Under Real pressure, Ancelotti will have to deliver
Manager Carlo Ancelotti has been around long enough to know these are the games that really matter at Real Madrid.
A Champions League last-16 tie against Paris Saint-Germain tonight, with all the noise, the drama and the intrigue, will carry greater significance for Madrid’s president Florentino Perez than any of their other 39 fixtures so far this term.
In 2018, Zinedine Zidane launched his entire coaching career off winning titanic battles like these. No matter that Real finished almost 20 points behind Barcelona in La Liga. Zidane marched his team past four European heavyweights in the knockout stages – PSG, Juventus, Bayern Munich and, in the final, Liverpool – and was instantly hailed a genius.
If success in Europe can excuse domestic failure at Real Madrid, the reverse is also true. Winning La Liga this season, however, may not be enough to prevent serious questions being asked about the direction of the club if it is PSG celebrating at the Santiago Bernabeu.
Ancelotti knows the demands better than anyone. He experienced them in 2015 after leading Madrid to the club’s 10th Champions League crown – only to be sacked the following season.
“Madrid is not a club where you put down roots,” he wrote in his book Quiet Leadership in 2017.
“You are only ever a piece of the project.”
Even when Real Madrid appointed Ancelotti last summer, it felt more like a marriage of convenience in a period of transition after Zidane’s departure and the financial uncertainty caused by the pandemic.
Ancelotti, meanwhile, grabbed an unexpected chance to manage at the highest level again. It has worked out better than perhaps imagined. Real Madrid’s 4-1 win over Real Sociedad on Saturday sent them eight points clear at the top of La Liga, which they will surely now win from here.
But for as long as Madrid continue to rely on a core of players in their thirties and coaches that manage rather than build, familiar questions remain:
How long can it last? And then, what comes next?
Two figures at PSG throw those questions into even sharper focus. Kylian Mbappe’s scintillating late winner in the first leg in Paris appeared to be both deflating and thrilling for Madrid supporters in equal measure.
Many felt they were getting an up-close preview of a player that will be theirs in the summer.
His arrival at Real Madrid would grant the club a generational shift in one move, a 23-yearold superstar to instantly build a team around.
The other pertinent figure is PSG’s coach Mauricio Pochettino, whom Madrid have coveted for the last five years and strongly considered to replace Zidane in 2018.