Low-profile Enzo Maresca out to cap fine season after bringing calm to Chelsea soap opera | OneFootball

The football has not always been thrilling but adding Conference League trophy to Champions League qualification would be a job well done

In their own minds at least, then, Maresca and the man he calls his “football father” have been on collision course for the best part of a year, subconsciously perhaps even since they spoke last summer, when the then Leicester coach was seeking advice before taking the Chelsea job.

The pair met when Maresca played under Pellegrini at Malaga and though, surprisingly, this is also the former Manchester City boss’s first European final, it is very much a meeting of master and apprentice. Indeed, Maresca cut his coaching teeth on Pellegrini’s staff at West Ham.

“It’s special,” Maresca said last week of facing the 71-year-old for the first time. “He’s a reference for me because of his career, because of his history and especially because in terms of a human being, he’s a top person.”

Maresca’s Chelsea secured Champions League qualification at Nottingham Forest on the final day of the Premier League season

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In a final that - as with each of Chelsea’s games in this competition - is between two clubs of wildly different European pedigree and financial resource, it is something of a quirk that Betis have the manager of greater heft.

Pellegrini has won the Premier League, taken Villarreal to a Champions League semi-final and lifted domestic cups in England and Spain. Maresca, like many of his young Chelsea team, is hunting his first major trophy.

But there is something more than inexperience that has Maresca, as Chelsea managers go, still carrying a curiously low profile, certainly by comparison to his predecessors in the BlueCo era.

He does not have the charming charisma of Thomas Tuchel and Mauricio Pochettino, nor draw the same external intrigue as inspired by Graham Potter’s unusual back story or Frank Lampard’s playing career.

Where Unai Emery, Eddie Howe and Nuno Espirito Santo appeared front and centre of their respective clubs’s Champions League pushes this season, Maresca often did not feel like the principle character. Perhaps he likes it that way.

Even a full year into the job, those outside the Chelsea bubble seem not to know quite what to make of the Italian. Nor do plenty of the supporters inside it, who have flipped between brief worship, outright fury and just about everything in between during a rollercoaster season.

Sunday’s punchy riposte to Chelsea’s doubters, though, was a rare and welcome public show of true personality, and having secured a return to the Champions League already, adding silverware to his maiden season might make a few people sit up and take notice of what suddenly looks a job well done.

The football has not always been thrilling, but that on-field aesthetic is the chief grievance of the remaining dissenters is a sign of progress in itself. Remember, this is a club that even 12 months ago many considered unmanageable, its issues endemic and beyond fixing by any one man.

Maresca told his Chelsea critics to ‘eff off’ after the Blues secured a top-five finish

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In pre-season previews, Chelsea were spoken of in similar vein to Manchester United and few would have been shocked had it been Maresca, rather than Erik ten Hag, who was sacked in the middle of another turbulent campaign.

Chelsea is a club that still feels perennially bound to exist as something of a soap opera, a club around which a bit too much stuff just seems to happen. Take, for instance, Mykhailo Mudryk - provisionally suspended for a failed doping test - turning up in a Wroclaw steakhouse on Tuesday, unbeknown to his manager.

Against that backdrop, though, Maresca could not have done much more to keep the football as the focus, a trick for which, like so much, he gives Pellegrini credit.

“For sure, today, if I am where I am it’s also because of Manuel,” he said. “The things I learned with him in terms of how to manage players, how to manage changing rooms, how to manage difficult situations, noise around the club.”

As European finals go, this one feels particularly quiet, a low stakes game in a third-rate competition, but one Chelsea can now comfortably embrace, having finished in the top-four, as a bonus, rather than consolation, prize.

For Maresca, slowly growing in stature on his coaching journey, it is chance to get one over on the man who set him on his way.