Carlo Ancelotti deserved his cigar. He had just won the Spanish league title and became the first man ever to claim championships in what have widely been considered to be the five top European leagues. If his Real Madrid can overcome a 4–3 first-leg deficit at home to Manchester City on Wednesday and then beat Liverpool in Paris later this month, he will become the first coach ever to win four Champions League titles. These are remarkable achievements, and yet there is a sense that Ancelotti is regarded less as an elite manager than as a manager of elite players.
In part, it’s an issue of style. Ancelotti is not an ideologue. It’s very hard to say what an Ancelotti team looks like. He has never taken over a club and transformed it into an avatar of his vision of football in the way that, say, Pep Guardiola or Jürgen Klopp have done. He impressed at Parma, and his stint at Everton looks rather better in retrospect than it did at the time, but what he is good at is taking over a major club and coaxing the players to their best form.
That players tend to love him is not in doubt. That photograph of him with the cigar came from Vinicius Junior’s Twitter account and was captioned “The BOSS.”
