How serial winner Carlo Ancelotti aims to shine light on underachieving Everton’s history

There are 29 plaques on the wall of Goodison Park, commemorating the select group branded ‘Everton Giants’. Dixie Dean, Neville Southall, Alan Ball and Brian Labone are among the men immortalised in brick. Carlo Ancelotti had cited his new club’s history and tradition as a reason to join before highlighting his own past. “I think you have to put a little plaque,” he said. “Here was sacked…”

It was an ignominious incident that did Chelsea little credit. Ancelotti, the previous season’s double winner, was beaten by a Jermaine Beckford wonder goal and dismissed in a cramped passageway in May 2011. “I was sacked in the corridor there,” he recalled. Signing up for Everton supported the old maxim: if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

Even a triple Champions League winner has a nemesis. “David Moyes was my nightmare,” Ancelotti reflected. “I never beat Everton.” Six meetings produced three wins for the Scot, including one on penalties, and none for the man who won league titles in four different countries. Retaliation came in a different form, with Ancelotti pipping Moyes to the job at Goodison Park. His credentials have been proved on the most glamorous of stages. It helps, though, for a club with a dismal derby record that he has doubled up as Liverpool’s bogeyman, famously losing to them in Istanbul in 2005 but chalking up seven wins with four different clubs.

“Liverpool fans were respectful, I think,” he added. “They are worried to see me because I beat them a lot of times. I am going to live in Liverpool. Yesterday, I was walking in the city. Everyone was kind, [taking] a lot of pictures. Liverpool is a football city: you can smell there is football everywhere here.”

It is an incongruous sight, Ancelotti and Everton, the serial winner and the club without silverware since 1995. “For a top club, victory is to win trophies, to win the league,” Ancelotti added. “For other clubs the victory… for example the goal for Everton in this period is to try to be as close as possible to the top of the table.” They are 15th now, territory he has rarely charted in one of the glorious of careers.

The idea, after his dismissal by Napoli, was to spend Christmas with his Canadian wife in her homeland. “Life changes so quickly,” Ancelotti added. “I was planning the holiday in Vancouver but I don’t like to be on holiday too much time. It is good to be here.”

His players tend to agree. The most skilled of man-managers has navigated his way from Juventus to AC Milan to Chelsea to Paris Saint-Germain to Real Madrid to Bayern Munich to Napoli making remarkably few enemies in a world of supersized egos.

He can be the amiable diplomat but he is not a soft touch. A warning was concealed behind the smile. Everton have spent £450 million in Farhad Moshiri’s time as owner. They are underachievers. “This squad until now it didn’t reach the level that the quality of this squad [should have] in my personal opinion,” Ancelotti noted.

His hope is that the kind word cajoles them into excellence. “This is my style of management,” he explained. “The relationship with players is really important for me. I want to have a good relationship with them. I am not a sergeant. They have to know what I like – that the players take responsibility for themselves and discipline. This is for me really important. I can use the whip sometimes. I don’t like to use the whip because no one used the whip in my life against me but I am able to do this.”

If he can whip Everton into shape and secure the trophy that has eluded them since 1995, he might yet get the right sort of plaque.