“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 yet, in a little less than ten years, he went from a shoe salesman to the manager of Italian giants A.C. Milan and the pinnacle of the European game.
But this is not another bombastic leadership story. This is a quiet tale of 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 il calico at a young age. But, unusually, 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 game and those who tried to play the best form of it.
That would shape a football philosophy which would kick-start the transformation of the European game.
Italy – even in the 1980s – was still characterised by ultra-defensive post-war football philosophises like ‘catenaccio’ which literally means ‘bolt the door’ in English. Sacchi, however, believed that if you could push that defensive inclination further up the pitch, then you would get the ball back in more dangerous areas which – providing you had the players to capitalise on this – 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 played a free-flowing form of football that the opposition simply didn’t know how to deal with. And so they did win more football matches, lots more.
His ability to install these ideas into different sets of players quickly is what got him noticed and that led to a rapid coaching journey through the leagues.
But he was still seen as a bit of an enigma by the Italian media; a quirky coach that could squeeze the best out of a provincial team, but not someone you would put in charge of one of Italy’s big city clubs.
When he arrived at The San Siri (Milan’s home ground) then, he was seen as a bit of a frivolous pet project for Milan’s inexperienced new owner – Silvio Berlusconi.
But Berlusconi knew there was more to Sacchi’s free-flowing style. He encountered a hard-working, detail-conscious manager whose teams were winning games because they were being coached to take risks in the right places.
He could see that, like many great innovators before him, Sacchi was redefining the modern game before everybody’s eyes and very few could see what was happening.
The key to successful organisation is not how individuals perform, but the dynamic structure that these people can collectively create.
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.
Frank Rijkaard, the third of the famous Dutch Musketeers to arrive in Milan on the other hand, was well on his way to becoming European football’s next enfant terrible until Sacchi put his faith in him.
Berlusconi, by all accounts, had wanted to sign a young Fiorentina forward called Roberto Baggio instead. But Sacchi convinced him that they needed a different type of player, one that wasn’t cut from an Italian cloth. Which is why they turned their heads to Holland.
Sacchi didn’t want Milan to buy up all the best players anymore. They’d been doing that for 20 years and didn’t have a single scudetto (League Championship) to show for it. He only wanted players who fitted his system. He didn’t care if they were petulant rebels or maverick individuals, he was only interested in whether they had enough intelligence for the task at hand.
This wasn’t about finding lumps of coal and turning them into diamonds either. It was a search for a certain kind of talent and then doing the thing that makes good leaders great: and backing yourself to manage it.
Great leadership is about finding the right talent and then backing yourself to manage it!
But what really set Sacchi apart was his understanding of the creative process. ‘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 have to create a structure based on the demands of the challenge no matter how difficult that is. Because as soon as you slip into imposing your own personal preferences on your team, it ceases to be disruptive and then you can never be greater than the sum of your parts.
His 1989 team now reads like a who’s who of European football – Baresi, Maldini, Costacurta, Donadoni, Ancelloti, Van Basten, Gullit, Rijkaard. But none of them were bigger than the club. No matter how good you were, you simply didn’t get to write your own job description at AC Milan. The innovation was defined by the team structure and everybody knowing what part they had to play within that.
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
For Arrigo 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 their medals at you when someone makes a mistake.
Arrigo Sacchi’s Milan’s won their first Italian Championship in 20 years in his first season in charge and followed it up with back-to-back European Cups (the fore runner to the Champion’s League).
He proved that transformation isn’t driven by motivational leadership. He knew that good people in poor systems don’t drive disruption and never will. But put brave people in to supportive systems and they can change the world!
Comments RSS Feed