He Can Have Any Job He Wants. Right Now, He Doesn’t Want One.

MILAN — Massimiliano Allegri is a doodler. Over the course of two hours, Allegri, the former Milan and Juventus manager, slowly fills the pad of paper in front of him. By the end, he has seven pages of scribbles and scrawls and sketches.

In some cases, the images are easy to identify: outlines of soccer fields, pockmarked with numbers to denote formations and arrows to highlight runs. Others are more hieroglyphic: in a corner of one sheet, a stick figure hangs, condemned, from a noose. Diagonally opposite, he has written the word “tablet.” It is circled, and underlined, so it must have been important.

A surprising amount of academic thought has gone into the significance of doodles: the psychologist Robert C. Burns once said that what might seem like the idle jottings of the bored and the under-stimulated “may carry messages from the unconscious.”

Perhaps Allegri’s are a sign that he misses soccer, then. Perhaps, a few months after his five years as Juventus manager drew to a close, they reflect his yearning to get back to designing game plans, to plotting victories, to celebrating titles. (Quite how the words “gol,” “dip,” “iron” and “German,” written in block capitals and connected by a single thread, fit into this requires further examination.)

Spend a little time in his company, though, and that is not the impression he gives. These last six months have been Allegri’s first break from soccer for 34 years: 18 as a rather better midfielder than he gives himself credit for — “I was a mediocre player,” he says, wrongly — and 16 as a coach, an Italian champion once with A.C. Milan and five times with Juventus.

It has become de rigueur, of course, for elite coaches to take sabbatical years, ever since Pep Guardiola declared himself so burned out after four seasons at Barcelona that he took himself off to New York for a year to refresh and recharge.

Allegri does not regard himself as being on sabbatical, though. That would suggest that he had become too consumed by his job, by his sport, by his ideas. He is just having “a break,” one that he feels he deserves, plain and simple.

He has not spent it traveling around Europe, watching training sessions, tracking his rivals or prospective employers, refining his thoughts. Where Guardiola took time off because he felt burned out, because he was too committed to soccer to keep on going, Allegri just has other interests.

“I’ve been reading a lot,” he said: mainly thrillers, but also a book on the artist Amedeo Modigliani, one that inspired him to travel to an exhibition in London. “I spend time with family, with friends, enjoying life.”

Over the course of two hours, as the 52-year-old wields his pencil and turns his pages, this becomes something of a theme. If there is an orthodoxy in soccer, there is a good chance Allegri does not really subscribe to it.

He is coaching royalty, of course, the winner of six Serie A titles, a veteran of two appearances in the Champions League final. He was one of only 12 men invited to UEFA’s Elite Coaches’ Forum in November. He was the only attendee who does not currently have a job.

His reputation is sufficiently lofty that he can afford to say he will return to work only in June, and not before. He can pick and choose the sort of club he wants. “After five years at Juventus, I don’t want to go back into the game and do badly,” he said. “It’s an important choice.” He wants a club with “rules, with discipline, with a strong internal structure.”

He is not prepared to take a risk on a team that cannot compete. In recent months, he has been linked with posts (some available, some not) at Europe’s aristocrats: Arsenal, Manchester United, Bayern Munich, Paris St.-Germain. Together with Mauricio Pochettino, he is the most coveted free agent in the game.

But while Allegri might be an accepted part of the establishment, he has a strong countercultural streak. He does not quite fit the paradigm of the modern manager. In an era when coaches are supposed to be obsessional, visionary philosophers, imbued by fans and news media with almost messianic, transformative powers, Allegri runs a little against the grain.

He said that he believes that clubs, and cities, have distinct “identities,” and that his job, really, is to adapt to those “intangibles,” rather than impose some grand, alien concept. Soccer, in his eyes, is “a team game defined by individuals: one against one against one against one.” He likes watching basketball, attracted by the emphasis on the talent of the individual.

He is a little dismissive of complex patterns of play: They are better suited, he said, to the small court of basketball than the vast sweep of a soccer field. “Soccer is art,” he said. He does not own a computer — though he concedes there is a family tablet — and is sceptical of a reliance on data.

“I grew up at the racecourse, with my grandfather,” he said. His hometown, Livorno, in Tuscany, has a rich tradition of horse-racing. “Federico Tesio, the greatest trainer in history, said that you can tell how a horse will run from the way its legs move in the morning. It is the same with footballers. You have to see how the players move. The eye is the most important thing.”

He describes the idea that a manager might be better served sitting in the stands, taking in the broad view of a game, rather than at pitchside, where you can smell the sweat and see the fear, as “one of the biggest lies in the game.”

“You’re detached if you are in the stand,” he said. “You need to be able to look the players in the eye, to see their faces. The stands are for the fans.”

He is especially scornful of what he sees as Italian soccer’s “extreme” reliance on tactics, its tendency to put “chains around the game.” He finds it odd that at Coverciano, where Italian soccer trains its coaches, the focus is on systems, and not how you “transmit messages, how you perceive the game.

“Sensations,” he insists, “are the most important thing.”

It is those sensations, deep down, that he misses: the chance to breathe the game. “I watch more games now than I did when I was working,” he said. “Then, it was only ever highlights from the analysts. You are with the team so much that there is no time for anything else. The videos always had to be no more than five minutes: you can see everything you need. If they came to me with 10 minutes: cut, cut, cut.”

Over these last few months, though, he has been able to watch five or six games a week, from all over Europe. He has been most impressed, he said, by Liverpool, the Premier League leader. He is fulsome in his praise of the work its coach, Jürgen Klopp, has done in altering the way his team plays. “When he was at Borussia Dortmund, goals always came easily,” he said. “Now the defensive balance is there, too.”

He likes Guardiola’s Manchester City. He is impressed by one of his former teams, Cagliari, in surprise contention for a Champions League place in Italy, and says he finds watching Atalanta — now qualified for the last 16 of that elite competition — “entertaining,” largely because they play “one against one, all over the field.”

“I coach when I am watching games,” he said. “I think about what I would do in this situation, how I would respond to that.” He misses that sensation of being by the field, of thinking his way through a problem. “I enjoy myself in that moment of pressure,” he said. “To find the ideal solution is a beautiful thing.”

It would be tempting to believe that what will draw him back, in June, is a desire to prove a point: to strike a blow against the tyranny of tactics, of philosophies, of systems. Tempting, but wrong. Allegri will be enticed by the chance to compete once more, to “breathe the game.”

For now, he has time for art, for books, for travel, for everything else in life. He has time to doodle, and he is enjoying it. Maybe, though, there is something in those snapshots of his subconscious, all those fields and formations. There is time for working through problems on paper, but deep down, there is nothing quite like solving them on the field.

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