Carlo Ancelotti is the great pragmatist standing in Pep Guardiola’s path again

It is a little over nine years since Pep Guardiola first took on Carlo Ancelotti as a manager. Guardiola’s Bayern Munich had sealed the Bundesliga title almost a month earlier, often registering 1,000 passes in a game, and his football seemed unstoppable. For 18 minutes in the first leg at the Bernabéu, Bayern continued to seem imperious. Then Ancelotti’s Real Madrid countered and Fábio Coentrão squared for Karim Benzema to score. Bayern continued to dominate the ball; Madrid continued to look dangerous. It finished 1-0.

In retrospect, before Guardiola and Ancelotti meet in another semi‑final at the Bernabéu on Tuesday, that game seems a defining moment. What had happened in the semi-finals against Internazionale in 2010 and Chelsea in 2012, a Guardiola team bossing possession and being caught on the counter, had happened again – and this time without the same sense of outrageous bad luck.

During dinner after that game in Madrid, Guardiola decided he would play a 3-4-3 in the home leg but, worried his side hadn’t played a back three since the December, he changed his mind on the flight home to a 4-2-3-1 that would liberate Arjen Robben and Franck Ribéry.

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That Friday, Tito Vilanova, Guardiola’s friend and former assistant, died. The next day, Bayern beat Werder Bremen 5-2. At training on Monday, Guardiola asked his players how they felt: they were excited, confident. They urged him to let them attack. He agreed, substituting his 4-2-3-1 for a 4-2-4.

It was, he later said, “the biggest fuck-up” of his career. Madrid sat deep, counterattacked at pace through Ángel Di María, and won 4-0 thanks to three goals from set plays.

Ancelotti, the affable pragmatist, had beaten Guardiola, the intense idealist. Last year, at the same stage of the Champions League, rather more freakishly, he did it again. Guardiola has won five of eight meetings, but in four of those Ancelotti was in charge of Everton.

The pair represent very different types. In 28 years in management, Ancelotti has won four Champions Leagues and is the only manager to win the title in each of Europe’s five major leagues – but he has won each only once, as though he lacks the almost pathological hunger necessary for sustained rather than merely repeated success.

Guardiola, in 14 years in management, has won two Champions Leagues and 10 league titles and changed the parameters of what is considered possible in football, developing and refining his concept of juego de posición, his entire career a convincing polemic for his vision of football.

Ancelotti is very different. His coaching dissertation at Coverciano was on the Christmas tree formation but although he did set up his team in that shape at times at Milan that has only been one option among many. He is a pragmatist, complicated as the use of that word is in football, adapting always to circumstance – and that perhaps means he is undervalued.

It was something Jamie Carragher touched on in the Telegraph last week when he pointed out that Sir Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United had not influenced other sides in the way that, say, Arrigo Sacchi’s Milan or Guardiola’s Barcelona did. Which is true, despite the howls of protest. It doesn’t mean Ferguson is not a great manager; he manifestly is, probably the greatest in British history. But he was not a radical who reshaped football in the manner of Herbert Chapman, Rinus Michels or Valeriy Lobanovskyi.

Managers can be visionary theorists such as Guardiola who change how the game is understood (although most of them, you suspect, progress incrementally, pushing always at the barriers of precedent before finding themselves in uncharted territory; very few revolutionary blueprints leap fully formed from the minds of their creators). Or they can be skilled leaders such as Ancelotti who thrive within the environment that already exists, essentially doing what everybody else is doing, but better.

Unless you happen to be writing about the evolution of football tactics, it’s not that one type is better than the other; they just have different ways of approaching the job. Perhaps the visionary will have a sudden spell of sustained success after their breakthrough, as the rest of the world scrabbles to catch up, but it may be that they struggle once their innovation ceases to be new, giving the pragmatist a longer career. Most coaches, anyway, tend to lie somewhere between the two extremes.

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In England, with its general suspicion of theory (Dr Johnson, you suspect, would find plenty of friends at TalkSport), the preference historically has been for pragmatists. It’s not just Ferguson: there was little new tactically about Brian Clough or Sir Matt Busby, while Sir Alf Ramsey and Bill Shankly played down the radical nature of what they were doing and at least part of the distaste for Don Revie outside Leeds was rooted in a recognition that he was attempting something that defied convention.

But everything changed 15 years ago when Guardiola became manager of Barcelona and the world at large became aware of just how potent a philosophy should be. Since then, and particularly with the rise of the German school, there is a perceived need for every young coach to have a theory, even as football has moved deeper into the age of the executive and the time available to coaches to implement anything of any complexity is reduced.

Theory, though, is no guarantee of success. Of the past 15 Champions Leagues, acknowledging there are some grey areas (José Mourinho, say, could be considered a philosopher of pragmatism), seven can be said to have been won by philosophers and eight by pragmatists. Guardiola’s notorious overthinking before key games, perhaps, can be seen as him trusting too much to theory.

Which is where Erling Haaland may prove most useful. It’s not just his goals, he has also edged Guardiola away from his purism. Haaland wants the ball direct, Guardiola prefers control, and that tension has perhaps proved creative. How effective that is can only really be judged in relation to the Champions League.

And the biggest test of that will come against the great pragmatist Ancelotti in Madrid on Tuesday.