Why Filippo Inzaghi Is the Perfect Driving Force to Restore AC Milan Success

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The moment Pippo Inzaghi ran over to join the mob of players celebrating with Sulley Muntari, the relationship was clear: This 41-year-old is right where he is, still close to the game he loves.

AC Milan won their first game with Inzaghi as coach, a 3-1 victory over Lazio, and right-back Ignazio Abate confirmed the obvious in an interview with Mediaset (h/t Forza Italian Football): that his manager is one of them and that he has “given us an incredible charge.”

Here is a man who is trying to coach with the same enthusiasm he had as a goalscorer. Talent is not enough for Inzaghi.

“I will always forgive a technical error,” he said in July (per Football Italia), “but I will never forgive the wrong attitude. A Milan player cannot get it wrong off the field.”

That is possibly the reason why Milan sold Mario Balotelli. In many ways, Balotelli is the complete opposite of the player Inzaghi was, someone spoiled with talent but unwilling to work hard every game.

“We are certainly losing a great player,” Inzaghi told reporters (h/t goal.com), “but we gain something more in team spirit and hunger.”

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Inzaghi was himself a hard worker. When he played, he looked like he was lucky—in the right place at the right time, in an offside position, deflecting balls into the net with his belly, off his upper thigh or knee, with his head and his eyes closed.

Sometimes he even shot off his own boot. Inzaghi “did not always play by Marquess of Queensberry rules,” wrote Paddy Agnew in his book, Forza Italia, but Inzaghi always found a way to score.

The press in Britain never really understood him. They called him a “six-yard line merchant,” according to Agnew. 

But it wasn’t just instinct. The man made his own luck. He studied before games. 

“He knew his opponents better than anyone else,” former teammate Gennaro Gattuso told La Gazzetta dello Sport (h/t Football Italia).

So Inzaghi wants to see the same effort from his players. He was not this huge bookworm as a player either: he had the same quirks as any competitor. He wore the same boots for games, held together with patches, softest of any shoe, he would tell you.

The boots “dated back to the dawn of time,” wrote Andrea Pirlo in his book, I Think Therefore I Play. 

Inzaghi also ate baby cookies, and he would always leave two in the packet. Not one or three. “That way the stars will stay aligned in my favour,” Pirlo recalled Inzaghi saying.

And for dinner, Inzaghi ate plain pasta with tomato sauce. Nothing spectacular, like the player he was.

Athletes can identify with these kinds of superstitions. Who knows what kinds Inzaghi has now: maybe a lucky suit (he still looks weird in one) or maybe he has to rub his dress shoes in a certain way. Maybe he still eats those biscuits.

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He wants to preserve what made him successful as a player.

“I don’t yet know if I am and will be a winning manager,” he wrote in his thesis, as translated by the journalist Steve Amoia.

“However, surely I want to become one with humility to always want to improve myself. And with the spirit that always animated me as a player.”

Inzaghi did not have any bad relationships with anyone. His days in the late 1990s with Alessandro Del Piero and Juventus were a little frosty. Inzaghi scored all the goals, taking the attention away from Del Piero. But Inzaghi was never misinterpreted, never the source of tension.

He was a team player, good to the president Silvio Berlusconi and thankful to regular people, recalling in his retirement letter the phone operators and the warehouse workers, the physiotherapists who treated his many injuries, the doctors and the cooks.

Inazghi was never above anyone. A little like Carlo Ancelotti.

When Inzaghi joined the world’s coaches at a forum in Nyon, Switzerland, last week, he was there with Sir Alex Ferguson, Pep Guardiola and Jose Mourinho. And then there was Ancelotti, his role model and friend. 

Ancelotti found Real Madrid broken and made them whole again. Months earlier, Mourinho was suspicious of moles in the squad and had called the team “sons of bitches,” according to the book, The Special One: The Dark Side Of Jose Mourinho (h/t Daily Mail).

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Ancelotti is not so confrontational. He calms waters and allows his players to be themselves. They went on to win La Decima together.

Inzaghi has the same attitude. He treats his team like a family, with a way of playing—and more importantly, a way of living

He comes from a stable family, with a brother Simone who shared his success as a footballer. His mother went shopping for Pippo and did his laundry. But even after they left the house, they went back home to eat on Sundays.

“My mother knows how to cook for me,” Inzaghi said back in 2000 (per The Guardian). “If I lived abroad, I couldn’t enjoy her meals.”

Respect is the most important thing, and you can tell he was raised with those values. These are values missing from the old Milan. It is Inzaghi’s job to restore those standards of excellence, no matter the players on hand. 

Because it wasn’t Fernando Torres, his new signing, scoring his debut goal. It wasn’t a spectacular strike. It was a redirection from Muntari. Inzaghi joined the celebrations anyway. The name on the back doesn’t matter.