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Enzo Maresca's chess-like approach a dangerous one for impatient Chelsea
The golden rule for pre-season analysis is to ignore absolutely everything that happens - unless there is an unmistakable whiff of disaster in the air.
- Published before Chelsea 0-2 Man City
Chelsea winning one of their five matches doesn’t matter.
Their shoddy performances don’t matter either, not with so many senior players absent until the beginning of last week.
What does matter is that lingering, intangible sense that something is wrong.
Chaos, upheaval, and impatience are already the trademarks of the Todd Boehly era, and as such have become self-perpetuating.
Ten new signings (and several still in the pipeline) looks clumsy and petulant, rather than refreshing or even exciting for supporters, while the inevitable tactical growing pains under a new manager immediately bring pressure and scrutiny.
More than that, an expectation that things will probably go wrong immediately sews doubt, and on the eve of BlueCo’s third season as owners it’s hard to see things any other way.
Thomas Tuchel lasted six Premier League matches before Boehly kicked him out. Graham Potter got to 22. Mauricio Pochettino managed a full 38, but just when a corner had been turned it was mutually decided it was best if he leaves.
It’s a terrible precedent to set for whoever was to come next, but particularly alarming when the appointment is a man with less than two seasons as a senior manager under his belt.
To be blunt: Chelsea’s absurd turnover of playing staff, impossibly demanding owners, super-clubs status, and current low ebb make them almost uniquely difficult to handle, and Enzo Maresca is just about the most inexperienced coach they could possibly have hired for a job.
That does not mean it won’t work, of course.
It would be foolish to predict anything with confidence when it comes to such an unwieldy and unprecedented project as this one, and it should be said Maresca is a respected tactical mind highly regarded by his old boss Pep Guardiola.
But the Guardiola comparisons are part of the problem.
Chelsea have hired a meticulous and idealistic coach, the kind who expects tactical elegance and perfectionism. It is an elitist approach to football, an ideology that has a regal self-righteousness to it, which is fine if the club are in awe of the style and see themselves as football’s elite.
That is not Chelsea.
What we’ve seen from Boehly is outsider energy, a confidence in finding untapped shortcuts and workarounds, a self-satisfied ‘move fast and break things’ approach.
But an even simpler issue for Chelsea is this: a club that failed to notice the tactical principles taking shape under Pochettino is unlikely to show patience, loyalty, or togetherness for a style of football that Leicester fans often found tedious even when it worked.
Maresca is on record comparing his philosophy to chess, a sport widely seen as slow and boring, the two words most often levelled at Leicester last season.
The Foxes support were ultimately won around, but it’s one thing to painstakingly build out from the back with comfortably the best team in the division and another to do that with a tetchy group in a results-first environment.
It’s no surprise, then, that Chelsea’s poor pre-season form has immediately produced feelings of impending doom.
At the moment the worried think-pieces focus on Chelsea’s high line being broken and on defensive errors by players learning to pass out from the back, but what lies underneath these criticisms is the implicit understanding that Boehly – the maverick rule breaker, or so he likes to think – is not going to fall in love with chess.
The players might, or they might not.
It is certainly a squad with enough talent, and history under similar managers, to adapt well.
Enzo Fernandez is the perfect number six to anchor a possession-based team, and he will be flanked by ex-Brighton midfielder Moises Caicedo and Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall, brought to the club from Maresca’s Leicester.
In defence, Marc Cucurella can perform the inverted full-back role and through Brighton and Spain has experience of Guardiola-like tactics, although there isn’t necessarily a top-quality centre-back pair.
This is an area Chelsea should look to improve.
Higher up the pitch Cole Palmer has worked with Maresca at Manchester City, Christopher Nkunku is a perfect centre-forward to drop and link the play, and Raheem Sterling and Pedro Neto are the direct runners needed to complete the Guardiola cosplay.
It is, in other words, a good squad... or at least it will be if Chelsea can trim it down.
There are more than 40 senior players at Cobham, a frankly ridiculous situation that neatly captures the disordered thinking that still engulfs the club, threatening to eat alive any manager who tries to impose a structure on the group.
Ready to make his mark in Blue.
— Chelsea FC (@ChelseaFC) August 11, 2024
Welcome to Chelsea, Pedro Neto! 🔵 pic.twitter.com/XdJvsrdlH5
Maresca needs time, both to get his radically un-Chelsea-like ideas across and to learn how to manage a super-club.
Yet time is the one thing above all else that Chelsea managers are not given, and after a summer in which Aston Villa, Tottenham, and Manchester United have all improved Chelsea could struggle just to stand still.
Not that they show any sign of doing that.
They are in constant flux, impatience their defining feature now that lavish spending has made PSR deadlines a yearly headache.
That would be a serious problem for any Chelsea manager. It is perhaps insurmountable for someone whose football isn’t entertaining enough to steal time from a chairman running out of it.
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