“I never realised that in order to become a jockey, first you had to be a horse”
Arrigo Sacchi.
Arrigo Sacchi is one of a rare breed of football (soccer) coaches. He never had a playing career to speak of. He was a salesman in his father’s shoe company before embarking on a coaching career that, in a little over ten years, would take him to the top of the European game.
It’s an incredible story, but not another one about bombastic leadership. On the contrary, this is a quiet tale about intelligent management and the importance of process in innovation. One that should probably have had a chapter in every business book since.
Arrigo Sacchi grew up in provincial Italy and, like most of his generation, he fell in love with the sport Italians call ‘il calico’.
Unusually, however, he wasn’t lured by the tribal attraction of his country’s marquee clubs. At first, he followed Hungarian side Honved and then Real Madrid, because for him it was about the beautiful game and those who tried to play it the best.
Italian football, by contrast, was still characterised by ultra-defensive post-war football philosophises like ‘catenaccio’ which literally means ‘bolt the door’ in English.
But Sacchi had come to the conclusion that if you pushed this defensive inclination further up the pitch, then you would win the ball back in more dangerous areas. Which, providing you had the players to capitalise on that, would win you more football matches.
It’s all very Pep Guardiola now, but back then, it was like putting pineapple on a pizza! Sacchi’s teams lit up leagues and that led to a rapid rise through the Italian game for the young coach from Fusignano.
But for all this success, Sacchi was still seen as a bit of an enigma by the Italian media. A quirky manager that could squeeze more out of a provincial team, but not someone you would put in charge of one of Italy’s big city clubs.
So, when he arrived at The San Siro (A.C. Milan’s home ground) he was viewed in much the same light as the club’s flamboyant new owner, Silvio Berlusconi. Interesting, but nowhere near experienced enough to turn around the Rossoneri.
Despite being one of the country’s biggest clubs, AC Milan had only won one Scudetto (league championship) in nearly twenty years, and had spent two seasons in the second division since the last one.
They’d been on the brink of bankruptcy only a few years earlier and despite having a roster that included a few future Italian greats in Franco Baresi and Paulo Maldini, they still weren’t pulling up any trees.
But Berlusconi had big plans and could see that there was more to Sacchi than met the media’s eye. His teams may have cut a swashbuckling demeanour on the field, but off it he encountered a hard-working, detail-conscious manager focused on developing systems that structured innovation.
What looked cavalier wasn’t really. Sacchi was coaching his players to take risks in the right places and it was about to revolutionise the game.
Arrigo Sacchi
One of the first things Sacchi did was to change how Milan acted in the transfer market. He didn’t want them to go out and buy up all the best Italian talent anymore. He wanted to find players who fitted the system that he was creating. So they turned their heads to Holland.
It’s easy to forget now, but both Ruud Gullit and Marco Van-Basten were unknown quantities back then. Clearly talented, but unproven outside a second-tier European league in a country that hadn’t qualified for the previous two World Cups.
While Frank Rijkaard, the third of the famous Dutch musketeers to arrive in Milan was well on his way to becoming European football’s next enfant terrible.
But this wasn’t about finding lumps of coal and turning them into diamonds. It was a search for a certain type of intelligent individual and then doing the thing that makes good leaders great: backing yourself to manage them.
Sacchi understood that you had to create a structure based on the demands of the challenge no matter how difficult that was. Because as soon as you slipped into imposing your own personal preferences on your team, it ceased to be disruptive.
So, no matter how good they were, or how famous they got, you simply didn’t get to write your own job description at AC Milan. There was no such thing as a blank sheet of paper.
It was almost the opposite. For Sacchi, the job of the manager was to create roles that enabled innovation from within a structure. It was not about individuals and how they performed; but the dynamic structure that these people could collectively create.
The key to that was everybody knowing what part they had to play, but then being trusted to go out and play.
Sacchi also understood that in a top-level football context that required talented players with something to prove, not individuals who could wave a medal at you when they make a mistake.
In an innovation context, this is essentially agile thinking applied to football without a requirement for so much top-level talent.
It’s the acceptance of the need for the management team to organise around some disciplined, consistent and clear ways of working.
It’s understanding that creativity needs structure or it simply runs out of control.
But it’s essentially about finding the right people for the task at hand and not being defined by previous job titles.
Arrigo Sacchi’s Milan’s won their first Italian Championship in nine years in his first season in charge. Then followed it up with back-to-back European Cups (the fore runner to the Champions’ League).
And they did it playing a form of football that few have matched since.
What Sacchi showed was that good people in poor systems just simply won’t be successful, no matter how talented they are. But that brave people in supportive systems well…they can change the world!
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