Roman Abramovich has made plenty of odd decisions as Chelsea owner but sacking Carlo Ancelotti still ranks among the daftest. Axe the only coach alive who now has three Champions League triumphs? Dismiss a man universally liked and respected (which, in football, is perhaps an even more remarkable achievement than the medals)?

It never did make sense but how typical of Ancelotti that, rather than express bitterness, he prefers to laugh at the absurdity of modern football. “At Chelsea I won the double. Sacked. At Real Madrid I won La Decima. Sacked,” he says with a chuckle over coffee in London.

They appoint me for being calm. Then they sack me and say ‘too calm’

“There is no manager in their career that is not sacked. Ferguson was sacked, Lippi sacked, Capello sacked, Mourinho sacked, Benítez. The only one not sacked is Guardiola, but he’s still really young. He has plenty of time. One day he will come into our club, the Sack Club.”

Ancelotti’s ability to laugh in the face of football’s craziness is one of his many endearing qualities — he was everyone’s favourite, genial Italian long before Claudio Ranieri — but you wonder if his easy-going affability sometimes means he is underestimated compared to, say, Mourinho or Guardiola.

He is football royalty, a highly decorated player, an even more successful manager, but he has never been one to brandish medals, to demand recognition. Ask what he wants etched on his gravestone and he replies, almost apologetically: “Good man, good manager,” as if worried that it sounds boastful. It is very rare to meet someone so successful with such genuine humility.

We should note that he is not immune to self-promotion, given that he is bringing out a new book, but who else among leading managers could call it Quiet Leadership – winning hearts, minds and matches? Writing has filled some of his year off, along with intense German lessons before taking over at Bayern Munich.

Billed as a management guide, it is most enjoyable for Ancelotti’s ability to tell funny stories, bushy eyebrow raised in wry amusement at the unfeasible demands of billionaire owners, or the challenging behaviour of superstar players.

He tells of Abramovich telling him off even after a 6-0 victory at Chelsea; of Paris Saint-Germain’s Arab owners informing him he will be sacked if he does not win a meaningless Champions League tie. They do win, but it breaks the relationship. “If I don’t do a good job then just fire me, don’t give me stupid ultimatums,” Ancelotti remarks.

There are insights into many star players, though none seems quite as memorable as Zlatan Ibrahimovic. Ancelotti tells of the Swede calling over a young player he thinks has underperformed. “Now you have to go home and write in your diary that you trained with Zlatan today, because I think it could be the last time that you do,” the Swede barks.

There is the time that Ancelotti looks unusually worried on the morning of a match. “Do you believe in God?” Ibrahimovic asks. “Yes,” Ancelotti replies. “That’s good, because you can believe in me.”

Ancelotti, 56, loves Ibrahimovic and the feeling is mutual. “I say Carlo is the best and I have worked with the best,” Ibrahimovic writes, ranking the Italian above Guardiola and Mourinho. “Mourinho knows how to treat a footballer, but Carlo knows how to treat a person.”

“He is, for me, the ultimate,” John Terry says, and David Beckham, Paolo Maldini, Cristiano Ronaldo, Alessandro Nesta have all penned tributes that are genuinely moving in their affection and appreciation for Ancelotti’s ability to bring extraordinary success without bullying or playing mind games or making it all about him.

It makes you wonder how Manchester United missed such an obviously good choice to handle the post-Ferguson convulsions. They tried to recruit Ancelotti in the spring of 2013 when Sir Alex Ferguson went to see him in Paris. “A nice lunch,” he smiles. “Alex chose the wine, really expensive.” But too late.

Ferguson offered him the job that would eventually go to David Moyes. “I had already spoken to Real Madrid,” Ancelotti reveals. “For the experience, a manager has to go to Madrid. If it hadn’t been for that, I would have come, 100 per cent.”

Now United are stuck in an awkward embrace with Louis van Gaal while Ancelotti heads to Bayern where he will hope to become the first coach in history to win four European Cups. Who would bet against him given that, at Real, he surpassed Mourinho in winning the preciousDecima. Maybe Ancelotti’s quiet leadership can succeed for Bayern in the Champions League where Guardiola failed.

His amenable style has been foolishly mistaken for weakness, especially by club owners. His sacking by Chelsea came about, he believes, because Abramovich thought he had gone too soft with the dressing room. “I’d heard it before and I’ve heard it since, but he was wrong — they are all wrong,” he notes. “It happened at all of them: Palma, Milan, Paris, Chelsea. Always in a difficult moment, someone says, ‘You give the players too much freedom, you have to whip them.’ In Italy, they call it la frustra. But that’s what you do to horses.”

He goes on: “They appoint me for being calm. Then they sack me and say ‘too calm’. ” He laughs again at the absurdity.

Ancelotti is no soft touch — stories of kicking a box that smacks Ibrahimovic on the head, and his handling of a rebellious José Bosingwa vouch for that — but he was influenced by Nils Liedholm at AC Milan who, when he saw a group of players misbehaving with girls in a car, came over and asked: “Any room for me?”

The carrot approach has always been Ancelotti’s nature. It goes back to his roots, growing up on a farm in Reggiolo in the rural north of Italy. “I think you grow your personality from the experiences you had in the beginning of life,” he says. “I grew up in a family really quiet, really humble. We didn’t have a lot of money but we were peaceful. We had food to eat but not lots to spend on clothes or anything so we didn’t focus or worry about that. I grew up in a peaceful way, no fights.

Football has no patience. If you aren’t patient, you can fight every day. You can fight with the press, the owner, the players, another manager,

“The man, the manager I am, is formed by those experiences. I have the character of my father. He was really patient. When he had the farm, he had cows. He made milk to make Parmigiano but to be paid, you have to wait one year and a half for the end of the process. For over one year, you have to check everything, wait. That’s patience.

“Modern football is the opposite. Football has no patience. If you aren’t patient, you can fight every day. You can fight with the press, the owner, the players, another manager. You can fight with the doctor sometimes . . .”

He smiles again. It is a clear reference to Mourinho but Ancelotti is not looking to squabble. The pair have had their public spats but decided to bury the hatchet a few years ago.

“We said, ‘OK, we are old men, we have to stop this.’ After that, he sent me a message when I won the Champions League, ‘Congratulations’. I sent him a message when he won the Premier League. That’s all settled now. We have no necessity to fight. As I write in the book, we aren’t the most important people. That’s the players.”

He is among a select group of super-managers rotating around Europe’s super-clubs but insists, several times, that he does not worry about his personal tally of medals. He has no need to, given his three Serie A titles and two European Cup victories as a player, his three Champions League triumphs as a coach, which puts him on the same pedestal as Bob Paisley.

“Honestly, it wasn’t a race for me to get to three,” he says. “There will come a day when another manager has four. If it’s me, great, but my happiness is working day by day with staff and players. Relationship with the players, that’s what it all comes back to.

“Just look at Leicester City. Ranieri had a tough time in his last job with Greece; Leicester had a bad season, almost relegated. But put them together and see what happens. You can tell it’s the relationship between Claudio and his players that has made it possible.”

After spending most of his year off in Vancouver, his wife’s home city, he will soon head to Munich where they are already laying plans by buying Mats Hummels from Borussia Dortmund and Renato Sanches from Benfica.

He explains how the game has changed from when he started management — bigger squads, more games — but mostly the lack of patience and the inevitability of joining the Sack Club even in a high-flying career. Does it not eat away at his love of the game when a man with his record can be dispensed with so casually, dismissed by Chelsea and Real Madrid, threatened with the axe by PSG? “No,” he replies, shrugging his shoulders characteristically. “One of my favourite sayings is from The Godfather,” he says. “It’s not personal, it’s strictly business.” He says that he holds no grudges and would go back to Chelsea if the timing was right. They should be so lucky.

On Monday Exclusive extract from Carlo Ancelotti’s explosive book: ‘We won 6-0 but Abramovich still gave me a dressing down’