametrically opposed to Italian football with quips like: “Italians can’t beat you, but you can lose to them” — turned to an Italian not to change who they are, but to make them Ajax again.

Whether the football Ajax have played has constituted a revival or not, it was a pinch-yourself moment for Italian football, as the hierarchy in Amsterdam looked at the 36-year-old from Tuscany and recognised itself in him.

The Brazilian Football Federation has done the same with Ancelotti. “An Italian will teach the game to the Gods of football,” Luigi Garlando wrote in Gazzetta dello Sport.

On the one hand, this should not come as a surprise. The most successful nation in international football has turned to the most successful coach in club football.

Ancelotti is not the first foreigner to manage Brazil’s national team, and although they have not gone non-native since Nelson Ernesto Filpo Nunez, an Argentinian, in 1965, Brazilian football was — at club level, at least — trending in this direction.

Brazilian teams have contested seven of the past eight finals in the Copa Libertadores — South America’s equivalent of the Champions League. Four have won under Portuguese coaches: Jorge Jesus, Abel Ferreira (twice) and Artur Jorge. Wolves’ Vitor Pereira also recently had spells with Corinthians and Flamengo. As such, when Brazil decided to go for a non-Brazilian for the first time in 60 years, it was perhaps a little startling that it was for an Italian — and not one of them.

An Italian! What ruination.

To be clear, that’s not how the great Zico described Ancelotti’s appointment. Nor is it, as a former Udinese player, his actual view of Italian football. Rather, he sees it as the impact of Brazil’s 1982 World Cup defeat to Italy and that Paolo Rossi hat-trick.

That 3-2 loss, which brought elimination at the second group stage, caused Brazil to reflect. They doubted themselves and their style. They felt the need to become less Brazilian and more Italian — tougher, more physical, more ruthless.

“If we had won that match,” Zico told newspaper Corriere della Sera, “football would probably have been different. Instead, after that, we began to lay the foundations for a style of football in which results must be achieved at any cost, a style based on destroying the opponent’s game and systematic foul play.”

In 1994, Brazil won the World Cup final in the United States after a penalty shoot-out. They beat opponents Italy at what they felt was their own game — a tense, nerve-shredding, action-less 120 minutes.

But that wasn’t Italy’s game, as Ancelotti well knows.

His first job in coaching was to serve as Arrigo Sacchi’s assistant at that tournament. Sacchi had been hired to implement his countercultural style to Italy — the high-pressing, on-the-front-foot, winning-isn’t-enough-on-its-own mentality of his era-defining and immortal Milan side.

Ancelotti saw Brazil win the World Cup in North America in 1994, now his job is to ensure a repeat (Alessandro Sabattini/Getty Images)

Although it was never translated to the national team, it goes to show that the stereotypes about both football cultures were as dead then as they are ahead of another World Cup in North America next year.

In an age of globalisation (albeit one in apparent retrenchment), styles that once developed in isolation have now largely converged.

If Ancelotti’s Italianness has been overlooked in the coverage of this appointment, it may be because — more than any of his peers — he has come to embody the role of a global citizen. He is as comfortable talking about walking along the beach in Crosby, during his time as Everton manager, as Copacabana.

After Italy failed to qualify for the previous World Cup in 2022, he supported Canada instead, having spent time in the homeland of his wife, Mariann — bear-watching and salmon-fishing — while between jobs.

A coach who has won all five of Europe’s top domestic leagues, Ancelotti has adapted to every context, every culture. A man of the world, a man for every circumstance, it’s not just what he knows, it’s the way he connects. It’s the fact he relates and how he relates.

While it is odd that a man who has written whole books about tactics, has reinvented players, and has balanced unbalanced teams in novel formations (the Christmas Tree) is often thought of as light on tactics, it is this ability to relate — through experience, in a calm and understated but charismatic manner — that makes the difference.

You feel it in his presence, which is why if you’re not in his office, at the training ground, and in the dressing room, some — from a distance — find it hard to put their finger on what makes him great.

Have no doubts, Ancelotti will feel as at home in Brazil as in Italy. He is a polyglot who likes to say that of all the languages he speaks (four), it’s his native tongue which is getting worse.

Far more than catenaccio — a methodology ingrained by Helenio Herrera, an Argentine-Moroccan, at Inter in the 1960s — what is innately Italian is the ability to bring Italy to the world.

Call it the Marco Polo element or the Xeneizes streak (Buenos Aires dialect for the Genovese immigrants who settled there and founded Boca Juniors): Italians export themselves and one of their greatest exports is coaching. At the European Championship last summer, five of the 24 competing nations were managed by Italians. More Italian coaches have won the Premier League title than any other nationality.

Brazil, by contrast, exports players like no other country in the world. Ancelotti joining Brazil is therefore a case of two great producers joining forces — one compensating for the other’s deficits.

Italy no longer produces players like Brazil does. One of the theories behind this is that Italian kids have the football coached out of them too soon — by the next class of wannabe Ancelottis — when Ancelotti himself has always tried not to get in the way of talent.

Ancelotti has won the Champions League five times as a manager and twice as a player (Alex Pantling/Getty Images)

Brazil, meanwhile, no longer produces coaches like Italy, perhaps because the opposite dynamic is occurring — coaches don’t coach, for fear of curbing the instincts of the next Vinicius Jr or Endrick.

By the same token, the success of Jesus at Flamengo and Ferreira at Palmeiras sparked a trend of hiring Portuguese coaches. While it may have initially filled a gap in Brazilian coaching talent, the fashion for them could now be obstructing pathways. Until the next Mario Zagallo or Luiz Felipe Scolari emerges, Brazil will have to make do with arguably the greatest manager of all time.

After reaching three consecutive World Cup finals in 1994, 1998 and 2002, Brazil haven’t won the tournament in nearly a quarter of a century and have now hired a European to, in part, help ensure they stop being eliminated by European nations; some of which — take Belgium, for instance (best not to mention Croatia) — have a smaller population than Sao Paulo.

Ancelotti is also the European who knows Brazil’s best players better than anyone and handles the uber-talented like nobody else on the planet.

If he ends that wait and adds the World Cup to all those league titles, as well as the five Champions Leagues he has won as a coach to go with his two as a player, a football man who should already be recognised as standing above everyone else will be on the shoulders of Christ the Redeemer atop Corcovado.

An Italian in charge of Ajax?! An Italian in charge of Brazil?! Football worlds have collided, yet the last time anyone checked, the Earth is still turning like nothing has happened.

Maybe because these football worlds aren’t too different after all.

(Top photo: Fran Santiago/Getty Images)

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