Enzo Maresca must be wondering what he has done wrong in English football.
In charge of Manchester City’s youth team, he won the Premier League 2 title. As Leicester City boss, he won the Championship before the end of April. And now as Chelsea manager, his side are favourites to win the Europa Conference League this season.
Yet even in the midst of a victorious London derby over Tottenham Hotspur earlier this month, there were murmurings of discontent, boos even. Three days later, they played out a dull 0-0 draw at Brentford, making it five months without an away win in the league. And then on Sunday, they were booed off at half-time, while trailing 2-0 to soon-to-be-relegated Ipswich Town. They came back to draw, but the damage was done.
“The match-going fans, 90 per cent of them think Maresca is a clown,” Alex Harris tells The i Paper. He owns Chelsea Fan TV, a YouTube channel that has more than 200,000 subscribers watching its fan cams and match day vlogs.
“I’m talking about fans that really follow Chelsea home and away, those are guys that have seen us through the highs and lows. We don’t have a problem watching us lose, but it’s the way you lose and the way you approach games.
“And that system does not show any form of fighting spirit, and it doesn’t encourage any inspiration from the stands.”
Maresca said he would not beg for the fans’ support after the Ipswich draw: “We are stronger with our fans, we are a better team. It’s up to them to decide the way.”
Harris added: “Maresca says we need the fans to get through the season.
“I say that the fans need the players to pass the ball forwards to get through the season. It’s extremely boring football.
“His style of football is the most uninspirational style I’ve ever seen. If we don’t play very well, then it’s quite frankly, a borefest.”
It is a bit of a recent development. Chelsea scored 20 times in the first 10 games of this Premier League season, and 19 in the next 10. Since then, they have only found the net 17 times in 12, and they have not scored more than once away from home since December.
Some fans directly attribute that slump in form to Maresca, and the early success merely a continuation of the work done by predecessor Mauricio Pochettino.
“Against the low block, we can do a lot more in general,” says Parth Gupta from The Chelsea Spot Podcast.
“We can take more risks. We can do a lot of more running off the ball, especially from wide areas.
“I think it’s sometimes very, very static, especially with [Jadon] Sancho and [Pedro] Neto. They both really like it to feet. Neto really likes to come into feet, then cut inside and then cross. Sancho likes to come to feet and look for the one-two. There’s not really any runs in behind.”
Dig a little deeper, and the statistics start to bear out that uninspiring style. Manchester City, Liverpool, Arsenal and Tottenham all play more “progressive passes” per 90 minutes than Chelsea do, with Fulham and Brighton not far behind them.
They are fifth in that metric, often called football’s most important statistic, but given the majority of their games are played with superior possession, they would expect to even be higher.
The statistics, encouraging though they might be in parts, don’t mean much to the Stamford Bridge faithful. Gary Neville recently called the football developed by Pep Guardiola, who Maresca worked under for a year at Manchester City, “a disease in the game”.
Those words resonated with many who sit in the stands at Stamford Bridge, who look at Maresca’s limited track record – this is only his third top job – and wonder what the point is.
“[Chelsea’s] football has become turgid. It’s totally controlled, risk free,” says David Chidgey, a board member for the Chelsea Supporters’ Trust.
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“Now Maresca would argue, ‘Well, I needed to control possession, I needed to control the game because we had a lot of players out with injuries. I didn’t have a striker for a long time.’ And he’s got a valid point. But it’s not what supporters want to see.
“Most supporters go to football because they want to see excitement. They want to go and see a player who can do something different, who can turn on sixpence and change a game. That’s what gets you up out of your seat. The turgid, sideways, backwards football does not.”
Perhaps, Maresca is the victim of his own success, having lost just two of his first 16 league games in charge.
“If you told anyone at the beginning of the season that we were going to get Champions League football, they would have been happy,” Gupta adds.
“I guess the problem is that we played so well in those first three months that people started talking about a title challenge.
“I think Chelsea fans should appreciate that the Champions League is something we haven’t been in for a couple of years now and getting back into it would be a success.
“Whether we have a chance in the top four and getting it comfortably next season or a chance in the Champions League next season is up to Maresca, but overall, people should just be happy with what they’re getting.”
Champions League football is not guaranteed. Chelsea are down to sixth now and there will be five spots available, and their run-in includes games against Fulham, Liverpool, Manchester United, Nottingham Forest and most significantly, a trip to fellow Champions League chasers Newcastle.
“It’s pretty much a final – and we haven’t won an away game in 2025 in the Premier League,” Gupta points out.
And maybe there is some misdirected anger aimed at Maresca. Since BlueCo took over the club just under three years ago, Chelsea have spent more than £1bn on loans and transfers. At one point, Maresca was running two different squads.
“I don’t think that we’ve signed players for footballing reasons. It’s not signing, it’s an investment,” Harris complains.
When Pochettino was told he could not have it all his own way, and that the transfer strategy would not be changing to suit his desires, he simply left. Maresca is not seen as someone likely to upset the applecart in the same way.
“He’s a yes man, which Pochettino wasn’t, and that’s why the ownership like him,” Harris says.
“So he’s going to bend to the ownership structure, and when his system works, it looks great.
“But then the question is, how often does it work? And I don’t think it’s going to work enough to have success at Chelsea.”
But the likelihood is that Chelsea fans will have to put up with another season of Maresca, irrespective of results. With the Club World Cup occupying much of their summer, it would be difficult to replace Maresca at a convenient moment.
“The reality is Chelsea have to win the Europa Conference League,” Chidgey says.
“If they don’t win that trophy, it’s completely embarrassing, and they should really get into the Champions League, although I feel that they may not, given that City and Newcastle might well edge us out.
“Is he the man to take us forward? I personally don’t think so. But if he gets us back into the Champions League, and wins the Conference League, you can say that he’s achieved the minimum of what we set out to do this season.”
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