Ancelotti vs Klopp is a generational match On one side the Real Madrid coach, shy and meditative, on the other the Liverpool coach, outgoing and rock'n roll

Watching Carlo Ancelotti and Jurgen Klopp compete in a Champions League final - tonight May 28 in Paris - at a time of comparisons and generational discourse may symbolize yet another opposition between different worlds. On one side the Real Madrid coach, on the other the Liverpool coach, two figures in every sense different. Because Ancelotti is a coach from another era: up-to-date, methodical, rigorous, but still with anti-historical charm compared to the icons we are used to seeing now on the benches. And that is why the comparison (even lifestyle) with Klopp fascinates us. They represent two antithetical schools of thought and, above all, professionals who belong to two different historical eras. 

Today's football is certainly more adjacent to Klopp than to Ancelotti, but the latter has that strange aura around his bench that, given the results, it is hard to characterize as an underdog. Before Real, Ancelotti actually seemed to have been sidelined from the international soccer geography after unsexy adventures with Napoli and Everton. Instead, two years later, he finds himself in the Champions League Final and champion of LaLiga, celebrated with his usual class as evidenced by the cigar-wielding photo that has made the rounds. 

As Allegri said recently, "Carlo (Ancelotti, ed.) is a classic coach, he never goes out of fashion. Like the blue suit or the gray suit". Ancelotti, on the charm of the wise, the expert, has built his current persona by tracing a topos as old as soccer itself. But it is precisely because of his attitude that he cannot be a role model, because he belongs to a way of thinking about soccer that one rarely encounters anymore these days. But it is precisely because he is a winner like few, through his homely, meditative style, that he is scariest of all. Ancelotti a boomer and Klopp a millennial? Maybe. What is certain is only that they are two phenomena in their own field.