It has been almost nine months and Carlo Ancelotti is still waiting for a call. All the talk was that he had spent his summer as a guest on one of Roman Abramovich's luxury super yachts, perhaps the nine-deck Eclipse or the 377ft back-up, Luna, the invite apparently testimony to the strength of his relationship with an oligarch who had wielded the axe a few months previously. But the rumours were bogus. Roman has not written. He has not rung. He has not even texted. The silence has been deafening.

"On his yacht? No, no, I didn't have that possibility," says Ancelotti through a guffaw, his mind drifting back to life at Chelsea and the moment the chief executive, Ron Gourlay, played executioner by delivering the owner's dismissal at Everton within an hour of last season's conclusion. "No, I didn't speak with Roman after the end of the season. He took a decision, and I respect his decision. Now everything is finished, so there is no reason to speak. If I had been the owner Ancelotti would have stayed, but I'm not. And I know that, in my life, sometimes you are sacked and can't finish the job you start with your team. But, in Italy, we say that if one door closes you can find a bigger door. Paris St-Germain could be that bigger door."

Chelsea return to Goodison Park on Saturday but, from afar, there is no bitterness lingering with Ancelotti at the indignity of his abrupt departure from Stamford Bridge only 12 months after claiming Chelsea's first league and FA Cup double. Nor should there be. The Italian's recent career has taken him on a tour of Europe's most glamorous hubs, from Milan to London to Paris where he is now ensconced in a swanky apartment in the city centre with a favourite restaurant swiftly identified and regularly patronised just around the corner. Life is "good". The food is "good". PSG, backed by Qatari Sports Investments, are potentially the wealthiest club in world football with more clout even than Manchester City, and appointed him as manager when they already topped Ligue 1. He boasts the perfect record to date – played five, won five – and, on Sunday, takes his team to Nice on the Côte d'Azur. So where exactly did it all go wrong?

At Chelsea, Ancelotti can pinpoint the moment he was cast as condemned man to a league defeat at Old Trafford three games from the end of term, when the title was effectively wrested away. In truth his reputation had already taken critical damage by then, an inability to arrest a mid-season slump having left the defending champions gasping in a desperate game of catch-up. Club policy had appeared muddled, veering from an initial desire to blood younger talent to a £73.3m midwinter splurge on Fernando Torres and David Luiz. The late season recovery was deceptive. Abramovich believed the time had come, again, for change with the man he had pursued so vigorously duly removed and Andre Villas-Boas given a clear mandate to overhaul.

Ancelotti has watched his successor's stuttering progress with interest, a season of transition having marooned Chelsea on the fringes of the title race with the club left to fend off those who would oust them even from the top four. The Italian tuned in last Sunday to see his former team fail to win from three goals up for the first time in the Premier League. That, he suggested, was a "strange" game but these are odd times. "I don't know how long Villas-Boas's changes will take, but when you change something at a football club you have to give the manager time," he says. "You cannot reach your objective immediately. They want to refresh the team, but the philosophy of this side was introduced by [José] Mourinho who turned John Terry, Frank Lampard and Didier Drogba into great players. They're the same players I trained, and the same players who are there now. Chelsea want to change all this." Such an assessment makes the task feel all the more daunting.

Some of the issues that dogged the latter days of his own tenure remain. Torres managed a solitary, scruffy goal in 14 league appearances for Ancelotti following his £50m move from Liverpool, the manager exhausting combinations of forwards and systems in a bid to eke more from his World Cup winner, all to no avail. Torres has now mustered two goals in 19 for Villas-Boas, and is scoreless in the Premier League since September. He remains an enigma. "When Fernando arrived at Chelsea he had the same problem – a lack of confidence in front of goal," says Ancelotti. "We thought it was just because he'd changed clubs and team-mates, and so needed time to get to know them better. Now I think it's different.

"Last season he lost even more confidence. It's always a problem for strikers when they don't score. It was a problem for (Filippo) Inzaghi, for (Andriy) Shevchenko and for (Hernán) Crespo. I played Crespo for six months at Parma and he didn't score. It all builds up. But, if you believe in the player, you have to stick with them. I think Fernando still has ability, and Chelsea still believe in him. I certainly don't regret standing by him last season. I wanted to support him. He needed to have time to return to his best, and he needed to play. With Drogba it's another story. There's a lot of competition, and it could be good to have Drogba and Torres play together, but it's difficult for them technically. You could put them in a partnership, but you'd have to build a different shape and a different system behind them. You have to support them from midfield."

The implication was that Chelsea do not have the personnel to make that a comfortable fit. It is almost uncanny, then, that Ancelotti should find PSG – even with a lead established by his predecessor, Antoine Kombouaré – with a somewhat unbalanced squad boasting two senior strikers but six centre-halves and five central midfielders following a scattergun, and ultimately ineffective, buying policy in the midwinter window. PSG are City in the early days after Abu Dhabi United Group's takeover, a club who have not claimed their domestic title in 18 years but are keen to make newfound ambition very clear, even when saddled by the reality that Ligue 1's reputation is not that of the Spanish, English or even German leagues.

January was an eye-opener. The Parisian pursuit of David Beckham and Milan's Alexandre Pato came to nothing. Some €105m (£88m) has been spent this season but the marquee arrival – other than Ancelotti himself – is still elusive and, when it was closest, common sense kicked in over salary demands. "It's not true that Carlos Tevez didn't want to come here," says the manager. "His first choice was Milan, and his second was PSG. We needed a striker and had an opportunity to buy him, but we couldn't find a financial agreement with him. Maybe it might happen in the summer, but I do not think his demands will change. The owners here are ambitious and want to invest, but they want to invest in the right way. Everyone said I only came here for the money, but I have the same contract now as I did at Chelsea – not one pound more.

"We bought three big players [Thiago Motta from Internazionale, Maxwell from Barcelona and Alex from Chelsea] but we found good agreements for them all. We don't just want to spend for the sake of it. I found a club that were first in the league, so there is a big responsibility on me to make sure they end the season top, but the owners' aim is very clear: to build a team in the Champions League, not just in France. At the moment it is a small club in Europe, but we are working on that. We know we are not at the same level of Chelsea, Manchester United, Barcelona or Real Madrid, but in the future we hope to close the gap. That will need time, too."

It had been tedium that eventually forced the 52-year-old to seek a return to the dugout, the seven-month sabbatical not feeling quite as attractive once domestic seasons were under way and drawing his focus. "At first it was nice to have four months not even speaking about football, but when the English and Italian leagues started I began to think … I did look back at Chelsea. It's normal to evaluate everything, and you have to do that when your mind is 'cold', after a couple of weeks. No, a couple of months. But I hope I'm a better coach now than I was. I learned a lot." And will he speak with Roman again? "Of course, in the future, I'm sure we will come back to having a relationship." For now the wait for an invite to visit Eclipse, or indeed for the oligarch merely to drop him a line, goes on.