- As Ancelotti prepares to lead Brazil at a World Cup, spare a thought for Goodison
- In December 2019, Everton somehow landed one of football’s greatest ever managers
- Looking back, it still feels like something that shouldn’t have been allowed to happen
This summer, Carlo Ancelotti will lead Brazil at a World Cup – managing Vinicius Junior, Neymar and Raphinha in front of a global audience of billions. And somewhere in the back of every Evertonian’s mind will be a quiet, slightly baffled thought: he once managed us.
As it happens, today is the great man’s 67th birthday.
There are moments in Everton’s recent history you file away and return to occasionally, just to remind yourself they actually happened.
The first win at Anfield in two decades. The night the new stadium finally opened. And then there is this one – the afternoon in December 2019 when the club announced, almost casually, that they had appointed one of the most decorated managers in the history of football.
Carlo Ancelotti. Three Champions League titles. League championships in Italy, England, France and Germany. The kind of CV that reads less like a football manager’s record and more like something a Football Manager addict made up after forgetting to turn the difficulty setting on.
How on earth did this happen?
The short answer, of course, is that timing is everything. Ancelotti had been sacked by Napoli on the tenth of December 2019 – remarkably, on the same evening he had steered them into the Champions League knockout stages – after a fractious falling-out with owner Aurelio De Laurentiis.
His reputation had taken a knock. Arsenal, simultaneously searching for Unai Emery’s replacement, were linked but opted for Mikel Arteta. And into that particular gap stepped Everton.
Sam Allardyce, not a man given to understatement, called it one of the biggest managerial coups in the club’s history. It was hard to argue.
Ancelotti flew into Merseyside, sat in the directors’ box at Goodison for a goalless draw against Arsenal, and by Boxing Day he was in the dugout for a win over Burnley. He rented a house in Crosby. Just like that.
The dream that briefly felt real
What followed was, by Everton standards, genuinely exciting. A first win at Anfield since 1999. James Rodriguez – a Champions League winner, a global name – arriving on a free transfer, the kind of signing that simply did not happen to clubs like Everton. There were real flickers of something building.
It wasn’t, of course. Ancelotti left in the summer of 2021 when Real Madrid came calling – because of course they did – and Everton lurched back into their familiar cycle of poor appointments, financial chaos and near-relegation. Don Carlo won another Champions League. Everton got Rafa Benitez.
And now here he is again, this time on the biggest stage of all.
The Brazil job is his first in international management, and yet his appointment as the Selecao’s first foreign coach since 1925 was seen as an admission that something had to change.
He has named a squad that includes Vinicius Junior, a returning Neymar and some of the finest attacking talent on the planet, and Brazil are widely tipped to reach their first final since 2002.
It is, by any measure, a long way from a Boxing Day game against Burnley in front of a half-empty Goodison Park. But then, that is rather the point.
The fact that the same man did both – that he once chose Everton, that he once walked our touchline and called our club his own – remains one of the more unlikely things to have actually happened in this football club’s history.
Enjoy the World Cup, Carlo. We will be watching with a small tinge of pride. And happy birthday!
