Legendary head coach Carlo Ancelotti has written about his time in the Bundesliga in his soon-to-be-published memoirs. Sport Bild – having obtained an advanced copy of the book – published some excerpts relevant to Ancelotti’s time with Bayern Munich. Interestingly enough, Ancelotti’s book is entitled “The Dream: How to win the Champions League“. It happened to be Ancelotti’s poor performance in this competition that led to his dismissal at Bayern.
Ancelotti only coached the German record champions for one full season. Though the Italian was able to lead Bayern to their fifth consecutive Bundesliga title string the 2016/17 campaign, Tomas Tuchel’s Borussia Dortmund eliminated Bayern in the DFB-Pokal semi-finals and ultimately took Germany’s domestic cup that year. Bayern were also eliminated in the Champions League quarterfinals by one of Ancelotti’s former clubs, Real Madrid.
Another bad loss against one of Ancelotti’s other former clubs, PSG, led to Ancelotti’s sacking in September 2017. The Italian legend’s Bayern coaching appointment lasted just 14 months and 60 competitive fixtures. The only other shorter coaching tenure Ancelotti ever experienced in his long and storied career was his initial one. The now 66-year-old coached 41 fixtures during 11 months in charge of AC Reggiana 1919 in his native Italy in the mid 90s.
His time at Bayern being so short meant that the Bundesliga club did not receive their own chapter. Ancelotti nevertheless goes into some depth about the fateful PSG match that ended up earning his the axe. Ancelotti opted to bench both Arjen Robben and Franck Ribery ahead of the match at Parc des Princes on September 27th, 2017. Robben wouldn’t enter the match until after PSG went up 3-0 in the 63rd-minute. Ribery remained on the bench throughout.
“Against Paris Saint-Germain, I decided to do without our aging wingers and let our defenders move further up the field whilst we focused mainly on centralized attacks,” Ancelotti writes. “It was a mistake. The balance wasn’t right. Accordingly, they were able rattle us with their counterattacks. They scored their first goal in the second minute. The final scoreline of 0-3 was Bayern’s heaviest defeat in the competition in 21 years.”
Ancelotti notes how different an experience it was to work with a fan-owned club such as Bayern, yet also reveals how this purportedly “different” managerial structure ended up leading to a familiar outcome. The Italian coach reviews an anecdote he has shared publicly before about how Bayern management seems to with to treat its players more like young children.
“Once, the bosses asked me to ensure greater discipline among the players and handed me a list of five points that I was to read out to them,” Ancelotti writes. “In my opinion, however, we were dealing with a top-class professional team and not a youth team. So I stood in front of the team in the locker room, took the piece of paper out of my pocket and said, ‘I have orders from the board to read this list to you.’ That was my way of distancing myself from the task.”
“I was accountable to several different people at Bayern,” Ancelotti writes. “Whenever things got heated in the media, I noticed a big difference in this job. What was completely new to me was working for a club that wasn’t ruled by the whims of a single charismatic owner. Instead, there was a diverse group of shareholders, while legendary former players traditionally called the shots at the club’s management level.
“I’ve now been fired four times by big clubs: Juventus, Chelsea, Real Madrid, and Bayern Munich,” Ancelotti goes on to say. “This demonstrates that you don’t need an erratic president or unpredictable owner to get the sack. Shareholders in a company can do that too.
While Ancelotti does say that the Bayern sacking was the “most ruthless dismissal of my career“, there’s plenty of passages in which he shows some understanding of why it came. Ancelotti makes clear that he understood what the parameters of the job were.
“We outpaced the competition in the Bundesliga that season [2016/17], finishing fifteen points ahead [of RB Leipzig] and thus five points more than Pep [Guardiola] had put between his team and the second-placed team in the table in the previous two years,” Ancelotti recalls. “This was nevertheless not considered a success at Bayern. It counted as meeting the bare minimum of expectations.“
