When Maresca arrived at Chelsea in the summer of 2024, i Blues they were returning from a twelfth and a sixth place, with three coaches sacked (Tuchel, Potter and Pochettino) in progressively more surreal circumstances and with an increasingly overstuffed squad of players, in a kind of bizarre social experiment.
Maresca had achieved promotion with Leicester at the first attempt, but the previous experience with Parma had been a disaster, and it’s one thing to coach in the second division, it’s another thing to coach Chelsea. At that moment it was easy to imagine the classic apocalyptic scenario: the new young and ambitious coach arrives, violently proposes very radical ideas, clashes with corporate and technical chaos, goes mad and is quickly shown the door. If one stopped to look at how his experience at Chelsea began and ended, he would say that Maresca did exactly what one could expect. However, everything that happened in between makes this story much more surreal, as always when Todd Boehly’s Chelsea is involved.
In reality the relationship between Maresca and Blues it foundered in the space of three weeks, or at least that’s what the manager Italian. On 13 December, immediately after the 2-0 win against Everton, Maresca made a rather bizarre statement considering the context: “The last 48 hours have been the hardest since I’ve been at the club, since many people haven’t supported me or the team.” At the time it was actually difficult to understand who Maresca was referring to. Just 24 hours earlier he had received the manager of the month award for November and, despite a streak of four games without a win, just a couple of weeks had passed since the 3-0 against Barcelona, the match that for many had marked the high point of Maresca’s experience at Chelsea.
November, more generally, seemed like the month in which Chelsea could actually make a leap to the next level: at the beginning of the month the Blues they had crushed Tottenham, who were ahead of them in the table at the time, with a performance of senseless intensity which ended 1-0 but with almost 4 expected goals products and 6 great opportunities in favor of Chelsea. That match, dominated at an impressive level, had effectively ruined Tottenham. At the end of the match Spence and van de Ven had furiously fled into the tunnel without saying goodbye to the fans, creating a controversy which then began a negative series for Tottenham, who quickly fell from sixth to thirteenth place in a month or so.
Also in November came the aforementioned match against Barcelona, but above all the direct clash with Arsenal, another match in which Chelsea had made it clear that they were a very mature and credible team, coming out with a convincing draw also due to the quality expressed, despite having played for almost an hour in numerical inferiority.
It’s difficult to understand what has changed in the two weeks between the Arsenal match and the Everton match. The “worst 48 hours” to which Maresca referred could appear to be a direct reference to the fans, always ready to challenge the team, even if the results under Maresca were clearly the best since Tuchel’s farewell in 2022. The reconstructions of these hours, however, make it clear that his suffering was instead aimed at what was happening within the club.
As Jacob Steinberg explains on Guardian, “The problem for Maresca was that some of his best players [James e Palmer nello specifico, nda] they were not able to play more games in a short time.” This situation, again according to the Guardian’s reconstruction, had led Chelsea to push for a long squad and to demand, more or less explicitly, that Maresca rely more on his second lines. Again using Steinberg’s words: “Maresca felt too much interference from above” and the post-Everton statements were attributable to the clash with his medical staff and consequently with the club.
It must be said that it is difficult to give validity to this type of reconstruction only now: Maresca was at Chelsea for 18 months, he has always had a very deep squad and has always followed more or less the same strategy. The only real change was dictated by the margins he had to make rotations. For such a high-quality team, playing in the Conference League as happened last season meant being able to allow itself a very deep turnover. Chelsea basically had two teams, one in the Premier League and one in Europe, where even Palmer was out of the UEFA list due to League Phase.
The same approach is not possible this season: Chelsea is in fact playing in the Champions League, the need to rely on its starters is decidedly greater and the matches in which Maresca made a turnover were clearly the worst played so far, such as the 2-2 against Qarabag in the Champions League and the 3-1 defeat against Leeds in the Premier League, the latter marked by an error in construction by Tosin Adarabioyo which then infuriated Maresca himself. This is also potentially proof that having a roster of 40 players isn’t always a good thing.
In any case, the match against Everton undoubtedly marked the end of the game: after those statements, the Italian manager’s credibility imploded. In the following midweek round, Chelsea beat Cardiff in the League Cup, but then went on to play another three games without winning, accumulating another 9 points behind first-placed Arsenal, falling behind third-placed Aston Villa and even overtaking Liverpool and catching up with Manchester United, two teams that for different reasons are not exactly experiencing the best seasons ever.
Even the fans fell off Maresca’s bandwagon at that point. Against Aston Villa and Bournemouth Maresca replaced Cole Palmer twice with the game still in balance and the Stamford Bridge crowd made him feel it by singing “You don’t know what you’re doing”, although this choice was easily readable with the need to manage the playing time of the Englishman, returning from an injury, just as requested by his medical staff.
In the same period of time the Manchester City case exploded. As revealed by David Ornstein of The AthleticIn fact, Maresca has had contacts with City for a hypothetical succession of Guardiola at the end of the season. After all, who better than a former Under 21 coach and Guardiola’s assistant to take his place? This affair, of which Chelsea was fully aware due to the agreements included in Maresca’s contract, evidently broke the bank.
Paradoxically, the end we have reached seems to have been sought not so much by Chelsea as by Maresca himself, who in recent weeks has appeared progressively more exasperated by the ways of his former club and has tried, even if it is not clear how, to build a exit strategy. Compared to what Chelsea has accustomed us to in recent years, a farewell like this is perfectly in line with expectations. Maresca was in fact the fourth manager, the sixth considering the leaders Lampard and Bruno Saltor, in just under four years. A number that seems normal only because Chelsea handled almost 50 players in the same period.
The substantial difference is that with Maresca Chelsea seemed to have taken the right path. Despite the qualification for the Champions League last season, in his first year the Italian coach had brought two trophies to London, and if perhaps the Conference could appear minor for the standing of a club that has won everything in the last 20 years, the Club World Cup, won by dominating the best team in the world in the final, definitely had a different weight. Likewise, net of the performance fluctuations that were legitimate to expect from a very young team, in which the oldest members of the squad have just turned 28, this season we have seen Chelsea’s greater ability to respond to the difficulties posed by their opponents.
In his analysis of the Club World Cup final last July, Emanuele Mongiardo highlighted how Chelsea were formidable in overcoming the furious pressure from PSG by relying on goalkeeper Sanchez and Malo Gusto. A significant thing, considering that both were coming off very complex seasons, both criticized for their performances and, at a certain point, had lost their place on the pitch.
Similarly, after the Premier League defeat against Sunderland at the end of October, marked by a goal from a throw-in by Isidor, Maresca had tried to change his defensive approach on throw-ins, leaving Joao Pedro and the two wingers very advanced (specifically two sprinters like Garnacho and Pedro Neto) with the task of threatening a transition, thus pushing the opponents to fill the penalty area less willingly. The same approach, also repeated on corner kicks against Arsenal at the end of November, effectively eliminated the danger of the players Gunners on a free kick. Having in mind how dangerous Arteta’s team is in the squares, it is easy to understand what impact such a solution had.
In these 18 months Maresca has taken a truly radical approach in his structure of ideas. To always quote Mongiardo: “Enzo Maresca seems to have come from the pen of a screenwriter who wanted to summarize in a single coach all the possible stereotypes about positional play.” The manager The Italian adhered fully to Guardiola’s principles, perhaps more than Guardiola himself, but he also showed an intelligence in working on their absolutely non-trivial application. In doing so he built a Chelsea that was at times brilliant, capable of producing exceptional performances against top-level teams such as PSG, Barcelona, Arsenal, and of achieving important results for a team that in the previous two years had seemed to be in the throes of sham management.
In the end, however, everyone pulled too hard. Maresca tried to use his results to gain more power and the Chelsea management instead tried again to impose his strategy as the only possible one. And the result was exactly what we could have imagined at the beginning of this journey.
