“Within the Milan Lab, you had a station which was focused on biochemistry and a station focused on structure, for example. The Mind Room was one of these stations. It was about looking at the player as a person, a person with skeletal, biochemical, emotional, technological and structural subsystems.”

The biomedical monitoring and cognitive training which Demichelis introduced was supported by all three of the managers he worked with – Arrigo Sacchi, Fabio Capello and Ancelotti – during a tenure which saw Milan win 21 major trophies.

It was a golden era, but in 2009, the atmosphere at Milanello changed. Following a third-place finish in the league and an early exit from the Uefa Cup, ties between the club and the manager loosened.

“The relationship cooled and we both became a little tired,” reflected Ancelotti in his book, Quiet Leadership. “Eight years is a long time and Berlusconi wanted to change something. I did too. I wanted to try a new experience outside the country.”

Ancelotti’s arrival at Chelsea had a sense of inevitability. He had been touted as a potential successor to Avram Grant towards the end of the Israeli’s time in charge and, according to Ancelotti, the interest was substantial enough to result in two meetings with Abramovich in May 2008.

Knowledge of the discussions was widespread – Adriano Galliani called Ancelotti to ask how the second conversation had gone – but despite the public courtship, Chelsea opted to appoint Luiz Felipe Scolari.

In Quiet Leadership, Ancelotti attributes the decision – in part – to his then poor grasp of English. When Chelsea came calling again in 2009, reservations were reversed, particularly given the club’s reluctance to replace any of its backroom staff. Ancelotti was given permission to bring just one member of Milan’s coaching team to Stamford Bridge. He chose Demichelis.

“I spent a lot of time thinking things over before agreeing to go to Chelsea,” said Ancelotti. “I was not sure – I had always worked with my football family before and I was a little bit worried about the language. Bruno was my safety net and he added value with his experience of the Milan Lab.”

Demichelis was installed as both Human Performance Director – with a remit to build a replica of the ‘Mind Room’ he had established at Milan – and assistant coach, operating alongside Ray Wilkins and Paul Clement.

While his appointment provided reassurance for Ancelotti, Demichelis’ arrival was questioned in certain quarters. “John Terry was the club captain at the time and I met him in Carlo’s office,” recalled Demichelis.

“Carlo introduced me as the assistant coach and human performance director. John looked at me and said, ‘You don’t talk about football. You’ve never played football. What the fuck are you doing here?’”

Terry’s reaction was perhaps partly influenced by Chelsea’s underwhelming pre-season transfer business. Nemanja Matić, Daniel Sturridge and Yuri Zhirkov arrived with little fanfare and would play only minor roles in the campaign that followed. There was a sense that the momentum Hiddink had built during his time in charge had stalled.

The scepticism was short-lived, however. Driven on by the still-formidable Čech- Terry-Lampard-Drogba axis, Chelsea began the season in supreme fashion, winning 14 of their first 16 games in all competitions.

Behind the scenes, Demichelis was making use of his Milan connections to develop a rapport with senior players. During his time in Italy, he had forged a close friendship with Clarence Seedorf, who would eventually bring Demichelis back to Milan during the Dutchman’s short time in charge of the Rossoneri in 2014.

“To Drogba, Clarence was an icon, a person he really respected,” said Demichelis. “So, when I was sitting with Drogba, I called Clarence. I gave the phone to Drogba and told him, ‘Didier, there is someone who wants to speak to you.’ He took the phone and I saw him stand up straight away. Immediately, with his body language, you could see the connection.”

Demichelis’s efforts were supported by Ancelotti’s willingness to delegate responsibility for addressing the squad on matters that strayed beyond tactics. “Sometimes he would start to talk about technical issues – anxiety, attention, concentration, motivation and cohesion, for example – and after a few minutes he would say ‘Bruno can explain this better than me,’” recalled Demichelis. “When he delegated like that, he was giving me real power. He helped me so much.”

The Italian’s sports science methods were also making an impression on Ancelotti’s core first team members. Drawing on his experience with Milan, Demichelis introduced regular electromyogram tests to measure muscular electrical activity. The readings enabled players to quantify conditions such as post-game ‘tightness’ and take proportionate remedial action, including carefully calibrated breathing training.

Demichelis found a staunch advocate in Petr Čech.

“He was there every morning,” recalled Demichelis. “We put ten electrodes across his entire muscular chain, starting from the neck and ending with the calf. We measured the level of tension and he would do the exercises until the right and left sides [of his body] were completely balanced.”

Čech’s devotion was perhaps partly inspired by Demichelis’s ability to illustrate clearly the benefits of preventative interventions such as electromyogram tests and heart rate monitoring.

“I told the players to think about when they drove back to their houses and had a dashboard in their car, displaying data,” he said. “If you hear a sound or see a flashing light indicating that the coolant temperature has increased dramatically, you stop. You have the information to see that something is going wrong and stop what you’re doing, before there are serious consequences.”

At Milan, Demichelis introduced daily six-minute tests, combining GPS data with physiological measurements, such as heart rate variability, to develop a ‘risk scoring’ system. By monitoring changes to a player’s score against a baseline, Demichelis was able to indicate potential susceptibility to injury and proactively apply treatment.

For example, a 10% drop in a player’s score would generate a yellow flag, with a 20% reduction resulting in an orange flag. A decrease of 30% would signal a red flag and preventative treatment in the Mind Room. Demichelis set up a similar system at Chelsea and, at the turn of the year, the team seemed in good health, both on and off the pitch. 2010 began with five straight victories, culminating in a 7-2 evisceration of Sunderland. By the end of January, Chelsea were top of the league table, leading Manchester United by a point.

The performances seemed to serve as testimony to the management team’s precise coaching, which had focused on managing the ‘load’ placed on players whose no holds barred attitude to training differed markedly from their Italian counterparts. The squad with which Ancelotti and Demichelis had worked at Milan was acutely aware of the demands of increasingly intense, long seasons. Training sessions were rarely conducted at full throttle. When they arrived at Chelsea, the duo found a group of players who were less conscious of – or just unwilling to accept – the need for balance.

“I said to Carlo, ‘You will be surprised, because these guys need to be held back, not pushed,’” said Demichelis. “They had only one gear: full speed. We needed to protect them from themselves.”

The change in ethos met with some initial resistance. In Quiet Leadership, Ancelotti recalls Florent Malouda throwing his GPS device to the ground in the middle of a training session, declaring that he was “tired of this GPS crap… it is just to control me and I don’t want to be controlled. I don’t want to train with this.”

A compromise was eventually reached, which saw the players wear GPS monitors for four of every six days’ training. It was a decision that seemed to typify Ancelotti’s willingness to listen to the squad’s concerns.

It also seemed to represent something of a departure from the methods employed by his most notable predecessor, Mourinho. The pair had clashed after the latter’s appointment at Inter Milan in the summer of 2008. “There are many coaches who have won the Champions League a few times. Carlo is one of them. He is also the only one to have lost a final after being 3-0 up,” said Mourinho in February 2009.

The antipathy was mutual. “If Mourinho is Jesus, then I am certainly not one of his apostles,” remarked Ancelotti, later in the same year.

The barbs lent an added tension to a match that looked set to make or break Chelsea’s season.

The draw for the last 16 of the 2009-10 Champions League produced some intriguing matches. Manchester United took on an ageing AC Milan, winning 7-2 on aggregate. The result seemed to confirm the impression that Italy’s influence on the latter stages of Europe’s elite competition was waning.

The pick of the ties, though, was undoubtedly Chelsea vs Inter. On the pitch, the teams’ respective spines – comprised of Lucio, Wesley Sneijder and Samuel Eto’o on the one hand and Terry, Lampard and Drogba on the other – illustrated the potential quality of the contest. Off the pitch, the games would see Ancelotti and Mourinho, fresh from their sparring contest in Serie A, lock horns again.

Inter gained the upper hand in the first leg, winning 2-1 at San Siro. It was a result that left the second leg at Stamford Bridge – Mourinho’s first visit to the ground since leaving Chelsea in September 2007 – finely poised.

Chelsea came into the match on the back of a 4-2 defeat against Manchester City, a game Ancelotti described being “outfought and tactically outthought”. Mourinho’s return would prove equally problematic. With Lucio, Walter Samuel and Thiago Motta displaying the solidity that would eventually propel Inter to a historic treble, the Nerazzurri secured a 1-0 win courtesy of a fine Eto’o strike.

In the aftermath, Ancelotti and the team faced real scrutiny for the first time since his arrival. The media training which Demichelis had made a priority during the summer of 2009 came into focus.

“In pre-season, you develop the way to cope and deal with unexpected results,” said Demichelis. “Every individual had the support of the entire team… players were trained to protect each other, to defend each other.”

The resilience proved critical at a time when Ancelotti was also under intense pressure from Abramovich. “The players knew the owner was on my case and had felt that they had let me down,” said Ancelotti. “They began playing for me; they felt they owed me and they responded brilliantly.”

Chelsea’s finish to the season was staggering. The team won seven of the nine league games after the defeat to Inter, scoring 37 goals in the process.

In doing so, they became the first team since 1962 to score a century of goals in a league season. More importantly, the run also ensured a first league title since Mourinho’s departure. All that remained was the FA Cup: beat Portsmouth in the final and Chelsea would be celebrating the most successful season in the club’s history.

The 1-0 win – against a side managed by another of Ancelotti’s predecessors, Avram Grant – was relatively straightforward, but the Chelsea manager’s pre-match team talk was less routine. “This is the last game of the season, we know what we’re able to do, and we know the opposition,” said Ancelotti, addressing his players. “What do you think the tactics should be?”

The tactic was evidence of the trust the Italian placed in individuals such as Lampard and Terry. In Quiet Leadership, the former Chelsea captain describes the dedication which Ancelotti’s willingness to listen, allied to a genuine compassion for his squad, inspired.

“It wasn’t for show: he genuinely wanted our input,” said Terry. “He wanted to know what kind of daily routine we were used to, what we felt made the players tick… I’ve seen players play through injuries, taking injections to get them through it, when they really shouldn’t have been out there at all, because they wanted to perform for Carlo Ancelotti.”

Terry’s testimony is striking, given Ancelotti’s relatively short stay at Chelsea. Despite winning the Double in his first season, the Italian was dismissed at the end of the following campaign, having guided the club to a second-place finish in the Premier League and the quarter- finals of the Champions League.

His legacy is perhaps as much about style as it is about silverware. The pre-FA Cup final address seemed to typify the ‘quiet leadership’ – described by Ancelotti as “the kind of quiet which is a strength… there is power and authority in being calm and measured” – which he spent years working on.

Strength. Power. Calmness. Ancelotti’s words would sit well with Bruno Demichelis. As Gichin Funakoshi said: “Shotokan strives to train the mind… while externally developing strength, to the point where one may overcome even ferocious wild animals. Mind and technique become one in true karate.”

John Nassoori is a freelance writer with an interest in performance psychology. He has written for publications including When Saturday Comes and The Set Pieces and co-produces The Football Psychology Show.