Chelsea view Enzo Maresca’s style as a route to success – and they’re building the club around it
https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6143724/2025/02/19/Chelsea-enzo-maresca-style/
A particular S-word was notably prominent in the stated rationale of Chelsea’s co-sporting directors Paul Winstanley and Laurence Stewart when Enzo Maresca was announced as the club’s new head coach on a five-year contract last summer.
“We are delighted to welcome Enzo to Chelsea,” they said in quotes published on the club’s official digital platforms. “He has proven himself to be an excellent coach capable of delivering impressive results with an exciting and identifiable style.”
Style. Maresca’s achievement in guiding Leicester City to promotion from the Championship as champions impressed Chelsea’s senior leadership, but what helped set him apart from the other candidates to succeed Mauricio Pochettino was the manner in which his team did it: playing a style of football that offers control, balancing chance creation with defensive solidity.
A style of football heavily influenced by Maresca’s mentor Pep Guardiola, the most consequential coach of the modern era. A style of football that Chelsea believe suits the players they have signed and the ones they intend to sign in the future. A style of football they believe offers the best chance of transforming this vast recruitment project into a consistent winner on the pitch at the highest level.
Eight months in, Chelsea under Maresca are a long way from that and trending alarmingly in the wrong direction. Two wins in nine Premier League games have dropped Maresca’s young team, depleted by injuries to several key players, from second to sixth and many of the performances have indicated that their style of play is malfunctioning.
Without a recognisable No 9 in their last two matches against Brighton, other words beginning with S came to mind watching Chelsea’s attempts to play Marescaball: sluggish, stale, sterile, spiritless, self-defeating. Many of the supporters who twice made the miserable trip to the Amex Stadium would probably venture a few more, not suitable for print.
Chelsea have been in difficult form recently (Ryan Pierse/Getty Images)
If there is a continuation away at Aston Villa on Saturday it is highly conceivable that Chelsea’s next outing at Stamford Bridge — against Southampton next Tuesday — will feature Maresca facing noises of disquiet from the stands, similar to those aimed at Maurizio Sarri. Sarri was the last Italian who attempted to implement a grand, progressive idea of football at a club that has spent most of this century defining itself in opposition to philosopher coaches like Guardiola and Arsene Wenger.
Sarri’s appointment was the clearest manifestation of previous owner Roman Abramovich’s own Guardiola fascination, but ultimately for the Russian the glorious end always superseded the stylistic means. All the signs are that Clearlake Capital’s commitment to the school of football represented by Maresca is much deeper and all-encompassing.
There were three significant BlueCo coaching hires last summer. Maresca was by far the most high-profile appointment, but former Benfica academy coach Filipe Coelho was also recruited from Estoril Under-23s to establish the principles of possession-focused, positional play in Chelsea’s development squad. Sister club Strasbourg replaced Patrick Vieira with Liam Rosenior, a bright coach highly regarded by Winstanley and Stewart who was tasked with developing young talent within a dynamic, progressive style of football.
Clearlake want all aspects of the BlueCo operation to have a coherent on-pitch identity. This is the one they have chosen and it extends to the younger age groups of Chelsea’s academy under the leadership of Glenn van der Kraan, appointed academy technical director in October after four years spent as head of youth coaching at Manchester City.
Within that context, hiring Maresca is a far bigger and more important bet by this Chelsea ownership than the appointment of Graham Potter, their ill-fated first attempt to find an emerging project coach to lead the post-Abramovich era in September 2022.
One of the leadership’s regrets about turning to Pochettino in the summer of 2023 is that it was a half-measure that delayed the pivot to this long-term direction. Their full-throated conviction on Maresca was underlined by the tabling of a five-year contract with the option to extend by a further year — offered in part due to the consideration that the Italian might be on City’s wish list to succeed Guardiola if he had chosen not to extend his stay until 2027.
Commitments of this scale and substance are not typically undone by a bad run of form.
Behdad Eghbali and Chelsea’s other co-owners are committed to the style in many ways (Glyn Kirk/AFP via Getty Images)
Chelsea want Maresca to be their long-term leader and he is less than halfway through what is regarded at Stamford Bridge as effectively a double season, with two Premier League campaigns book-ending the inaugural expanded Club World Cup in the United States. The next Pochettino-style review led by Winstanley and Stewart — who retain the full trust of ownership, despite the criticism frequently directed at them from supporters — has always been projected to take place in the summer of 2026, and there is no appetite to bring that forward.
But the eternal truth of football is that results and performances shift more than fan sentiment. Maresca’s public insistence that his job is not contingent on Champions League qualification is technically true, but it does not reflect the strength of the desire and the sense of urgency at every level of Chelsea to see the club back at Europe’s top table as soon as possible.
More of that desire and urgency must be seen on the pitch in the final 13 matches of the campaign, even in the face of a daunting injury situation. Last summer, Chelsea fully expected teething problems and difficult moments during the adaptation process to Maresca’s style of football. There was also a strong belief going into the campaign that the talent level of the first-team squad was worthy of a top-four finish.
Maresca will likely need to get creative with his tactics to halt Chelsea’s slide and keep pace with a resurgent City, Bournemouth and Newcastle United — particularly up front, where Nicolas Jackson’s absence radically changes what the team can and cannot do in the final third.
But even Guardiola’s dominant run in England has been underpinned by a willingness to evolve and adapt his approach to different personnel, circumstances and opponents. Premier League football is an ever-shifting landscape, as the City manager referenced in a recent interview with TNT Sports. “Today, modern football is the way that Bournemouth play, that Newcastle play, like Brighton play,” he said. “Liverpool is a bit like that, like we were (before the injuries). It’s modern football. It’s not positional — you need to rise the rhythm (to an) unbelievable (level).”
Chelsea’s “rhythm” has deserted them in the last nine matches, but the style Maresca was hired to implement is one they are determined to master.
