“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. In fact, 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 pinnacle 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’ at a very early age.
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. Which didn’t sit right with Sacchi. He believed that you could push this defensive inclination further up the pitch and in doing so, 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 with their seemingly cavalier approach 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. Talented, 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.
The key to successful organisation is not how individuals perform, but the dynamic structure that these people can collectively create.
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.
Berlusconi, by all accounts, wanted to sign a young Fiorentina forward called Roberto Baggio, but Sacchi insisted on finding players who weren’t cut from an Italian cloth. So, instead, they turned their heads to Holland.
Intelligent people want detail which they can then distil into a clarity of purpose and focus their energies on. The role of the manager is to provide that.
Arrigo Sacchi
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 individual and then doing the thing that makes good leaders great: and backing yourself to manage that.
Many believe that football is about players expressing themselves’ he said, ‘but that’s not the case…the player needs to express himself within the parameters laid down by the manager’.
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 slip into imposing your own personal preferences on your team, it ceases 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. Innovation was defined within the team structure and everybody knowing what part they had to play in that.
Because for Sacchi an organisation – at any level – is not about individuals and how they perform; it’s about the dynamic structure that these people can collectively create. For that you need talented people with open minds and something to prove, not individuals who will wave a medal at you when they make a mistake.
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 the importance of structure to innovation. That it’s not about how dynamic you appear or how disruptive you are, but how you grow within the team. He proved 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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