BY LILIANE TANNOURY
SPECIAL TO THE TIMES KUWAIT
Carlo Ancelotti arrives at Real Madrid in a bet as unexpected as it is strange from Florentino Perez. Unexpected because Florentino fired him in 2015, still with a year of contract ahead of him, due to his “soft hand”, his complacency with the locker room and accusation of him “having the team little worked”.
Although with a good image in the club, he now comes with the big task of revitalizing a group in which he will have to carry out a generational cleanup. This responsibility, for which at the end Florentino thought he was the ideal man, comes due to the very close and respectful relationship he has with part of the team.
Carletto, Ancelotti’s nickname, had a contract with Everton until 2024, but when he learned of Real Madrid’s interest, he did not hesitate.
Florentino Perez’s decision is to give a second chance to the manager who made history in the Lisbon final against Atlético de Madrid and won the Tenth( La Decima ). Carletto is the strategy that most convinces the president of Real Madrid not to oppose the departure of Zinédine Zidane, or to fret over the refusals of other coaches to join.
Ancelotti was not Florentino’s first choice. Not even the second or the third. He tried Massimiliano Allegri, Mauricio Pochettino and also Antonio Conte, but for one reason or another he could not reach an agreement with any of them.
With Ancelotti he now bets on the known, for a manager with experience and a friendly hand that, as shown in the past, seems to be the best way to manage the club locker room.
Florentino needs the next season to be successful in order not to lose strength in his fight for the implementation of the European Super League (ESL). He knows better than anyone that his strength in this fight is directly proportional to his sporting success. A weak Real Madrid will not have the strength in international instances to implement an ESL in its original or eventually adjusted version.
In any case, the tendency is for the return of Carlo Ancelotti to have positive effects on an unbalanced squad, which has lost its identity and suffers from the physical and technical fall of very important names in the third-championship, followed by the Champions League with Zinedine Zidane from 2016 to 2018 .
The task will not be easy.
It is possible that the Italian coach will have to take advantage of the younger ones and give up some more experienced athletes in a medium-term job. There are many players at the end of their professional cycle, young ones are not exploding and new signings are giving a level that was not contemplated even in the worst scenario.
Carlo Ancelotti will have to rebuild the team. Tactically, things will not go very far. In his previous spell at the club, Ancelloti played with a 4-2-3-1, which turned into a 4-4-2 whenever necessary. There are players now that allow him to use this same system, although it will undoubtedly require more ball possession, something the team did not have with Zidane.
Even so, and within the task of revitalization and generational cleansing, it is very likely that James Rodriguez with whom Carlo Ancelotti has a special relationship and has coached him at the Bernabéu, Bayern and Everton will return to the club and he will also do everything to resurrect Gareth Bale.
Despite struggling with a lack of revenue due to the pandemic, which the club estimates in losses of 500 million euros, Florentino is doing everything he can to make up for Ancelotti with a big signing. The priority is a striker and the chosen ones are Mbappé and Halaand.
Carletto returns with his calm and conciliatory smile, where almost everyone remembers him with affection and respect, but his chances of success now are not the same as six years ago, at least immediately.
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Liliane Tannoury is a prominent sports senior TV producer and presenter at Al Arabiya TV in Dubai. She has covered most of the sports tournaments and events around the world. Liliane has conducted numerous exclusive sports interviews all over the world for Al Arabyia, including Cristiano Ronaldo, Jose Mourinho, Zlatan Ibrahimović, Gareth Bale, Antoine Griezmann, João Felix and many others. She also often invited, as a guest, to Sports Tonight Show at Dubai Eye Radio station and chronicler in the THENATIONAL newspaper from UAE among others.
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