What can Manchester City fans expect from Enzo Maresca?

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Maresca, very much a coach of the Guardiola school, is almost the same age as the Catalan was when he arrived at City in 2016, and the two men even bear a physical resemblance. So is this a case of ‘meet the new boss, same as the old boss’? Well, not exactly. There is only one Guardiola, and while City may have chosen Maresca in part because of his stylistic similarities, the Italian is a different coach and personality who will seek to make his own mark on English football’s dominant club as he attempts to follow in some legendary footsteps. Liam Twomey, who covered Maresca’s time at Chelsea, provides a flavour of what City fans can expect from their new manager. There will be no major culture shocks, no nasty surprises at the scale of the ambition or the size of the challenge that comes with it. Maresca is not just deeply familiar with working in an elite environment, he is deeply familiar with working in this particular elite environment. No other top-level coach, except perhaps Mikel Arteta, is better acquainted with the idiosyncrasies of the modern City, the house that Guardiola built. Maresca spent a season coaching the club’s elite development squad to the Premier League 2 title before returning to the Etihad Stadium from a failed first foray into head coaching at Parma to become Guardiola’s assistant in 2022-23, the season which yielded the club’s first treble. City’s squad has changed significantly since. So too has the hierarchy, with Hugo Viana — whom Maresca knew as an opponent in La Liga in the mid-2000s — succeeding Txiki Begiristain as director of football. Maresca’s assimilation back into his former club should still be swift. Guardiola is not the former City manager who Maresca routinely refers to as his “professional dad”. That honour belongs to predecessor Manuel Pellegrini, who coached him at Malaga and later appointed him as his assistant at West Ham United. Pellegrini is at least as big an influence on Maresca’s journey to this point as Guardiola, and City fans will likely recognise tactical elements from both men in next season’s team. Early in his Chelsea tenure, it became clear that Maresca was deploying a Pellegrini strategy of instructing his defenders to hold an offside line on the edge of their own penalty area when defending in their own third of the pitch. It frequently caught opponents offside, but there were also notable occasions when the system was too easy to beat. In possession, Maresca seeks to control games with slow, stable possession achieved through numerical superiority in similar ways to Guardiola. His favoured 4-2-3-1 generally became more of a 3-box-3 (or 3-2-2-3) with the ball, but he also demonstrated the ability and willingness to make tweaks within his base structure to account for the strengths and weaknesses of specific opponents. He became heavily associated with inverting a full-back into midfield at Leicester City and continued in the same vein at Chelsea, often moving full-backs Marc Cucurella, Malo Gusto and Reece James into defensive and sometimes attacking midfield roles. Nico O’Reilly, for one, should feel at home in his team. Whether everyone in City’s squad will is another matter. Maresca’s demands on the footballing ability of his goalkeeper to pass the ball through and around opposition pressure will ask interesting questions of Gianluigi Donnarumma, while Erling Haaland is less of a link man than he typically looks for in his No 9. Speaking in a press conference before a match against Liverpool early in his season at Chelsea, Maresca revealed the depth of his familiarity with Jurgen Klopp’s work at Anfield. “Four or five years ago, when I finished playing and started as a manager, I watched 38 games of Liverpool in one week — to study and to analyse how they were with the previous manager (Klopp),” he said. Maresca routinely watched as many as eight of the previous matches played by Chelsea’s next opponents in order to inform his tactical preparations; after a win against Manchester United at Stamford Bridge late last season, he noted that Ruben Amorim’s side had changed their standard approach in favour of a more aggressive man-to-man strategy out of possession. This level of diligence extended to Conference League or Club World Cup group-stage opponents that Chelsea were expected to beat comfortably. In training sessions at Cobham, Maresca was relentlessly exacting about the positioning of his players in and out of possession, as well as the patterns of play he wanted them to produce. None of this will come as a shock or surprise to the City squad, many of whom have spent years working under the maniacally meticulous Guardiola. Despite delivering Champions League qualification and two trophies, Maresca never truly connected with Chelsea fans. That was partly because his possession-focused, positional style of football — which appears pretty well entrenched culturally at City — was broadly unpopular at Stamford Bridge. It was also partly because he projected little in the way of outward charm. Maresca is a serious guy. He has Guardiola’s intensity but not his quirky wit or passive-aggressive sarcasm. Well, at least not in press conferences or media interviews, which are the most frequent avenues through which coaches communicate with supporters as well as journalists. Footage released from Cobham training sessions showed him laughing and joking with his players. The Spanish-speaking players in Chelsea’s squad saw the most of his lighter side, and were the most affected by his departure. Not everyone in the squad loved him and was devastated to see him go, but there were no indications that Maresca struggled to command authority or respect in the dressing room, which is the most important test of a coach’s charisma. His stature also grew with Club World Cup success last summer, though some at Chelsea felt he allowed it to go to his head. People close to Maresca insisted his attitude remained the same. No high-level coach reacts well to encountering external criticism or internal resistance, but during his brief stints at Leicester and Chelsea, Maresca developed a reputation for being, in the eyes of some, particularly volatile and thin-skinned. Leicester were 10 points clear at the top of the Championship when grumbles were heard among supporters at the style of play in a 3-1 win over Swansea City in January 2024. “I came to this club to play with this idea,” Maresca said after the game. “The moment there is some doubt about the idea, I will leave the day after, it’s so clear. “You can feel the fans when they’re not happy, some people take things for granted.” Maresca was generally more disciplined in front of the media at Chelsea, and in particular more restrained when questioned about fans’ objections to his “idea” of football, but his combustibility manifested in other ways at Stamford Bridge. As detailed in The Athletic’s inside read on his Chelsea departure, one big source of tension was the club’s medical department recommending how many minutes certain players should play. This was the primary prompt for Maresca to say he had endured “the worst 48 hours of his career” due to a perceived lack of support at the club in a press conference after a 2-0 win over Everton in December. Within a month, he was gone. Regardless of the circumstances, some future employers would understandably be wary of hiring a coach who has demonstrated he is prepared to walk out of a job in the middle of a season. City are clearly confident that they represent a cleaner cultural fit than Chelsea and can more readily accommodate Maresca’s spikier qualities. Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms