Maresca's Style Works: Only Injuries & Poor Recruitment Are Hindering Him
Enzo Maresca's style has been successful. Outside factors are the issue.
There’s a famous quote from Rudyard Kipling “If you can keep your head when all around you are losing theirs”. I think this is very applicable to Chelsea right now.
There’s two complaints. One about Enzo Maresca’s football not being sustainable or effective, and boring. The other being that we’re in some kind of crisis and we should all be in panic mode, and Maresca is in trouble.
Honestly, its like some Chelsea fans are addicted to anger and the dopamine hits of both the joy of success and anger of defeat, with no in-between. One minute its “we can win it all” when we win a final, the next, after one defeat, its “we’re a crap team, top 6 at most, sell everyone”, when the reality is neither are true.
First, on the complaints Enzo Maresca’s football. I keep hearing that it’s boring, predictable and easy to beat. A funny accusation to make given we’ve only lost 2 Premier League games with 11 men in the last 6 months, and won 26 of our last 38 games including Liverpool twice, PSG, and the Nuno low block of Nottingham Forest on the final day of last season.
I hear some people saying they want a different style, comparing Arsenal to Jose Mourinho’s first Chelsea side, largely due to their defensive prowess.
Lets be clear first, Mikel Arteta’s Arsenal is only similar to Jose’s Chelsea in the defensive aspect.
Jose’s Chelsea was a much more attacking and creative side, scored way more goals and created way more open play chances than Arteta’s Arsenal, who are the third WORST in the PL this season in open play goals - over 50% of their goals have come from set pieces. I wouldn’t want to play football like Arsenal play now. Its not the only way to win football matches.
Jose’s first Chelsea team would smash this Arsenal side, they’d negate their set piece strength and find a way to win. No problem.
Speaking of defence, this brings me back to Enzo Maresca’s Chelsea. In the 2024/25 season, Chelsea had the third best defence in the Premier League. This was with our current centre back options plus Levi Colwill, and Robert Sanchez in goal. And Josh Acheampong, our best CB right now, barely played either. If Maresca had got his wish of signing a top CB either in January or the summer, and/or Levi had stayed fit, my guess is we’d have conceded less goals and have more points right now.
At the same time, this season we’re the PL’s joint top scorers. This is without Cole Palmer or our number 9 Liam Delap being available for the last two months.
We’re on the same number of points after 8 games this season as last season. Last season we had a striker in top form, as well as Cole Palmer and Levi Colwill fit and playing well. This season we’ve matched it without any of those factors/players available.
The evidence is clearly there that if we’d not had the injuries we’ve had, and if Enzo Maresca had been backed with the GK and CB he wanted, the chances are we’d be up near the top of the league. Playing a more possession based, attacking style of football than Arsenal, and our defence would have been much better than it currently is. I think we’d have 5-7 more points and have conceded 5-6 less goals, giving us the second best defence in the PL and taking us 2nd.
All this, if we’d backed Maresca in two positions, and/or without so many injuries. That’s how close we are. I don’t believe we were ever going to win the league this season, but had we got the right players in the summer, we’d be in the race for a lot of the season, and closer now. The players we signed were good, don’t get me wrong. But there were two more additions we needed to make.
If we had planned our squad and recruitment properly and been more efficient, we could have found a way to get a CB and GK out, in order to bring in Mike Maignan and at CB. Its that simple.
Going back to Enzo Maresca, another myth is that he uses the same tactics. Nope, not true. He is tactically flexible. He’s adapted his formation and tactics way more often than anyone gives him credit for. He’s not a full Pep disciple. He combines the positional play and possession/control of Pep’s football, and the freedom for attackers of Carlo Ancelotti - its just freedom within a structure and within a position. He’s played different formations and adapted tactics at half time to win games too (Nottingham Forest this season was an example of this).
The reason it looked so poor against Sunderland is that our players were clearly fatigued, not concentrating properly and not performing. Judging his football based solely on the defeats is absolute folly.
To be clear, I’m not going to blindly defend Maresca. If he makes bad decisions and costs us games, I’m going to call him out. My loyalty is to the Chelsea badge, not individual.
But there’s literally no reason to panic right now. We’re 3 points off third place in the PL with 29 league games and 7 months of the season to go. The target this season was to consolidate the top 4, hopefully get more points and finish higher, maybe win a domestic cup and have a good run in the Champions League. It wasn’t realistic to win the title this year.
With 7 months of the season to go, we have Liam Delap coming back which will help us against low blocks and in creating chances, and scoring them. It will also allow Joao Pedro time to properly recover from his injury and get fit.
Cole Palmer and Benoit Badiashile, who looked good before his injury, will both be back in 5 weeks or so, with most of the season still to go. All three will now be rested and a lot fresher after not playing for a few weeks/months. Dario Essugo could be back in December too, and give Moises Caicedo a much needed rest during the hectic Christmas period.
Alejandro Garnacho - who didn’t have a pre-season so has taken time to get fit - played well against Sunderland and scored a good goal. As he gains fitness, he could be a goal outlet for us. Andrey Santos and Romeo Lavia are both fit and available and we have a couple of midweek games coming up, Wolves away in the league cup and Quarabag in the Champions League, where we could easily rest Moises Caicedo and Enzo Fernandez, and they would be well good enough to start in their place. Estevao Willian is also beginning to find his feet and hopefully will get some more starts soon, and is relatively fresh.
Finally of course we have the January window coming up. If the club are smart and Dave Fallows has his say, we should be trying to sign a top CB in that window, and moving one on to meet UEFA’s restrictions on us. If we do, that will definitely be a boost to our season.
The point I’m trying to make here, is the first, Enzo Maresca’s philosophy of football works, and has been successful already in winning trophies, and in the PL. He can achieve even more with time and the right players. He and his tactics are not remotely the problem at Chelsea right now.
And second, there’s no reason to be negative, despite the Sunderland defeat. We’re in the mix for the top 4 with some top players to come back and improve us, and a deep squad so we can rest some players in the next couple of weeks.
We were always going to start this season slowly due to fatigue and injuries, again, I said this back in May/June.
I’m confident we’ll improve over the season and end up with about 75-78 points and finishing top 4, maybe with a domestic trophy too. That will be well enough to see Enzo Maresca keep his job at Chelsea - unless of course he chooses to leave of his own accord.
There’s a lot more to come from this Chelsea squad, and we’re closer than many people think to being challengers again. Next season, if we do things right, that should be happening.
The Score
Yes, we are joint top scores, but we have played five games at home and had an extremely fortuitous run of fixtures. We have scored 10 of our 17 goals against three of the bottom 4 teams, against 4 goals in three games against teams in the top half of the table.
We have taken 4 points in 4 games against top half opposition and two of those were courtesy of a late injury time winner against a woeful Liverpool side who have lost their last 4 in the league. We are flattering to deceive. Even the 9 points we have taken from the bottom 4 were fortuitous. We could easily have gone in 2 down against Forest. We had fortuitous VAR decision wipe out Fulham and Palace's goals and even the truly woeful Hammers were 1 up against us before doing their usual impression of the French during WW2 whenever they concede.
This despite the fact that the only top 6 team we have played is Sunderland, who outplayed us and deserved to win, the only convincing performance at The Bridge has come against a poor Liverpool team, whose 7th place at the moment is false, they are lucky not to be in the lower reaches of the league.
I won't accept fatigue as an excuse, when we played at home and have such a big squad, eight of those players had a week to recover. United and Forest away are the only times we have had to leave London in the league. We still have to play nine of the current top 10 away from home.
How can you say Maresca is not to blame. His substitutions against a United team whose morale was rock bottom were appalling. Against Brighton in the next game he made the same mistake again. His decision to take Josh off on Saturday was truly baffling.
As for blaming the goalkeeping situation, United apart Sanchez has been pretty solid this season, now he has finally abandoned forcing him to always play out from the back a season too late. Same with Josh coming in for Levi, we have nine Centre halves, if he cannot fit them in a system than that's poor management. He continues to play Enzo, who has disappeared this season and unbalances the midfield because he is a joke defensively. If he isn't fit give Santos a chance to establish himself. He continually plays Neto on the left, despite the fact that he is so much better on the right. In Cole's absence he has been reluctant to introduce Estavao earlier. He continues to play Gusto as an inverted midfielder or Gusto and James as midfielder, where under Poch Gusto's strength was his engine bombing up the touchline.
Sorry, Maresca has to take an awful lot of the blame for where we find ourselves and it is not just the Sunderland game. We are not operating in isolation, Arsenal and the other teams also have injuries, it is a fact of life, what matters is how you deal with them.
Another famous quote (attributed to Mark Twain, original source unknown) is that there are lies, damned lies, and then there are statistics. I prefer to trust the evidence of my own eyes. We've watched probably every game under Maresca and the vast majority, bar a few outliers, of what he dishes up has been awful considering the talent at his disposal. The outliers need to be seen in context as well. Palmer going rogue to win the Conference league final and being unplayable in the destruction of PSG. There were a few games last December beating Villa & Spurs with the combo of Enzo, Lavia & Caicedo in midfield where I thought we looked like an outstanding side but then it lapsed again (probably Lavia got injured again). Based on what we see week in and week out , I can't accept the view that Maresca is a good manager.