Carlo Ancelotti is heading out of Real Madrid, and Los Blancos’ managerial position is increasingly looking more and more like the Defense Against The Dark Arts position at Hogwarts. With Ancelotti’s exit, Real Madrid have gone through 8 managers since December of 2004, with none lasting longer than 3 years. Rough, but at least it’s not a matter of life and death.
At the official press conference confirming Ancelotti’s exit, Real Madrid coach Florentino Perez was clear about his reason for firing Ancelotti.
"It was a very difficult decision to make; the demands at this club are the utmost because Madrid always wants to win silverware.”
Although, he made no ventures into guessing what exactly went wrong for arguably the most successful coach of the past decade.
"What did Ancelotti do wrong? I don't know. The demands here at Real Madrid are very high."
This is all very expected in a most cynical kind of way. Ancelotti is arguably one of the most successful Managers in Real Madrid’s entire history. His 74.79% winning percentage in his two years in charge is second only to Manuel Pellegrini in the past decade, and third all time in the entire history of Real Madrid — he would be second all time if not for a 1-0-0 record posted by Vicente del Bosque during an interim spell all the way back in 1996. Ancelotti’s 4 trophies in that time are more than any other manager in the past decade — including Jose Mourinho — and he even won Real the one trophy it had spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars chasing: La Decima, Real Madrid’s 10th Champions League Trophy. So when Perez says that he doesn’t know what Ancelotti did wrong, rest assured he meant in a managerial sense, and not in terms of Ancelotti’s additions to the trophy closet.
Perez has no idea how or why a manager loses the ability to get the utmost out of his players. He knows exactly why he fired Ancelotti. Ancelotti hauled in historic silverware during his time at Real Madrid, but he didn’t do it consistently enough, and that’s what makes this all so expected.
Even though Ancelotti won La Decima. Even though Cristiano Ronaldo sent out an Instagram post professing his hope that Ancelotti would remain Real Madrid’s manager. As soon as Ancelotti ended the second half of this season with a grand total of zero trophies since his Club World Cup, he was going to be fired.
Real Madrid buy the best players, the biggest names, and in doing so they command the closest thing to a brand of perfection that you can find in soccer. Not winning the league, the Spanish cup, or the Champions League was more than a simple failure for Ancelotti, it was a devaluation of the Real Madrid brand, and that is simply unacceptable by Perez. The next manager, whoever that may be, will have to produce a major trophy haul every year — even the Spanish cup might not be enough on its own — no matter what.
With the high turn-over rate of players at the club, and Perez valuing the name on the back of the jersey more than where it fits on the team sheet, every Real Madrid manager for the foreseeable future will inherit a team that has too many square pegs and not enough square holes.
Every manager has to juggle egos and playing time while trying to instill a system that offers the best chance to win. None have to do it in an environment like Real Madrid’s, where quite literally everything is working against them. Even the addition of talent, a boon for almost any other manager in the world, can be a crippling load.
Who ever comes in next needs to be comfortable in change the way Bane was comfortable in darkness: they can’t merely be able to adapt to it, they need to have an innate ability to live with it. Over the course of a year, a player can go from a god-like hero to a walking representation of a failure. The new manager will have to be able to sustain that player’s belief through those ups-and-downs. The team could go on a 22 match win streak in the Fall, and turn in a tepid shift through out the Spring, and the manager will have to command enough discipline to turn that tepidness into trophy winning success. The best player in the most important game of the decade could be sold during that offseason for a better looking stud incapable of filling the same role, and the manager will have to make it work. Any of these things, and many more that I can’t conceive, can and will happen every year, and the manager will have to keep the procession of trophies into Real Madrid’s cabinet locked into step.
Real Madrid don’t need a manager, they need the second coming. Perez is attempting to find that through a glorified process of trail and error, and I don’t believe that, operating the way he is now, those trials will ever end.
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