Enzo Maresca is out at Chelsea. Thus brings a close to another weird chapter in the weirdest club's recent history. The upside for the legion of Chelsea haters is that the particular weirdness and grossness of the club's present predicament provides ample material to further stoke the flames of hate. But the downside, as ever, is that it probably won't even matter, as both Maresca and Chelsea look to fashion their twin Ls into a pair of Ws.
There are no good guys involved here. Maresca is for my money one of the more unlikable coaches in a profession that, across sports, tends to select for unlikability. He comes off like the textbook sideline tyrant, smug and preening in moments of success, insincere in moments of humility, absolutely certain that all triumphs redound to himself and all failures owe to either those below or above him who did not heed his commands. For much of his Chelsea tenure—a job he got mostly due to his proximity to Pep Guardiola during his one season as a Manchester City assistant—the Italian was content to play the puppet for the Blues' notoriously meddlesome bosses, handing playing time to the players the club had most heavily invested in, shamefully contributing to the ostracization campaigns against the players the club wanted to bully out of their contracts. Maresca surely assumed that his "successes" at the end of last season (not blowing a top-four finish, winning the hardly hallowed Conference League and Club World Cup trophies) would carve for himself some more power of his own, which appears to have been what motivated his recent public criticisms of how the club is being run. What he found out, however, was that the same puppeteer's hand he'd welcomed up his ass earlier would be quick to fling him off the minute he stopped moving his mouth along with the fingered instructions. No one should weep that this guy is out of a job.
But no matter how annoying anyone may find Maresca's whole deal, Chelsea itself remains the much more evil actor here. Not for running Maresca out of town, mind you. Maresca is a solid, but merely solid, manager in the very modern mold. He has an impressive record in big games when he can tailor a specific gameplan to take advantage of the specific shortcomings of strong opposition, but he's mediocre at best when his team has to assume the initiative themselves. This is due in part to his disinterest in empowering players to take ownership of the game themselves, and he doesn't seem to be all that good at the interpersonal stuff that makes up the bigger and more important parts of the job. On the whole, Maresca hasn't improved Chelsea's play either collectively or individually, and his adequate, but merely adequate, results seem to reflect more the undeniable quality of the players than any canny coaching on his part. Getting rid of a coach like that is no crime.
Instead, it's the overall situation Chelsea has put itself in that demonstrates just how rotten the institution is. Say what you will about the petro clubs, but at least they operate in the game according to the game's established parameters, trying to spend money to build the strongest possible team to win the big trophies. Chelsea operates on an entirely different logic. I don't think there's a way of making sense of the club's decision-making without seeing it as the extractive M.O. of vulture capital. Chelsea's ownership group—BlueCo, a subsidiary of private equity firm Clearlake Capital—treats soccer like an immature market ripe for the pillaging. As we put it in our Premier League season preview, for BlueCo's Chelsea, "Academy players are resources to sell off for pure profit and fund new transfers for often mediocre players. New signings are opportunities for transfer fee arbitrage, where you buy 10 guys this summer with no real intention to integrate all of them into the team but rather in hopes that you can sell eight of them the next year and make a tidy profit. Contracts should be long and incentive laden, that way it shrinks amortization costs while also making it potentially easier to run players off by showing them how little they'll play and get paid if they don't agree to leave. If the players don't go where you tell them, then it's off to the bomb squad." As you can see in Chelsea's shady selling of the women's team to itself for a massive profit, which helped it successfully skirt the sport's financial regulations, the same vampiric techniques that have led to private equity's domination and ruination of the larger world make up BlueCo's blueprint as it sets out to do the same to the soccer world.
As is often the case in these twisted times, the shamelessness and greediness of the involved parties is not likely to do much harm to either's future prospects. By "mutually agreeing" to part ways now, both Maresca and Chelsea stand to benefit. In what is shaping up to be a disappointing, though probably not disastrously so, season, Maresca has conjured for himself a neat little exit that allows him to pound his chest about his principled nature while avoiding any of the stink of another meh season. It's telling that this divorce comes so closely on the heels of the reports that Man City had sounded out Maresca as a potential Guardiola successor should the Spaniard choose to leave in the summer. Chelsea, for its part, gets to rid itself of a mediocre manager who can now serve as a convenient scapegoat should the team fall short of expectation.
All indications point to Liam Rosenior as Maresca's imminent replacement. Rosenior is a promising, likable young manager who has done commendable work at Strasbourg, which is not so coincidentally the other club in BlueCo's portfolio. After years spent swapping players between the Chelsea and Strasbourg rosters depending on financial exigencies, the English team helping itself to the French one's hotshot manager midseason would be the most blatant example yet of how the multi-club ownership model distorts the sport, turning once-proud clubs into farm teams. But hey, best of luck to Maresca and Chelsea going forward.
