In 2021, a single deleted Instagram post turned Carlo Ancelotti into the most publicly interested manager in football — and cost Alex Iwobi his place in the Everton team. Five years on, Iwobi says he learned the hard way.
Carlo Ancelotti has won three Champions Leagues, the Premier League, Serie A, La Liga, and just about everything else football has to offer. In March 2021, while managing Everton, one of his stranger moments in press conference history involved reading out an Instagram post written by a 24-year-old Nigerian midfielder and announcing, with barely concealed amusement, that he genuinely wanted to know where the player preferred to play.
That player was Alex Iwobi. The post was deleted. The damage was done. And this week, in a new interview, Iwobi looked back on the whole episode with the kind of clear-eyed honesty that only comes when you’ve genuinely grown past the mistake that caused it. “I learned the hard way,” he said. His head, by his own admission, was gone at the time. He was 24, frustrated, and handled it badly.
What Actually Happened
The sequence started in March 2021 when Iwobi received a Super Eagles call-up for Nigeria’s AFCON qualifiers against Benin and Lesotho. Marking the announcement on Instagram, he posted: “Always an honour to get a call-up to my national team. Hopefully, I get to play in my preferred position.” He didn’t specify whether he meant Nigeria or Everton. He didn’t need to. Everyone assumed he meant Everton, where Ancelotti had been rotating him across wing-back, wide midfield, and various hybrid roles throughout the season.
Ancelotti read the post. Ancelotti held a pre-match press conference. And then Ancelotti did what Ancelotti does: said the most deceptively straightforward thing possible, letting the entire room absorb the awkwardness. “I read the post,” he told reporters. “I want to speak to him, of course. I want to know his preferred position.”
— Carlo Ancelotti, Everton press conference, March 2021
The reference to Andrea Pirlo was vintage Ancelotti: technically a compliment, functionally a humiliation. He was pointing out, in the most civilised possible terms, that a player with concerns about his role could simply walk down the hall and raise them with the manager. Instead, he’d posted on Instagram.
Ancelotti’s Response Made It Worse
What came next was almost crueller than an angry reaction would have been. Ancelotti was true to his word. In the very next match against Burnley, he tried Iwobi as a number ten behind the strikers in a midfield diamond — the position the player had publicly agitated for. Everton went 2-0 down inside 25 minutes. Burnley’s pressing completely overwhelmed Everton’s build-up. By half-time, Ancelotti had reverted to a flat 4-4-2, moved Iwobi to the right wing, and then took him off in the second half.
Iwobi’s own account of that afternoon, shared this week, is painfully honest. “He said to me, ‘Where do you play?’ I told him I like number ten, he tried me in one game against Burnley, and we lost 2-0. After 45 minutes, he said ‘Alex, get back on the wing, ” and in the second half, I got taken off.”
— Alex Iwobi, 2026 interview
Iwobi Then vs. Iwobi Now
Everton, 2020/21
Rotated across multiple positions. Publicly frustrated. Lost in Ancelotti’s system. Inconsistent, by his own admission. A £34m signing that hadn’t found his best level.
Fulham, 2025/26
4 Premier League goals, 3 assists. Fulham Goal of the Month nominee. GOTM winner in 2024. A disciplined, creative force in the middle of the park under Marco Silva.
The contrast between those two versions of Iwobi is about more than positional clarity. It’s about maturity. The player who posted frustrated thoughts on Instagram in 2021 has been replaced by one who, at 29, channels that same emotional intelligence into reading the game rather than airing grievances on social media. That’s growth. Real, visible, measurable growth.
What Ancelotti’s Aura Actually Did For Iwobi
Iwobi described Ancelotti’s presence at Everton as “crazy.” The Italian has that effect. Players who worked under him at Real Madrid, Chelsea, Napoli, and Bayern Munich all describe the same thing: an aura of absolute authority that doesn’t need to be performed or enforced. It simply exists. Walking into a room with Carlo Ancelotti in it feels different from walking into a room without him.
For a young player already uncertain about his role and his best position, that presence could either focus you or unsettle you. For Iwobi in 2021, it unsettled him. He didn’t talk to his manager. He posted on Instagram. A press conference was held about him. And then he got moved back to the wing and substituted against Burnley.
Looking at it now, through the lens of his Fulham career and his continued presence in Eric Chelle’s Super Eagles plans, the Ancelotti period reads differently. It was the friction that eventually produced the focus. As FootballInNigeria.com.ng has covered, Iwobi’s current form at Craven Cottage is among the best of his career. This week, he was nominated for Fulham’s February Goal of the Month for his composed finish against Sunderland. That’s not the player who lost the ball 13 times against Southampton in a forgettable 45 minutes in 2020. That’s the finished article.
Editorial: The Lesson Every Young Nigerian Footballer Should Read
Iwobi’s Ancelotti story isn’t really about Ancelotti. It’s about the moment when a talented player’s frustration outpaced his judgment, and he picked the wrong outlet for it. Social media as a passive-aggressive channel of communication with your manager is a trap. Most players who fall into it don’t recover as cleanly as Iwobi has.
What separates Iwobi’s story from that of a cautionary tale is what came after. He didn’t spiral. He didn’t dwell. He went to Fulham, worked with Marco Silva, redefined his positional identity, and became one of the more reliable creative midfielders in the Premier League. The embarrassment of 2021 became a data point in a longer story of self-improvement.
Every young Nigerian footballer navigating the frustrations of being played out of position, of feeling undervalued, of watching their role shift match to match under a manager with different priorities, should read this story. Talk to your manager. Don’t post about it. Ancelotti will find out either way, and he’ll be considerably less patient the second time.
With Iwobi now firing at Fulham and firmly in Super Eagles contention ahead of the 2026 World Cup playoff, fans tracking his form can build accumulator wagers around his goal contributions through the Bet9ja’s current promotion, which offers 170% boosts on multi-leg Premier League wagers and up to ₦100,000 on first deposit.
What Comes Next
Iwobi is 29. He has a Fulham contract, a Super Eagles spot, and four Premier League goals this season. He also has a GOTM nomination that fans can vote on at Fulham’s official website. He’d have been 24 the last time he won it, back in February 2024. Winning it again would feel like the kind of full-circle moment that a career rebuilt on hard lessons deserves.
He learned the hard way. It turns out the hard way worked.
📌 Did You Know?
- Ancelotti’s press conference response to Iwobi’s Instagram post referenced his successful positional reinvention of Andrea Pirlo at Juventus in 2011, when he moved the creative midfielder into a deep-lying playmaker role — widely considered one of the most inspired tactical decisions in modern club football.
- Everton paid Arsenal £34 million for Iwobi in August 2019, making him one of the most expensive signings in Everton’s history at the time, which created enormous pressure on a player still finding his best position at the elite level.
- The Burnley match in which Ancelotti tried Iwobi at number ten ended in a 2-0 Everton defeat, with Burnley’s aggressive press exposing Everton’s build-up so severely that the experiment lasted fewer than 45 minutes — and became one of the most-discussed positional experiments in the Premier League that season.
- Iwobi’s Instagram post was later deleted, but not before it was screenshotted and reported across every major football media outlet in England within hours of being published, giving it far more visibility than if it had simply stayed up.
- Marco Silva, who coached Iwobi at Fulham and oversaw his positional transformation into an authoritative central midfielder, had previously managed Watford and Everton in the Premier League, making Iwobi’s Fulham story something of a reunion with a manager who understood his qualities from the outset.
- Iwobi scored his first Premier League goal for Fulham in October 2022, a long-range effort against Aston Villa, which gave early notice that his move from Everton had unlocked a new, more productive chapter of his career at the top-flight level.
- Carlo Ancelotti was the first manager to win the UEFA Champions League three times as a manager, having won it with AC Milan in 2003 and 2007 and with Real Madrid in 2014, and he later added a fourth with Real Madrid in 2022, one year after his brief Everton stint ended.
