Why Maresca will struggle to succeed Pep

After a decade largely spent dominating the English game, Pep Guardiola has called it a day at Manchester City. His long-term future has looked quite uncertain over the last couple of years, so the 10-time English champions have had to seriously think about identifying his successor for a good while.

The person they have seemed to land on is Enzo Maresca. The Italian tactician reportedly held talks with the club prior to departing Chelsea at the turn of the year. While his position at Stamford Bridge was already becoming untenable amid a breakdown in relationships with other key decision-makers, that he chose to walk away himself rather than be sacked and receive compensation was an eyebrow-raising detail.

Other potential candidates, including soon-to-be Chelsea manager Xabi Alonso, have emerged in recent months. However, City look set to stick with Maresca, who has reportedly signed a three-year deal. Succeeding such a hugely successful long-serving coach is never easy — just ask David Moyes — and there are good reasons that make the ex-Leicester City boss a safe pick, but there are some causes for concern too.

Maresca’s track record

After hanging up his boots at the end of a playing career that featured stints at West Brom, Juventus, Fiorentina, Sevilla and Málaga, Maresca quickly transitioned into coaching. He started off as an assistant coach at Ascoli in Italy before moving on to Sevilla, where he joined current Türkiye boss Vincenzo Montella. He moved on to England at the start of the 2018/19 as a part of Manuel Pellegrini’s coaching staff at West Ham, and first joined Manchester City in 2020 to take charge of their youth team.

Maresca’s first head coach role came back in Italy with Parma in Serie B, but that proved to be short-lived as he averaged 1.2 points per game in 14 matches. He then returned to City, this time as an assistant coach for the senior squad in their treble-winning 2022/23 season. That was followed by a move to take charge of the relegated Leicester City, with whom he absolutely dominated the Championship. Chelsea then came calling in the summer of 2024, and he spent the next 18 months with the Blues.

Maresca’s time at Chelsea isn’t entirely straightforward to analyse, not least because of the way they were running their player trading operation during it. He certainly showed that he had a preferred tactical approach, though, as he stuck with a pretty structurally rigid possession and control-oriented setup that typically took the shape of a 4-2-3-1 formation on paper and moved to an expansive back three setup in possession.

The Italian coach lost his very first competitive fixture in charge of Chelsea to none other than Manchester City, but then watched his side remain unbeaten in the league for two months and shoot up to second by mid-December, boasting the best attacking record in the division and sitting just three points behind would-be champions Liverpool. Cole Palmer was particularly outstanding as he benefitted in a setup designed to get the most out of him and returned with 12 goals and six assists in the first half of the league season.

However, Chelsea’s defensive frailties started to get exposed with back-to-back losses to Fulham and Ipswich Town after Christmas, prompting Maresca to step in and slow the team down. This slower circulation-focused approach did work in terms of improving the defensive numbers, but it came at a great cost to an attack that was flying in open games and transitions.

After some questionable transfer decisions in terms of on-pitch impact, at least, Chelsea entered the new season with a good deal of tactical continuity and looked to grow their attacking output back on top of what they hoped would be a stronger defensive foundation. However, the weaknesses of their simplistic out-of-possession strategy soon started to get exploited, but to his credit, Maresca responded by making some successful tweaks. On the whole, though, the Blues looked a bit worse off than they were a year prior, and a worsening off-pitch situation ended up with their head coach leaving as aforementioned.

All things considered, Maresca did a pretty good job in a difficult environment, but it would be fair to ask questions of the manner in which he dealt with Chelsea’s defensive weaknesses and caused an attacking drop-off in his quest for controlling games. Additionally, some of his selection decisions, such as parting ways with Nicholas Jackson, could also be described as dubious. However, he had a lot of help from the sporting directors in this regard too, so it would be unfair to blame him entirely.

Perhaps, then, it is worth glancing at Maresca’s work at Leicester to get a better idea of what his teams can look like with all being well. The Foxes adopted a very similar tactical setup under him (albeit in a different league context) and yielded rich rewards, topping the Championship with 97 points.

While Maresca’s Leicester weren’t flawless by any means, he will surely be quite well-placed to succeed if he can get Manchester City performing at a similar level. The Foxes had by far the biggest player payroll in the Championship at the time, at least twice greater than all but two of their competitors. Manchester City’s financial muscles also have the potential to get similarly massive, but dominating to this extent in an increasingly wealthy Premier League is a tough ask.

Challenges in replicating this at Manchester City

One of the strongest arguments for hiring Maresca at Manchester City is that he has recent history with the club. He worked with a good few of the current squad’s members during his time as an assistant coach in Pep Guardiola’s staff, and of course enjoyed a hugely successful 2022/23 campaign. Hayden and I discussed this in greater depth on the podcast last week.

The key factor, then, could well be Maresca’s ability to adapt to a changing Premier League. While Manchester City used to dominate with a similarly control-oriented setup as recently as a couple of seasons ago, they have fallen below their peak to a noteworthy extent over the last two years for a myriad of reasons.

Although Rodri’s ACL injury and Manchester City’s subsequent collapse are incredibly apparent even on a four-year xG trendline, that was more of a breaking point than being the sole cause of their problems. I had written about the issues from the club’s perspective, most notably including subpar squad-building, at the time, but there also is a league-wide trend worth paying attention to.

When Manchester City last won the Premier League in 2023/24, they were a part of a front-running cluster of three teams that were head and shoulders above the rest of the division. All three of them ended the season with an average Expected Goal Difference per 90 in excess of +0.9. This season, by contrast, no one managed to reach that figure.

City and Liverpool have evidently gotten worse than they were a couple of years ago, but the same cannot be said of Arsenal. Yet, the Gunners’ xGD/90 figure has dropped by more than 0.2 between these seasons. This only points to one thing — the increasing riches and smarter investment across the Premier League have made it a far more competitive division, with other clubs also finding performance edges through different avenues like set-pieces. As a result, it is far more difficult to dominate the league and put up 90-point seasons, as City did around the time Maresca was last there.

Indeed, Manchester City have themselves been forced to modify the way they play amid all of this upheaval. Even the world-renowned control freak Pep Guardiola had to cave and look for solutions amid a shocking run of results last season, with one of his first attempts involving the formation of a new strike partnership between Erling Haaland and Omar Marmoush that tried to attack space in behind and caused the team to look forward much quicker. The ex-Barcelona tactician gradually reintroduced some elements of a more control-based approach since then, but even this season, City did not necessarily kill by a thousand passes and had to look for different attacking formulas before becoming truly formidable going forward.

However, their defensive issues were never entirely solved. Rest defence has surely been one of the chief causes for Pep Guardiola’s restlessness over the last couple of years, but City aren’t exceptionally solid in a settled block or high press either.

The issues with the squad-building definitely come into the picture in this regard, as the lack of quality depth in defensive midfield severely limited what Guardiola could do. With at least one (in Bernardo Silva) and possibly both (in Rodri) of their midfield mainstays leaving this summer, Maresca will need City’s recruitment department to do as good a job as possible if he is to keep the team competing at the highest level. For his part, the Italian coach will need to find the right balance that keeps the team solid without excessively constraining the elite attacking talent he will have at his disposal.

Between the changing nature of the league, City’s weaknesses and his own room for improvement, this is sure to be the biggest challenge of Maresca’s career so far.

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