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.
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“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.
“And that system does not show any form of fighting spirit, and it doesn’t encourage any inspiration from the stands.”
Harris added: “Maresca says we need the fans to get through the season.
“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.”
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.
The goals are drying up under Maresca (Photo: PA)
“We can take more risks. We can do a lot of more running off the ball, especially from wide areas.
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.
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”.
“[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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“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.”
“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 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.
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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.
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.
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.
“So he’s going to bend to the ownership structure, and when his system works, it looks great.
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.
“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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