Why Guardiola, Maresca and Salah love chess: Space, patterns and ‘controlling the centre’

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What do Pep Guardiola and Enzo Maresca have in common?

Coaches wedded to a certain style of football? Midfielders who became managers? Worked together at Manchester City? Bald? All of these things are true, but that’s not the answer we have on the card.

The answer we’re looking for? Chess.

Both men, who meet at Stamford Bridge this afternoon, are keen proponents of the idea that football can learn plenty from chess, and they as coaches can take valuable lessons from it too.

After leaving Barcelona in 2012, Guardiola took a sabbatical and travelled to New York, where he met with Garry Kasparov, the Russian grandmaster. He has also studied the methods of the world’s top-ranked chess player, Magnus Carlsen.

“You have no idea how similar the two things are,” Guardiola said in Pep Confidential, Marti Perarnau’s book about his first season at Bayern Munich. “There was one thing Carlsen said that I loved. He said that it doesn’t matter if he has to make some sacrifices at the start of the game because he knows he is strongest in the latter stages. It got me thinking and I must learn how I can apply it to football.”

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Maresca dedicated large tracts of his 7,000-word coaching thesis, written for his diploma at the Italian coaching school Coverciano, to chess. “A coach can only benefit from acquiring the mind of a good chess player,” Maresca wrote. “I concluded that playing chess can train the mind of a coach. The fundamental element of chess is the logic that leads a player to understand and thus predict the opponents’ moves.”

Maresca also highlighted the two games’ tactical similarities. “The chess board is like a football pitch that can be divided into three channels — a central one and two external ones. 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.”

The similarities in how space is used also came up in an interview with Carlsen and Guardiola. “In chess and football, the important thing is to control the middle,” Carlsen said as Guardiola looked on, rapt. “If you control the middle, you control the pitch or the board. Another thing is that in chess, you attack on one side, so you overload, and then you switch so you have an advantage on the other side. In terms of space, it’s remarkably similar.”

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Most people reading this piece will know why ‘controlling the middle’ is important in football, but an explanation in chess might be worth making. “Each of the pieces moves differently, but nearly all of them are better in the centre,” Gawain Jones, a grandmaster who recently won his third British Championship, tells The Athletic.

“It’s one of the first maxims you are taught: get your pieces out and control the centre squares, and starve your opponent of space and they’re hemmed in at the sides. The knights are referred to as ‘octopuses’ because they can move to eight squares, whereas if they’re at the side they can only go to three or four.”

In his book Football and Chess: Tactics, Strategy, Beauty, Adam Wells draws further parallels. “At the most fundamental level,” Wells writes, “football and chess involve using space effectively and getting the timing right to break down an opponent’s defence while preventing them from breaking down yours.

“And that’s it. There are very few limiting rules. There are no complicated scoring systems or procedures of play that have to be followed. It is clear cut: you must capture pieces or score goals while staying within the confines of the board or pitch.’

The list of football coaches and managers who apply chess to their profession is lengthy. During the European Championship this summer, Switzerland coach Murat Yakin was asked about a match being a ‘poker game’, to which he responded that he doesn’t like poker because too much depends on what hand you are given, and that he prefers chess.

“There are certainly parallels when it comes to tactics,” he told magazine Schweizer Illustrierte before the tournament. “I explain simple (chess) moves to my daughters: which steps they can make with which piece, how they have to think ahead and how to safeguard their tactics. If I set a strategy for the team, I have to be able to explain easily what I mean exactly.”

Rafa Benitez is a keen — and very competitive — player, which fits with the perception of a manager who doesn’t so much see 11 human beings running around on a football pitch, more 11 pieces that he emotionlessly shifts.

Maybe the most enthusiastic chess player in football management is former Barcelona and Villarreal coach Quique Setien, who used to compete in tournaments. At one point, he was so highly rated that, according to an interview with the Spanish newspaper Marca, he could have represented “51 of the countries at the Chess Olympiad”.

“As many as you wish to find,” he told Marca when asked about the similarities between football and chess. “You can be an offensive player, but you always need to control what’s going on in your camp, without leaving pieces unattended, in a synchronised way. The same happens in football when you have a coordinated team, in which all the players are connecting.”

Perhaps slightly more surprising is the number of footballers who swear by chess.

Mohamed Salah told Sky Sports in 2023 that he was “addicted” and is rated at around 1,400, which, according to Chess.com, puts him somewhere between ‘decent’ and ‘proficient’. Salah mostly plays online, with a username that is his actual name with a bunch of numbers after it: he said he enjoys messing with people who ask him if he actually is Mohamed Salah.

Christian Pulisic almost seems to play as much chess as he does football: for him it’s partly an emotional connection, having been taught the game by his grandfather (he has a tattoo of a queen on his arm, with Mate, his grandfather’s name, beneath it), and partly a distraction because he started playing again regularly during the Covid-19 pandemic.

“It’s an incredible game that can help you with a lot of things, like problem-solving or seeing different patterns,” Pulisic told the Daily Mail in 2021. “I’m not saying it directly correlates to me being a better footballer but it’s certainly better than staring at a screen, gaming. It can really help you to stay sharp in your head — you have to think very quickly.”

New Barcelona midfielder Dani Olmo believes chess can inform his use of space. “On the pitch, I try to think about every movement,” he told Sky Sports, “not just to move left because the ball is going left. I am always trying to find the best solutions when I have the ball and when I do not have the ball. Either for me or the team-mate, to create space for other guys or even for myself.”

This tallies with something Jones tells The Athletic. “Chess tactics tend to focus on pattern recognition,” he says, “recognising that there is something not quite right with the opposition’s tactics.”

For Anthony Gordon and Trent Alexander-Arnold, chess is more akin to brain training. “Chess is a life skill because it applies to everything,” Gordon told the BBC this year. “It’s a very peaceful game. It gets my brain working, which I love.”

Alexander-Arnold played Carlsen in a game arranged by sponsors in 2018: predictably he was routed in 17 moves, but you don’t have to be able to compete with the best player in the world to benefit. “It helps with concentration,” Alexander-Arnold said. “Because it takes a lot of concentration throughout both games to really focus on what your opponent is doing and how they’re trying to attack and hurt you. I think you can take notes from both of them and use them in each other’s games.”

The Liverpool defender isn’t the only player who has faced Carlsen, himself an almost obsessive football fan who, for a while, topped the world rankings in Fantasy Premier League. Pulisic, Martin Odegaard and former Real Madrid midfielder Esteban Granero are among those who have faced Carlsen.

Magnus Carlsen, chess champion, FPL master (Koen Suyk/ANP/AFP/Getty Images)

Others just use it to pass the time: Harry Kane took up chess after watching Netflix drama The Queen’s Gambit and has continued at Bayern Munich, playing against team-mates Joshua Kimmich and Kingsley Coman. “I use chess to switch off,” Kane told GQ. “It’s such a mental game. You have to focus on every moment, every move.”

During Euro 2024, the Netherlands squad travelled around Germany by train and on these long journeys, Bart Verbruggen and defender Stefan de Vrij would set up a board and play a game or two.

Chess also has a firm place in the language of football, but perhaps erroneously. When a match is likened to ‘a game of chess’, it’s normally a cypher for ‘this game is slow and boring’.

A more generous interpretation would describe a very controlled, cagey match, which fits the perception of chess. Jones argues that chess is a much more reactive game than that, which strengthens the link between it and football. “It’s much more chaotic than we would like to think,” he says. “It’s good to have a long-term plan, but you can’t just stick to it: it’s all about adapting your plan to what your opponent is doing. From that perspective, it’s much more like a team sport. You have to be reactive.”

Players or coaches are often said to be thinking three or four moves ahead, but that’s a misnomer. “I don’t think it’s that practical,” says Jones. “It’s more about thinking one move ahead. It’s just about making the right move. There’s always the idea of balancing your plan and your opponent’s. There will be some calculation involved, but chess is understood as a much more dry, mathematical game than it actually is.”

There are reasons to be sceptical about the influence of chess on football. The obvious difference is footballers are sentient while chess pieces are not: a chess player can have a plan and enact it while only worrying about their opponent, whereas a football coach has to rely on 11 independent human beings doing as they’re told.

But even if the realistic influence is relatively thin, there are ‘marginal gains’ that explain why coaches are so keen on chess. Someone like Guardiola will do or study almost anything if they think it will give them even the smallest advantage. “He does it with anyone who can contribute any small idea to continue progressing,” Marti Perarnau, Guardiola’s biographer, told the Spanish journalist Kike Marin about the manager’s meetings with Carlsen.

Like anyone who is good at anything, Guardiola and other football managers take inspiration and influence from many different sources, but that so many elite figures look to chess tells you the strength of its influence.

“If we’re the ones initiating the action, as opposed to simply reacting, then we’ll control the flow of the game,” Guardiola says in Perarnau’s book Pep Guardiola: The Evolution when describing similarities between chess and football. “The opponents then have to react to what we do, which automatically means a limited choice of options. It makes them more predictable.

“It’s a cycle: you take control, show that you have the upper hand and then you slam home your advantage… this is what it means to eclipse the opposition.”