Chelsea have been given permission by Leicester City to speak to Enzo Maresca about becoming their next head coach and the Italian is expected to soon succeed the departed Mauricio Pochettino at Stamford Bridge.
It is anticipated that the 44-year-old will agree a contract of at least five years, having led Leicester City to the Championship title in his only full season in senior management.
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Maresca’s only managerial experience before taking over at Leicester last summer was a short-lived 14-game spell in charge of Parma and a much more successful season as Manchester City’s under-23 coach.
Leicester looked at his background as a player, a serial winner at Juventus and Sevilla, and his dedication to becoming one of the most highly rated coaches around, including his treble-winning contribution as Pep Guardiola’s assistant at Manchester City.
Chelsea appear to have done likewise and after only one full season in England are hoping to make him their new coach.
In this article, a version of which was first published last summer, we explain Maresca’s career so far with the help of those who know him.
It is with De Zerbi at AC Milan that Maresca’s football journey began. Maresca was born in Pontecagnano Faiano near Salerno in Italy’s deep south. He joined Milan aged 10 and quickly formed a bond with De Zerbi at their academy.
“We were very young kids,” De Zerbi previously told The Athletic. “You go to school and play football. In the evening it was tough because you were alone there, feeling loneliness. Everything was not as golden as it appears.
“With Enzo, I always had a very good relationship. I was playing as a No 10. He was a No 6 or No 8. He was a great player, better than me.”
It was at Milan that he first met coach Fulvio Fiorin, who over 25 years later would help Maresca launch his coaching career, too.
“He arrived at Milan, where I was coach of the Giovanissimi (under-14s and 15s),” Fiorin told ForzaParma. “He was a rookie, but he was already strong, so much so that I promoted him. He played a few games with us.
“Enzo is a wonderful boy, he has a wonderful family. He is one who values values. He doesn’t show it because he wants to hide behind this apparent tough guy look, but he has a great sensitivity.”
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After three years with Milan, he moved to Cagliari for four years. Then, Maresca took the bold step to move to England as an 18-year-old, joining West Bromwich Albion in the Championship. He was due to train with a number of clubs, but West Brom were the first. Manager Denis Smith was determined to sign Maresca.
“The story that we heard, and I don’t know whether it’s true, is that once he’d done that training session we press-ganged him into signing before he could go and train anywhere else,” defender Daryl Burgess says.
“You could see straight away that he had confidence and ability and he was a really likeable guy.”
Striker James Quinn recalls a bright, confident teenager who wasn’t intimidated by his new surroundings and embraced all aspects of playing in England — on and off the pitch.
“I remember when he first walked in,” Quinn says. “We’d never had a player from Italy and then we had two because he came with Mario Bortolazzi (a midfielder who was 15 years older and nearing the end of his career).
“It was a bit of a novelty having a couple of Italian lads walk in. He was very confident. He walked around the dressing room and shook everyone’s hand with a big smile on his face.
“The initial impression I got from him was that he was a confident, happy-go-lucky lad, and throughout his time with us he was really good fun.
“He was a really nice lad but he did have an opinion on the game. It was very early in his career so it was impossible to say whether he would go into coaching or not but, for someone so young, he wasn’t afraid to voice his opinion and have a go at older professionals in a respectful way. And, to be fair to him, he backed it up on the pitch, so they couldn’t really complain.”
Maresca became an instant fan favourite at The Hawthorns. Quinn recalls how behind his pleasant and humble demeanour, there was a player driven to succeed and determined to be a winner.
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“I wouldn’t say you looked at him and he was beautiful on the eye technically, but he was a street footballer,” Quinn says.
“He liked to dribble, he could glide past people and he was strong physically. Most of all, he was aggressive and he was a winner. He would be upset if he lost and you don’t always get that with young, foreign players coming into a dressing room.
“He did a lot of what he wanted to do himself on the pitch, to be honest. He was a little bit of a Paul Gascoigne type. He would dribble for long distances, go past players, try to get in the box and he had a trick. He was a handful and he looked older at 19 or 20 than he does now.
“He had a bit of puppy fat and was still growing into his body. He looks really well now, younger than he did when he walked into our dressing room!”
Burgess recalls there was just one aspect of his game that was missing that prevented him from achieving even more as a player.
“If he’d had an extra yard of pace he’d have been a world-beater,” he says. “He just didn’t have that yard of pace that all world-class midfielders seem to have. He’d have been at Juve (who he joined from West Brom in 2000) a lot longer than he was if he had that.
“He always wanted the ball and to do what he wanted to do, which is fine if you have the right players around you.”
Despite his limited English at first, Maresca threw himself into life at Albion, integrating into the squad with relative ease.
“He had a little bit of English when he came into the dressing room but I remember he picked it up very quickly,” Quinn says. “That enabled him to be part of the banter in the dressing room. He was always laughing and smiling. He would play jokes on people and if you played a joke on him he wouldn’t take it seriously.
“He used to be Hughesy’s (Lee Hughes) right-hand man when it came to pranks.
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“I remember a night game live on TV and we started our warm-up with a lap of half of the pitch. As we got halfway round, the TV cameras zoomed in on us.
“Hughesy called (mascot) Baggie Bird over to shake his hand. Sky cut straight to them. Enzo knelt down on all fours behind Baggie Bird and as soon as he held his hand out, Hughesy pushed him over Enzo and those two came running giggling like two schoolboys.
“Hughesy used to just use him for all of his little gags. It just showed he wasn’t too full of himself.
“He liked having fun and being part of it. He was very much a typical English footballer, if that makes sense. He fitted really well into the dressing room as if he was a young lad from Birmingham.
“When him and Mario first came in I tried to learn a bit of Italian and I would try to speak it first thing in the morning and he would laugh at me.
“Mario was in his mid-thirties and a lovely bloke who looked after Enzo. Enzo would go around to his house with his wife and the kids, but because he was so mature he settled into English life really quickly.
“He got himself a place and would look after himself and cook for himself. He was a tough kid, as you have to be at that age to move away from your family to a country where you only have a basic grasp of the language.”
“He was very popular,” adds Burgess. “He used to come out with me, sometimes my wife, Andy Hunt and others. He would go out with his friends and then he would turn up wherever we were.
“I remember when he was in the showers, all you would hear was ‘Quando Quando Quando’ (an Italian song made famous in England by celebrity Leicester City fan Engelbert Humperdinck). I think it was the only song he knew.”
As well as the different culture of English football on the pitch, Maresca also embraced the lifestyle off the pitch. He was a hit with local women, especially as his English improved.
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“He definitely joined in and he wasn’t shy when he was out either,” Quinn says. “He was a fun-loving lad who enjoyed himself.
“He wasn’t a big drinker. He would sometimes come out and not drink and sometimes he would have the odd one, but he would never drink to the levels we used to in those days. I think he was a little bit surprised at what went on when players went out in the late 90s, but he would still be amongst us, laughing and joking.
“He was a good-looking lad and would get a bit of attention from the ladies and he loved that, but he was always respectful. There weren’t many good-looking Italians rocking around Birmingham in those days, especially young, famous footballers who had an exotic accent.
“So I suppose they were more likely to go and speak to Enzo than me and Hughesy (Lee Hughes).
“He enjoyed it, like any man would, but he never went overboard.
“He threw himself into everything he had to do, whether it was dressing-room banter, training, English lessons, cooking, and he really adapted well.”
Maresca’s stay in west Birmingham only lasted 18 months, but he had a huge impact before he was signed by Italian giants Juventus for £4.3million.
“I was surprised when I was told he was only there for 18 months because it felt a lot longer, such was the impact he made,” admits Quinn.
“I was a bit staggered when his move came about because he had been in and out of the team, so for a club as big as Juventus to come in and pay a lot of money at the time was a bit of a surprise.
“It’s not every day your team-mate gets sold to Juventus, so I always looked out for him and watched him from a distance.
“I’m not surprised he was successful because he had all the attributes, not just physically or technically, but with his mentality, too, and it doesn’t surprise me that he’s gone on to be a good coach. I can imagine what he would be like around players.”
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After his time at West Brom, Maresca won a Serie A title with Juventus and spent four years there — interspersed with loan spells at Bologna and Piacenza — before moving to Fiorentina.
“I always say that with Juventus, I learned to win,” Maresca told the Manchester City website. “With Juventus, first of all, you have to win, so working there with them you understand how important it is.”
He did most of his winning as a player at Sevilla, lifting two UEFA Cups, a UEFA Super Cup, and a Copa del Rey. He also met his wife, Maria Jesus Pariente, who is from Seville, and had a son — Paolo — while in Spain.
After one year with Olympiakos in Greece, he returned to Spain with Malaga to play under Manuel Pellegrini. Pellegrini first sowed the seed of Maresca becoming a coach when it was time to hang up his boots.
“I’ve always said that in terms of experience about football, Manuel is, for me, like a father,” Maresca says. “Also, Manuel was both the coach and the person who convinced me to try to be a coach myself.
“I was still working as a player with him at Malaga and one day, during a chat with him, he said to me: ‘You have to try to become a coach because I think you can become a good coach’.
“It was just a chat but, from that day onwards, I started to think that maybe I did have a future as a coach. That’s how it started.”
After Malaga, Maresca enjoyed spells with Sampdoria, Palermo and, finally, Hellas Verona before moving into coaching, having studied at Coverciano — the Italian FA’s university of football.
There he wrote a thesis entitled “Football and Chess”, in which he compared his coaching and tactical philosophy to that of the board game.
“There are a lot of similarities,” he says. “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.”
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He linked up again with Fiorin at Ascoli and was an assistant at Sevilla before joining Pellegrini again at West Ham United, where his coaching style had a big impact on the players, as former midfielder Robert Snodgrass says.
“You could tell from the off that he was good – like really good,” he says. “Everything about him made you think, ‘This guy’s a proper winner’.
“Up until then, in my career, I’d been used to the man-management style, coaches who got the best out of you by motivating — Steve Bruce, Gordon Strachan, Sam Allardyce. Enzo introduced me to the idea of being managed tactically, of a coach getting the best out of you by educating you and teaching you.
“The Spanish are massive on positional play. It’s what they seem to think about most and he was like that. The things you see at City, three at the back, wing-backs who push up or go inverted, a really aggressive approach to pressing – Enzo was big on all of that and it wasn’t a surprise to see him go in with Guardiola.”
Pellegrini gave Maresca the responsibility to conduct tactical sessions and Snodgrass said it was revelatory.
“I’d always thought of pressing as pressing other players, but he got my head into how to press space and how to make a difference that way,” he says. “Attacks started with the centre-backs. You played high up and got bodies in the opponent’s half and you tried to win the ball high up.
“What you got was wing-backs going high and creating space for the wingers. Then your two eights would make big forward runs to give you something to aim at.
“You had forwards who were so high they’d be offside, but then they’d come back in the second phase and give you a threat. His speaking about it was an education for me. He made me a better player, definitely, and I still keep in touch with him now.”
He continued his coaching education with Manchester City, firstly as the head coach of the under-23s, leading them to their first-ever Premier League 2 title, and as assistant to Guardiola last season in the historic treble-winning campaign — after a brief spell as a manager at Parma.
GO DEEPER
What to expect from Maresca's Leicester side on the pitch
Talking about how he expected Maresca to set things up at Leicester, which might also be applicable at Chelsea, Snodgrass said: “If he’s like he was before, you’ll see a lot of pressure on the defenders. He’ll want players there who can play in any position across a back four or five. He’ll want defenders who you can shift into the centre of midfield if he needs them to, a bit like John Stones.
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“They’ll probably be super aggressive, trying to make sure that when the opponent gets the ball, he doesn’t have time to look at the picture in front of him. He can only look down and play a pass.
“He honestly did open me up to a different way of thinking, especially about how to take up the right positions. His English is great and the way he interacts is excellent. You can tell he was a terrific player in his time, too. Obviously, he did some of the coaching at West Ham, but his personal touch was the thing, the detail he gave you and the way he helped the lads individually. He’s one guy I look at and think, ‘I really learned a hell of a lot from you’.
“One of the things I noticed was how good he was at doing that with lads who weren’t in the team. He kept them fresh and made them feel like they were involved and I think there’s a bit of a higher power in that, the idea that ‘this isn’t about me, it’s about all of us’. That is so obvious at City, that everyone’s made to think like that.
“He’s from the same mould as Guardiola, 100 per cent. I reckoned when he left Parma that Guardiola would want him back at City. He’s a top operator and a job like this (Leicester) was always going to happen for him.”
He only got 14 games to imprint his philosophy at Parma, where there was the upheaval of 15 new players arriving following relegation from Serie A.
“In my opinion, this (Leicester job) is one where if it doesn’t work straight away and you give up on it quickly, like clubs sometimes do, you’ll regret not sticking with him. Maybe he won’t need time. Maybe he’ll be that good, but if he needs it then you’ve got to give him it,” says Snodgrass. “He’s worth it.”
(Top photos: Getty Images)