“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 and 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 wanted to be the best at it.
A stark contrast to Italian football at the time, which was still characterised by ultra-defensive post-war football philosophises like ‘catenaccio’ which literally means ‘bolt the door’ in English.
Sacchi had come to the conclusion that if you pushed this defensive inclination further up the field, then you could win the ball back in more dangerous areas. Which, providing you had the players to capitalise on that, would mean that you would score more goals and probably win 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 the leagues and their cavalier approach seemed to expose an Italian ideology that had confined a generation. That led to a rapid rise through the Italian game for the young coach from Fusignano and eventually, into the hot seat at AC Milan.
For all this remarkable success, however, 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 sophisticated 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 despite also having a roster that included a few future Italian greats in Franco Baresi and Paulo Maldini.
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 his 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.
Many believe that football is about players expressing themselves, but that’s not the case…the player needs to express himself within the parameters laid down by the manager.
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 he turned his head to Holland.
It’s easy to forget now, but both Ruud Gullit and Marco Van-Basten were unknown quantities back then. 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 and 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 optimal.
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. You had to fit into a predefined system and then learn how to express yourself within that.
For Sacchi, the job of the manager was to help players grow within it. It was not about individuals and how they performed; but the dynamic structure that these people could collectively create. Another element of which was everybody knowing what part each team member also played so that the group could support that too.
Sacchi also understood that in a top-level football context talented players needed to have something to prove. He didn’t want individuals who could wave a medal at you when they make a mistake. He wanted people whose first inclination was to try and fix the problem.
In a business context, this is essentially just agile thinking applied to football. The acceptance of the need for a 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). But they did it with a style of football that few have matched since. Proving that change can happen quickly if you have good people in supportive systems but also, that good people in poor systems just simply won’t be successful no matter how talented they are.
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