If Carlo Ancelotti’s glamorous Real Madrid spell does indeed come to an end after the Copa del Rey final, it won’t be the first time the legendary Italian has left at the close.
Reports in Spain suggest that failure against Barcelona this weekend Sevilla will see president Florentino Perez wield his axe with five LaLiga games still to play.
It would be a sorry end for Ancelotti, the record Champions League winner who took his total to five in the Spanish capital before a premature exit to Arsenal in the quarter-finals this season.
A sacking after defeat to Barcelona would be particularly brutal too, given that they only trail their Clasico rivals by four points in LaLiga, and have a head-to-head still to play during the run in.
Yet big clubs and serial winners don’t hang around, as Ancelotti knows all too well from the start of his coaching career at Juventus.
One of Italy’s greats as a player, Ancelotti retired as a two-time European Cup winner at Milan in 1992 and after three years as an assistant with the national team he took the hotseat at Reggiana, earning promotion to Serie A.
He then took former side Parma to second and the Champions League, and although it was clear he was the country’s best up-and-coming coach, nothing could’ve prepared him for his next job – Juventus.
Having left Parma with a sixth-place finish in 1998, Ancelotti had six months on the sidelines before getting itchy feet and agreeing to go and meet Turkish giants Fenerbahce.
There was a twist, though, when a surprise number popped up on his phone.
“Luciano Moggi [Juventus’ general manager] called me the day before my three-day trip to Turkey to meet Fenerbahce.
“He said: ‘Before you commit to anything, call me. We’ll meet when you get back’. I thought he wanted to ask me about a player. As soon as I evaded the Turkish team’s guard, I called him and we had a secret meeting.
“I followed a car to the house of Antonio Giraudo [Juve CEO], Moggi and Antonio Bettega [vice president] were also there, the Triad in the flesh.
Ancelotti arrived in Juve when no one expected itGetty“’Do you want to manage Juve?’ they asked me. ‘Don’t you have [Marcelo] Lippi? He’s the best,’ I replied. ‘He’s not happy here, and we’ve thought about you.’ Within a few hours, we signed the contract, which they handwrote in 23 lines on a sheet of paper.”
Offered the chance to stay in his homeland and coach the country’s winningest team going was too much to resist for Ancelotti, even if he was on a hiding to nothing as Lippi had won three Serie A titles and the Champions League in the previous years.
Yet that wasn’t even the biggest issue – Ancelotti’s past was. As a Roma, Parma and Milan legend, the boy from the south he was never going to quite fit in at Juve in the posh north, and fans made sure he knew that straight away.
“In my first week in Turin, I was driving to the office and in the middle of Piazza Crimea there was an obelisk that someone had spray-painted: ‘A pig can’t coach’,” Ancelotti remembered.
“Moggi was waiting for me with the Juve hooligans. ‘You have to make peace with Ancelotti,’ he told them.
“I played in the 1980s for Roma and our rival was Juve. When I was at Milan, our main enemy was Juve. Then I coached Parma and our rival for the Scudetto was Juve…
“They could only see me as an enemy. And that’s it. It’s something I couldn’t change and it didn’t change.”
A ‘pig’ quite clearly could coach, though, and Ancelotti finished runner-up in his first season which objectively was par, but not subjectively for a club where winning is all that mattered.
The next season things got worse. A man now synonymous with the Champions League was knocked out in the first group stage for Juve’s earliest exit and only a title win could save him.
Heading into the finale with that goal still attainable, Juve and Ancelotti needed a slip up from Sven-Goran Eriksson’s Roma but it didn’t come.
In fact, his old side were 2-0 up at half time against Parma, and that’s when the press release arrived that Ancelotti had been sacked during his half-time team talk.
“The reason for Ancelotti’s departure is that it is difficult to work in a city where the great part of the fans and the press are against you,” president Umberto Agnelli explained.
Ancelotti’s final months were traumaticGettySpeaking post-match, Ancelotti admitted: “I won’t hide that I am sorry about a decision that is hard to digest.
“I am very sad with this decision after all the points we have gained this season. I am proud that we were here with a chance of the title on the final day, but I want to look to the future calmly now.”
Later, he revealed he had even more reason to be upset, as he’d been informed of the decision before the game despite having just signed a contract extension.
“When they made the decision to get rid of me, they didn’t have the courage to tell me,” Ancelotti recalled. “I found out from the sports journalists in Turin.
“’You’re a dead man, the next coach is Lippi,’ they kept telling me. I couldn’t believe it; they had just renewed my contract…
“My relationship with Juve was a love affair that never began. We were too different. I was a small-town boy, they were businessmen in suits. A Swatch watch versus a Rolex. Plastic versus gold…”
The legend quite liked his SwatchGetty And got revenge on Juve fans anywayGettyAs it turned out, the new millennium preferred a Swatch as Ancelotti proved to be coaching gold.
Returning to old side Milan he beat Juve in the 2003 Champions League final and although they twice finished runners up to the Old Lady, those titles were wiped from the record books due to the Calciopoli match fixing scandal.
Juve wouldn’t win another Champions League, while Ancelotti would win five, two with Milan and three with Madrid.
Ahead of one of their meetings in 2015, he made it clear how bad that stint was, and why even if Perez brutally sacks him this weekend, it will never compare to his Juve trauma.
“I never liked Turin. Too glamorous, a couple of galaxies away from my lifestyle. Move over posh kids, here comes the fat guy with his tortellini,” he said.
“Juventus is a team I never loved and probably never will. It was a new ecosystem for me, and I was never comfortable. I was just a cog in the machine…”
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