Enzo Maresca, Chelsea and the chess thesis that explains his football vision

Pawn Sacrifice came out in cinemas a decade ago. In phonetical terms, it sounds more Soho than Chelsea. But a blue movie, it wasn’t. Nor was it a box office hit. The film, like Chelsea, dramatically underperformed its estimated budget. Toby Maguire and Liev Schreiber were in the leading roles and it still flopped. But Enzo Maresca enjoyed the re-telling of Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky’s Match of the Century for the meeting of minds as much as the Cold War intrigue that surrounded a chess match in Reykjavik in 1972.

Towards the end of his playing career, Maresca began studying chess.  He found a teacher while in Palermo and must, in time, have learned the finer details of the Sicilian Defence and Fegatello, the delectably named Fried Liver Attack. It goes without saying, managers at Chelsea have become chopped liver very quickly in the Todd Boehly-Clearlake Capital era. Maresca is expected to be their sixth in two years if you count a forlorn and fleeting interim like Bruno Saltor, a sequence of events that brings the Italian term for checkmate to mind: Scacco Matto. ‘Matto’ means bonkers, crazy.

But we digress.

Maresca thought learning the rudiments of chess would prepare him for management. Anyone strolling around the library at Coverciano, the Italian Football Federation’s coaching school on the outskirts of Florence, which is to UEFA Pro Licences what Harvard Business School is to MBAs, can pull down his thesis and read about how the hypermodern Nimzo-Indian defence used by every world chess champion since Jose Raul ‘The Human Chess Machine’ Capablanca relates to Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City sides. “A coach can only benefit from acquiring the mind of a good chess player,” Maresca argued. “The proof being the development of a number of mental skills” that are excellent for “the prefrontal cortex”.

He listed them as “gaining the dexterity to devise tactics and strategy, improve creativity (important for the surprise factor)” not to mention the way the game “facilitates concentration.” The 44-year-old also claimed, “Chess teaches you to control the initial excitement when you see something good and trains you to think objectively when you see yourself in danger.” No doubt having paid Kasparov-like attention to how Chelsea have recently been run, Maresca still somehow deduced that a potentially reputation-toppling move away from Leicester could be worth it, irrespective of the experiences of Thomas Tuchel, Graham Potter and Mauricio Pochettino. One can only deduce he thinks he’s playing chess, the kind that beats Deep Blue and AI models like AlphaZero, while those guys were playing checkers.

As the opening gambits about Maresca’s judgement (or lack thereof) in taking the job draw to a close, the parallels he makes with chess are, in all seriousness, well observed. “The chess board like a football pitch can be divided into three channels. A central one and two external ones,” he highlighted. “In football as in chess, an inside game can be more interesting as it’s the quickest and most direct towards goal or the king.” Controlling the middle is fundamental, as Guardiola emphasised to Maresca during his time on his staff, either directly through classic midfielders a la Xavi, Busquets and Iniesta or indirectly with inverted full-backs a la Philip Lahm or Rico Lewis acting like knights in chess. Build up through the middle and the pitch opens up like the board, the angles of attack become manifold.

In football terms, the Italian Maresca is influenced by the Spanish juego de posicion. He cites Paul Morphy, the Cruyff to Fischer’s Guardiola, on the “ability to see combinations clearly” and how “the positional game is, first and foremost, the ability to arrange the pieces in the most effective way.” Then there’s the surprise element to chess, which in football terms, again might be considered being on the cusp of taking the Chelsea job as an up-and-coming coach. Maresca instead sees it as the little tweaks from game to game or within a game that can force an opponent to play to their weaknesses, and lose confidence and time.

“During a world chess championship game in 1991, Viktor Korchnoi took an hour and 20 minutes in making his 13th movement in response to an unexpected variation by his rival Anatoly Karpov,” Maresca explained. “Karpov’s move was not checkmate but the time advantage he gained by surprising his rival was definitely decisive. Korchnoi needed to reorganise and revise his strategy and tactics.”

So many Soviets feature in Maresca’s thesis, one imagines Roman Abramovich and Marina Granovskaia, Chelsea’s former owner and chief executive, would have been every bit as impressed as Boehly and Behdad Eghbali. He could become the seventh Italian to bestride the dugout at Stamford Bridge. Two of them won the league, one the Champions League, another the Europa League. All of them, perhaps with the exception of a fellow West Brom alumnus in Roberto Di Matteo, were more experienced than Maresca and operated within a club with a different owner who spent big but in a more rational and effective way.

He is expected to arrive on the back of winning the Championship with Leicester after threatening the 100 points barrier. He even came within a game of matching a 104-year record for the most second-division wins (32) in a single season. Some call it Marescaball. His supervisor at Coverciano would probably define it Maresca pawn. On the face of it, he seems part of the new wave of Italian coaching, which has washed Francesco Farioli up at Ajax and led Juventus to settle on Thiago Motta. He was at the table for that famous meal in Manchester featuring Guardiola, Roberto De Zerbi, Daniele De Rossi and Aleksandar Kolarov not as Pep’s guest but one of his assistants. The halo effect that comes from working with the Catalan can dazzle employers. Mikel Arteta’s success at Arsenal upon leaving Guardiola’s staff led Parma to offer Maresca a job when he was the coach of City’s elite development squad.

Maresca had a difficult time in charge of Parma (George Wood/Getty Images)

It did not work out.

Maresca inherited a team disoriented by the enthusiasm of new American owners who spent lavishly (€80million!) on unknown youngsters from all over the world (particularly Argentina and Romania) and, unable to put their fingers on what was going wrong, sacked a couple of managers in their first season. The flux was so great even players of Joshua Zirkzee’s potential didn’t shine and Parma surprisingly went down. Maresca was asked to pick up the pieces in Serie B and, more specifically, to turn a couple dozen individuals into a team. Sounds relatively familiar, doesn’t it?

Despite having the highest wage bill in the second division, Maresca was fired within a matter of months. He left Parma with 17 points from 13 games, narrowly outside the relegation play-out spot to avoid Serie C. Upon reflection, Maresca still called it a “positive experience”. His qualms were a lack of patience (“They gave me a three-year contract and when you do a multi-year contract it’s because there’s a project idea behind it) and unrealistic expectations (“No one ever told me that in the first year we should have gone to Serie A, all the more so when fifteen or so new players arrive in the summer”). Still, the local media criticised him for using players like Simon Sohn out of position and, having complained about the disruption of too much transfer activity, he still had the nerve to insist: “Parma could have made the play-offs with the three players we identified for the January transfer window.”

The scars he suffered at the Ennio Tardini made Maresca think twice about taking the Leicester job last summer. “I was a little fearful,” he told Gazzetta dello Sport, “because it resembled Parma: a big club had been relegated and there was huge pressure to immediately bounce back.” Leicester set a record pace out of the blocks and finished the first half of the season with 58 points, a testament to Maresca’s impact but also the sort of spending that led the Premier League to refer the club to an independent commission for an alleged PSR breach and for failing to submit their audited financial accounts to the league for the 2022-23 season, when they were still in the top flight.

Automatic promotion was not all plain sailing. After a 3-1 win against Swansea in January, Maresca was frustrated by the King Power’s exasperation with the somnolent side of his tiki-taka style. “Probably when you win, win, win at home, and you continue to win, people think it’s easy. But it’s not easy. I arrive in this club to play with this idea. The moment there is some doubt about the idea, the day after, I will leave. It’s so clear. No doubts.” He did not appreciate the failure to sign Stefano Sensi on loan from Inter Milan after Chelsea recalled Cesare Casadei and Wilfred Ndidi suffered an injury. Leicester’s second half of the season yielded 39 points, enough to get over the line in first place but a drop-off that looked like it might spiral after defeats to Middlesbrough, Leeds and QPR in the spring.

Unlike Ipswich, who punched well above their weight to return to the Premier League for the first time in 21 years, Leicester met expectation. After all, having 18-goal Jamie Vardy in the Championship felt like a cheat code even with him now firmly in the twilight of his career. Chelsea, meanwhile, evidently share Maresca’s view that promotion was not as easy as it seemed. That Chelsea and the former midfielder have settled on one another, frankly, remains a surprise. To return to chess terminology, neither found themselves in Zugzwang: a situation wherein any move can only weaken one’s position and carries the risk of checkmate — but not moving isn’t an option. Chelsea, for instance, didn’t need to sack Pochettino. Maresca wasn’t obliged to leave Leicester.

Having lost the benefit of the doubt, it’s only fair to second guess these grandmasters.

(Top photo: David Rogers/Getty Images)