Soccer Coaching Blog | Professional Soccer Coaching Advice

Chelsea manager Carlo Ancelotti has released a book called The Beautiful Games of an Ordinary Genius. It’s a good read and I can recommend it to any coach who wants entertainment and some coaching advice. In the book Ancelotti reveals that his predecessor Jose Mourinho left an archive of training exercises at Stamford Bridge from which Ancelotti says he has learned a lot.

Amazing that a coach of his experience still gets ideas from reading what others have written. Maybe I’ll introduce him to Better Soccer Coaching! But the point shows we all need information to help us be more creative with our own coaching.

“It is a sign of his considerable intelligence that he does not try to do everything himself,” writes Paolo Maldini, in the foreword of the book, and Ancelotti also explains what he learned from Arrigo Sacchi, Nils Liedholm and Sven-Goran Eriksson as well as the “teeny-weeny bit” he picked up from Fabio Capello.

He himself has been a very creative coach and has ideas to share with the rest of us. Ancelotti details with pride how he devised the Christmas Tree formation and responded to Berlusconi’s

He also reveals that he has kept meticulous files on matches, and as Sacchi’s assistant, he had to note down every single kick and run of every single Italy game.

Interstingly his one big remaining ambition is to coach an African team at the World Cup because, he explained at yesterday’s launch of the English edition of his book, “they have the physical and technical skills but do not yet produce teams worthy of their potential”. That’s what Ancelotti tends to do with the teams he takes over.

He was also a good goalscorer – watch the clip below when he played for AC Milan with Ruud Gullit and Marco van Basten