If you were asked to imagine an archetypal Champions League match for someone who has never seen European football before, there’s a good chance your two managers would be Pep Guardiola and Carlo Ancelotti. Guardiola versus Ancelotti, more than any other possible combination, is pure Champions League.
Guardiola and Ancelotti are two of four managers to have won (at least) three European Cups as a manager, alongside Bob Paisley and Zinedine Zidane. And while Paisley and Zidane achieved their hat-tricks with just one club – Liverpool and Real Madrid – this duo covers a larger part of the continent.
Guardiola won two with Barcelona and one with Manchester City, Ancelotti won two each with AC Milan and Real Madrid. It also doesn’t take into account Guardiola’s three semi-final appearances with Bayern Munich, nor Ancelotti’s history in this competition with Parma, Juventus, Chelsea, Paris Saint-Germain, Bayern and Napoli. These are the two coaches with the most Champions League wins as coaches overall. Oh, and they also both won the European Cup as players.
The funny thing is that this is an almost purely continental rivalry. They have only succeeded once simultaneously in the same league, when Ancelotti spent 18 months in charge of Everton, who he guided to mid-table. In other words, they never fought for a title, so no real rivalry emerged.
What’s interesting about their relationship is that, whereas once they would have been placed at one end of the spectrum in football’s ideological debate, they now seem very different. This is partly because they have changed, but it is more because the debate has changed.
In the 2000s, European football was largely defensive, concerned with form, structure and sporadic counter-attacks. José Mourinho and Rafa Benitez then felt like the managers who defined the Champions League.
In contrast, Ancelotti’s Milan team felt like an exception. He was desperate to accommodate as many playmakers as possible in midfield – at a time when others were looking to destroyers and playmakers. Ancelotti fielded Andrea Pirlo, Clarence Seedorf and Kaka in the same midfield. diamond plot, and sometimes used Rui Costa and turned him into a Christmas tree.
When Guardiola was interviewed by The Times of London in 2004, he lamented the absence of deep-lying playmakers in the game – there were hardly any midfielders who reminded him of his own style of play. “The only that I see today is Pirlo,” he said. Guardiola once replaced Pirlo. The Italian had been transformed into a deep-lying midfielder, from previously being seen as a number 10, during a loan spell at Brescia. When Pirlo moved to Milan, Brescia brought in Guardiola to play this important role.
And when Guardiola became manager, of course, he set out to redress the balance and popularize the concept of the passing midfielder. Xavi and Andres Iniesta, who just won Euro 2008 with Spain, have reached new heights. Sergio Busquets was trained by Guardiola as the Guardiola figure, playing in front of the defense. Without an energetic destroyer in the mold of Gennaro Gattuso, Guardiola’s Barcelona midfield was even more technical than Ancelotti’s Milan midfield. The two managers who most kept the concept of the deep-lying playmaker – and possession football in general – alive were these two.
This vision actually won the day. Now almost every top team insists on dominating possession. Things have evolved; Pressing has been repopularized, although in part it is to regain possession as quickly as possible. No matter how you look at it, every good team is supposed to maintain possession and try to dominate the game. Deep defense and counter-attacking is, at the highest level, almost dead as a default strategy.
Now the debate is less about whether you want to dominate possession and more about the level of freedom players are given. Guardiola’s emphasis on positional play in attack is evident, and his Manchester City team has been defined as much by established patterns of play as by the brilliance of its individuals. You think of wingers crossing to finish at the far post, or City players separating their opponents to create space for Kevin De Bruyne to burst into.
There is a certain familiarity to City’s attacking play – that’s not to say it’s easy to stop him, but some neutral players have started to tire of him, especially now that Guardiola’s team is based around a penalty box attacker, Erling Haaland, who needs service.
It’s tempting to wonder what Guardiola would do with the 2024 era if he had a talent like Lionel Messi at his disposal. He gave Messi the freedom to express himself and move as he pleased at Barcelona, but that was ten years ago, and Guardiola’s approach has apparently become even stricter: there are even more constraints for its attackers.
It’s surprising how often City’s attacking players, seemingly often in the form of their lives, simply leave the club. We get the feeling that they want to experience a certain level of pleasure. Jack Grealish has gone from an unpredictable box of tricks to something more functional – and while he’s not the first to undergo this type of transformation, it’s questionable whether he’s actually any more effective.
Ancelotti gives his players more freedom, although what is interesting is the extent to which he has turned back. His early coaching days focused on a strict 4-4-2 with very rigid and defined roles for the attackers. It was more about their game without possession than with it, but Ancelotti sold Gianfranco Zola and turned down the option to sign Roberto Baggio at Parma because he couldn’t accommodate a number 10 in his system. “I was Ancelotti, the anti-imagination,” he once recalled.
Ancelotti’s radical overhaul came when he coached Zidane at Juventus and realized that a player of that quality needed to break free from a system. It wasn’t always possible to get the best out of Zidane or his teammates. Indeed, Zidane’s freedom was more suited to his years playing for the Galacticos in Madrid, and while that specific era was ultimately disappointing, it helped create an ethos that has endured: the emphasis on empowerment individuals.
Madrid is more about the players than the coaches and, of course, Zidane and Ancelotti, each for two spells as coach, have proven to be perfect because they don’t micromanage too much.
Ancelotti’s Madrid is not as consistent as Guardiola’s City. But in Vinicius Junior, Rodrygo and Jude Bellingham, they have three players who can turn a game around single-handedly with a moment of magic, probably more than any of City’s players, when it comes to De Bruyne and Phil Foden in shape. . There is more alternation of positions in attack, more examples of players popping up where no one expects them.
This will be the third consecutive season that these managers will meet in the knockout stages of the Champions League. Ancelotti’s Madrid won 6-5 on aggregate in an end-to-end draw two years ago, while Guardiola’s City won 5-1 last season. This corresponds to the difference between the two: Ancelotti’s teams know how to improvise better, Guardiola’s have learned to follow a very particular (and very successful) script.
(Top photos: Getty Images)