Enzo Maresca, the Guardiola apprentice who left Chelsea to inherit the master’s chair

Enzo Maresca

Photo: Timfilbert / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	February 10, 1981 Pontecagnano Faiano
Occupation	Footballer
Honours	UEFA Cup ×2 · EFL Championship 2023-24 · UEFA Conference League 2024-25 · UEFA Super Cup · Premier League 2
Individual awards	UEFA Cup · EFL Championship · UEFA Conference League

Every manager who follows a giant inherits a comparison. Enzo Maresca inherited something stranger: a comparison with the version of himself that once stood a couple of metres from the giant, taking notes. At Manchester City he is not the outsider hired to dismantle an era. He is the former assistant asked to prove that the era was a method rather than a man, and that a method can be handed over the way a set of keys changes hands.

The first weeks have made that question louder, not quieter. City won their opening five Premier League matches under him and went three points clear at the top after an eight-goal win over Sunderland, all while the midfield that defined the Guardiola years was being taken apart and rebuilt. Maresca has been careful with the numbers. “It’s much better to win games,” he said after the Sunderland match, before reminding everyone that “it’s quite early.” The caution is characteristic. He has always preferred the long argument to the loud one.

His own long argument began in Pontecagnano Faiano, a town near Salerno in southern Italy, where he was born on 10 February 1980. He left home at eleven for AC Milan’s academy, moved to Cagliari’s youth system in his teens and, at eighteen, made a choice few Italian prospects made at the time: he signed for West Bromwich Albion in the English second tier. Two seasons at The Hawthorns were enough for Juventus to buy him. Turin gave him a Serie A winner’s medal in 2001-02 and very little playing time, so the real education came on loan, at Bologna and above all at Piacenza, where he scored nine goals from midfield in a single season.

The club that shaped the player was Sevilla. Between 2005 and 2009 he belonged to the side that won the UEFA Cup twice in a row, in 2006 and 2007, along with the 2006 UEFA Super Cup, the 2007 Copa del Rey and the Spanish Super Cup. That team had no global star and needed none. It won through organisation, through midfielders who could play in several positions and through a collective confidence that did not depend on a single name. Maresca, who could operate as a deep-lying playmaker, a box-to-box runner or a mezzala, was exactly the kind of footballer such a team is made of. Later spells at Olympiacos, at Málaga, where he helped the club reach the Champions League for the first time, at Sampdoria, at Palermo, where he won Serie B, and finally at Hellas Verona completed a career of 394 league appearances and 49 goals. He represented Italy at every youth level up to the under-21s and never won a senior cap.

He retired in February 2017 and moved straight into coaching, first as an assistant at Ascoli, then alongside Vincenzo Montella back at Sevilla and with Manuel Pellegrini at West Ham United. In August 2020 Manchester City handed him their Elite Development Squad, and in his only season in charge of the under-23s he won the Premier League 2 title. His thesis at Coverciano, the Italian federation’s coaching school, was titled “Football and Chess”, and he summarised it in a 2021 interview with La Gazzetta dello Sport: “The most important is positional play and strategy. For a coach, it’s important to have the mentality of a chess player: develop a plan, study counter moves, choose the arrangement of the pieces.”

The first senior job went badly. Parma, freshly relegated to Serie B, appointed him in May 2021 and dismissed him that November after a poor run of results. Maresca went back to the place where his ideas made the most sense. In June 2022 he returned to City as one of Pep Guardiola’s assistants, replacing Juanma Lillo, and spent the following season on the bench of a team that won the Premier League, the FA Cup and the Champions League. That year explains almost everything that came after: he saw, from the inside, the most complete version of the model he had been studying for a decade.

Leicester City, just relegated from the Premier League, hired him in June 2023. He spent his first two months living at the club’s training ground. His team won its first four league matches, and he was named Championship manager of the month four times that season, in August, October, December and April. Promotion was sealed on 26 April 2024 and the title three days later with a 3-0 win at Preston North End. Leicester scored 103 goals in 53 matches under him, playing football that looked unmistakably like City’s in a division that is supposed to punish that kind of ambition.

Chelsea came for him within weeks with a five-year contract, and the first eighteen months looked like vindication. His first game was a 2-0 home defeat to City. Then came a 6-2 win at Wolverhampton, the Premier League manager of the month award for September 2024 and a fourth-place finish that returned the club to the Champions League. In May 2025 Chelsea beat Real Betis 4-1 in the Conference League final and became the only club to have won all three current UEFA competitions. Two months later, in New Jersey, they beat the newly crowned European champions Paris Saint-Germain 3-0 in the final of the first expanded Club World Cup. Mikel Arteta described that Chelsea as the best attacking team in the league “by a mile”, and put it down to the manager.

The ending is the part of the story his admirers prefer to skip. The same methods that produced trophies also produced friction. Supporters complained in his first season about slow, patient possession, and he had to defend the style in public. Relations with the club’s ownership deteriorated through the autumn of 2025; after a 2-0 win over Everton in December he described the previous days as “the worst 48 hours” of his time at the club, and his departure was announced on 1 January 2026. When City appointed him six months later, Chelsea issued a statement saying they had felt “let down” because they believed “his head and heart were focused on another club and another opportunity”. City paid Chelsea around £17 million in compensation, and Maresca reached a personal settlement with his former employer on top of that. “I recognise that my departure from Chelsea in the middle of the season caused disruption,” he acknowledged. The disciple who had built his career on the idea that the system matters more than the individual had, at the decisive moment, made a very individual choice.

The chair he now occupies was vacated on 24 May 2026, when Guardiola took charge of City for the last time, at home to Aston Villa, after ten years and 20 trophies. His final season brought the League Cup and the FA Cup but not the league, which went to Arsenal. Maresca signed a three-year contract on 29 June. “City is an incredibly well-run football club,” he said. “Everything they do is innovative, planned and purposeful. For a manager, that is a dream situation. It provides the consistency I need to do my job effectively.” Read next to Chelsea’s statement, the sentence sounds like a verdict on his previous employer as much as praise for the new one.

He has not treated the inheritance as a museum. Rodri, the midfielder around whom Guardiola’s last great City side was built, was sold to Barcelona. Bernardo Silva, Tijjani Reijnders and Nico González also left. In came the England international Elliot Anderson, Ayyoub Bouaddi and, on deadline day, Enzo Fernández from Chelsea for £125 million, equalling the British transfer record. Maresca had coached Fernández at Stamford Bridge and pushed hard for the deal. The midfield of the new City therefore carries a piece of his Chelsea team, the clearest sign so far that he intends to adapt Guardiola’s model rather than preserve it under glass.

What he builds with those players follows the grammar he learned at City, spoken with his own accent. His teams usually start in a 4-3-3 or a 4-2-3-1 and become a 3-5-2 with the ball, a full-back stepping inside to add an extra passer in midfield. Without it they press man to man high up the pitch and, when the press is broken, drop into a compact 4-4-2. English writers call it Marescaball. The accent he adds is balance: possession as a way of staying defensively solid, not only as a way of attacking. He talks about what he took from Marcello Lippi, Carlo Ancelotti and Pellegrini as readily as about what he took from Guardiola, a reminder that the student has had more than one teacher.

Away from the touchline he keeps a deliberately low profile. He is married to María Jesús Pariente, with whom he has four children, and the family stays out of his press conferences, which he prefers to fill with talk of structure, space and the next opponent.

The early table flatters and warns at the same time. Five straight league wins, a derby against Manchester United played with ten men and a game against Bournemouth in which City fell behind suggest a squad that has already absorbed his instructions under pressure. The real examination comes later, in the Champions League knockout rounds and the spring run-in, the stretches in which Guardiola’s City used to separate themselves from everyone else. Maresca has spent more than thirty years learning, playing and teaching one idea of football. This season will begin to show whether that idea belonged to Guardiola, or whether it can now belong to him.

Tags: sports, athletes, Premier League, Manchester City, football managers, Enzo Fernández, chelsea, pep guardiola, Enzo Maresca, Leicester City