Chelsea ‘not a mess’ nonsense from Maresca is exactly why he got the job

It really is hard not to feel some sympathy for Enzo Maresca as he attempted to “This is fine” his way through a Chelsea press conference nominally about the Conference League but instead, inevitably, a series of questions asking whether Chelsea are okay and if there is anyone we could call.

But then you remember that Maresca has this job precisely because he has no profile or clout and is thus more willing to say mortifying things than proper managers.

The Temu Guardiola does, we assume, actually possess enough self-awareness to know he hasn’t really done anywhere near enough in his career to date to find himself managing a club of Chelsea’s (currently admittedly quite theoretical) stature. But the flip-side of that is that it requires him to pretend he has no self-awareness at all and say things like this.

“You like to say we have 42-43 players, but more than 15 players are apart from the team. I am working with about 25. It’s not a mess like it looks from the outside.”

Okay, but that’s worse. I mean, you…you do get how that’s worse, right?

We can happily believe that Chelsea’s honking self-important owners are genuinely proud of themselves. We fully accept that they think they’ve found a loophole and, having found it, are now in their own dull empty heads duty-bound to utilise it to show the world how clever they are.

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But we cannot accept Maresca believes any of this stuff he’s having to come out with.

There’s just a great sadness to it. Here’s a football manager – very possibly one with genuine potential to be good if given the right chance – who has done a deal with the devil. A fast-track to the top table, but in return you have to say the most ridiculous sh*t imaginable with a straight face.

It’s no wonder they had to get rid of Mauricio Pochettino, isn’t it?

He wasn’t perfect, but try for a single second to imagine him saying, “We are, by our own admission, paying 15 players hundreds of thousands of pounds a month not to train with us and this proves you are wrong and everything is going perfectly to plan.”

Imagine Thomas Tuchel saying this stuff. Or Antonio Conte. Even Graham Potter wouldn’t say it. We’re not even certain Frank Lampard would. Not with all those GCSEs.

But there’s poor Enzo, coming out with this absolute guff, debasing himself, w*nking for coins in an attempt to fast-track his way to success at a club where that is simply no longer possible.

So yeah. Hard not to feel some sympathy for the bloke. But not impossible. Not if you try really hard. Not if you remember that this is exactly what he and everyone who’s joined Chelsea in the last year or so has happily signed up for.

And here’s the thing. It will become easier and easier to have less and less sympathy for those caught up in the Chelsea football threshing machine.

It’s perfectly possible to have a ton of sympathy for Raheem Sterling, but it won’t be when it happens to new signings in a year or 18 months. This is what they’ve signed up to. This is what Chelsea are now.

To sign for this club as a player or manager is now to become a willing human experiment. There will still be your Conor Gallaghers and Trevoh Chalobahs – the academy graduates whose only crime is really to love a football club that no longer really operates as one.

They are just the first high-profile examples of what will happen again and again as Clearlake get ever deeper into this black hole of a strategy.

But Maresca, not so much. He is the first if not last football figure about whom there really should be no sympathy for what has already befallen him and the worse that is surely inevitably to come.

Nobody forced him to leave Leicester for this dignity-shedding exercise in Comical Ali style obfuscation. Nobody forced him to become Chelsea manager and say with a straight face that having 15 first-team players who aren’t training with the first team is actually evidence of just how smoothly everything is running, thank you.

But everyone now knows that this is what being a Chelsea manager now entails. And that those 15 players currently in exile represent the most plausible future career path for any player daft enough to sign up to be part of Clearlake’s grand experiment.

Nobody can any longer say they haven’t been warned.

MORE ON CHELSEA MESS FROM F365:

👉 Chelsea ‘bomb squad’, Enzo Fernandez and Joao Felix in ranking of 22 Todd Boehly mistakes

👉 Only two Chelsea players more annoyed than first Arne Slot outcast in ranking of the 110

👉 Mailbox amused as Chelsea doing ‘Boy Math’