The Chelsea coach, guest on stage at the Trento Sports Festival, talks about his career, his teachers (“from Ancelotti to Lippi but the type of football that has always fascinated me the most was that of Guardiola”) and his relationship with his family
Football is passion, instinct, pure adrenaline. This is why Enzo Maresca doesn’t regret the rush to the hottest sector of Stamford Bridge after his Chelsea’s victory against Liverpool which earned him an expulsion. “I couldn’t hold back because it’s the first time we’ve won a match after the ninetieth and against the champions of England.” And even the many injuries he has to deal with at the moment (more than ten) don’t make him lose any sleep. “We and PSG are the teams that are showing signs of effort at the Club World Cup. But it was too good to play that competition and too good to win it. So somehow I’ll manage.” On the stage of the Trento Festival, the only Italian coach in the Premier League this season spoke about his entire life, from footballer to coach. “Curiosity has always followed me in life. I like to learn, it was like that as a player and it’s the same now. Who did I take it from? I was lucky enough to have many good coaches: from Ancelotti to Lippi but the type of football that always fascinated me the most was that of Guardiola. Perhaps playing with Sevilla against that Barcelona team I understood that I would be a coach.”
globetrotter
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Maresca left Salerno at the age of 11 to pursue his dream as a footballer at Milan: “It was terrible, don’t do it with your children”. And then he played in England and Spain. “It was wonderful at Sevilla, I was lucky enough to score two goals in the Europa League final and to have a coach like Pellegrini from whom I learned a lot. And then in Spain I met my wife, the mother of my four children. By the way, there is no comparison between the job of a coach and that of a father. The second is much more difficult because you never know what the right solution to take is.”
and then the guardhouse
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“Being close to someone like Pep was fantastic, seeing how he pays attention to details and how he manages the team which is fundamental for my growth.” Maresca looks ahead: after having brought two trophies to Chelsea and above all brought the Blues back to the Champions League, he doesn’t think about trophies: “I have always thought that the players are the absolute interpreters, my job is to try to improve them because this is how the team improves.” Enzo is very close to his family and closes by telling how his mother and wife saw his role as a player and now that of a coach in opposite ways. “When I played for my mother the players were always right and never the coaches, now she thinks that the coaches are always right and never the players. My wife on the other hand first agreed with the coaches and now with the players.” World-wide, in every sense.
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