“Those who know only football know nothing of football.” José Mourinho pinned that line to his lapel years ago, crediting an old university professor, but the premise holds: ninety minutes are merely the surface. To make sense of the game, you often have to look away from it. Davide Ancelotti understands this implicitly. In his first campaign as a European number one, he has Lille sitting second in Ligue 1, trailing Monaco by a single point. Much of that early momentum stems from an unexpected place: a fierce, eclectic reading habit.
As L’Équipe recently noted, the manager reads without boundaries—sports history, classical fiction, corporate management, personal development—and filters those texts directly into his pre-match addresses. On his desk at Luchin sits Doug Lemov’s The Coach’s Guide to Teaching, an American study on pedagogy that functions as a working manual for conveying ideas clearly, communicating effectively, and accelerating player development.
Then there is Phil Jackson. Jackson’s championship runs with the Chicago Bulls and the Los Angeles Lakers serve as a blueprint for a manager who views instruction as the core of the job. His books are office staples, quasi-bibles for an approach built on legacy. “I believe a coach has to teach—both in terms of the game and in human relationships,” Ancelotti says. “And sometimes, books are the way you get there.”
It is far from theoretical. During his four-year stint assisting his father at Real Madrid, Ancelotti considered adopting Jackson’s habit of gifting tailored books to players, matching titles to individual personalities and circumstances. It was designed to build rapport while quietly tackling tactical demands—such as persuading Kylian Mbappé and Vinícius Júnior to swallow their egos and track back.
“Once you understand a player’s character and background, if they’re going through a tough period, you think of a book they might read,” he told the paper. “They might never open it, but it creates a point of contact.” The project never materialized, but the logic remained. A tactics board and a video suite only go so far. For now, his office wall holds just two pinned quotations. The first belongs to Friedrich Nietzsche: Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you. The second is Albert Einstein: If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.