I wrote an article recently on how obsessed Enzo Maresca is with football. He loves the game so much, he lives and breathes it every single game.
He wouldn’t call it work, but the hard ‘work’ that Maresca puts into his ‘job’ right now is going to be some of the hardest work you have ever witnessed in the game. I’d hate to be his family, as I am pretty sure they don’t get a look in. You can imagine he gives them about an hour of his time on Christmas Day to eat some food together and then he’s right back in the office preparing for Chelsea’s next game all afternoon.
And it seems that is exactly how he is spending his days right now as well leading up to Sunday. He is drastically researching and preparing for the Manchester United game, with a cup game against Newcastle United thrown in the mix too.
But of course, preparation for Sunday has been made much tougher now with the sacking of Erik Ten Hag and at the time of writing, we do not know who will be in the dug out at Old Trafford this weekend.
Kieran Gill of The Daily Mail reported on Tuesday night that Erik ten Hag’s sacking has complicated Chelsea’s week as they’d already analysed Manchester United’s play under the Dutchman in prep for Sunday.
Maresca says he is now ‘poring over’ PSV games from when Ruud van Nistelrooy was manager, as there is a chance he will be in the dugout this Sunday as caretaker manager for The Red Devils.
He is also aware they may have to switch again to Ruben Amorim and will then be watching how Sporting play and setup.
To go to this extent of level of research is not normal. I have known circumstances where many other managers have not done this, so don’t think it’s just a normal part of preparation for a game. Of course, many other managers do work this way, and Maresca is one of them. He and his staff conduct extensive research of their opponents before every game, and looking at how the manager sets up is just one small part of it before looking at the individual players too.
The fact that Maresca is researching Van Nistelrooy as well as Amorim just in case, really is an incredible show of the work and energy he is putting in to this job and what he puts into football overall. He is obsessed with the game.
This is obviously just all another big positive for us as Chelsea fans, because you know that that amount of extensive research on our opponents is only going to help us prepare and setup better.
I had to mention this and write about it, because it really did impress me and I’m very sure it’s not just the norm for all managers to put this much work into the opposition scouting.