Pawn Sacrifice was released in cinemas ten years ago. Sonically, it's more Soho than Chelsea.
But this was no blue movie. It was a commercial flop. Like Chelsea, the film made way under its budget. It starred Tobey Maguire and Liev Schreiber, and still flopped. But Enzo Maresca had fun reinterpreting the “Match of the Century” between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky as as much a communion of minds as Cold War intrigue surrounding a 1972 chess match in Reykjavik.
Towards the end of his playing career, Maresca began to study chess, finding a teacher while in Palermo and no doubt learning the finer points of the Sicilian Defense and the deliciously named Fegatelo, the “fried liver attack.”
Needless to say, Chelsea's managers have been swiftly dumped under Todd Boley and Clear Lake Capital. Counting disappointing and fleeting interim managers like Bruno Sartre, Maresca will be the club's sixth manager in two years. The turn of events brings to mind the Italian phrase “scocco matto,” meaning checkmate. Matto means mad or insane. But I digress.
Maresca figured he could prepare for management by learning the fundamentals of chess. Anyone strolling through the library at Coverciano, the Italian Football Federation's coaching school outside Florence, can pull out his papers and read about how Pep Guardiola's Manchester City team is related to the ultra-modern Nimzo-Indian defense employed by every world chess champion since José Raul “the human chess machine” Capablanca. Coverciano is like the Harvard Business School for the UEFA Pro Licence.
“Coaches can only benefit by acquiring the mind of a good chess player,” Maresca argued, “and the evidence is the development of numerous mental skills that are supervised by the prefrontal cortex.”
Boris Spassky shakes hands with Bobby Fischer during their first chess match (AFP via Getty Images)
He cited the benefits of chess as “developing tactical and strategic dexterity and enhancing creativity (important for the element of surprise)” and that it “improves concentration.” The 44-year-old also claimed that “chess teaches you to control your initial excitement when you see something good and trains you to think objectively when you are in danger.”
No doubt having paid Garry Kasparov-like attention to Chelsea’s recent run, Maresca nevertheless somehow speculated that a move from Leicester that could turn their reputation around would be worth it, regardless of the experience of Thomas Tuchel, Graham Potter or Mauricio Pochettino. One can only assume that while they’re playing checkers, he thinks he’s playing chess that can be beaten by AI models like Deep Blue or AlphaZero.
As Maresca nears the end of his opening remarks about his judgement (or lack thereof) in taking on this job, the parallels he draws with chess are, in all seriousness, well observed.
“The chessboard is like a football field that can be divided into two channels: the central channel and the outer channel,” he emphasized. “In football, as in chess, the inner game is more interesting because it leads most quickly and directly to the goal or the king.”
As Guardiola emphasized to Maresca during their time on his staff, controlling the center is fundamental, whether directly through classic midfielders like Xavi, Sergio Busquets or Andres Iniesta, or indirectly through chess knight-like inverted full-backs like Philipp Lahm or Rico Ruiz. Building up from the center opens up the pitch like a board, allowing for multiple angles of attack.
In soccer terms, the Italian Maresca was influenced by the Spanish Fuego de Posición.. He quotes Paul Morphy, Fischer's Johan Cruyff to Guardiola, as saying “the ability to clearly see combinations” and that “the positional game is, first and foremost, the ability to position the pieces in the most effective way.”
Plus, while there's an element of surprise in chess – a budding coach on the verge of taking over at Chelsea in soccer terms – Maresca believes that by making small tweaks from game to game, or even during a match, he can exploit weaknesses in opposing teams and drain their confidence and time.
“In the 1991 World Chess Championship, Viktor Korchnoi needed an hour and 20 minutes to react to an unexpected change by his rival Anatoly Karpov and make the 13th move,” Maresca explained. “Karpov's move was not checkmate, but the time advantage he gained by surprising his rival was undoubtedly decisive. Korchnoi had to reorganize and revise his strategy and tactics.”
The Soviet Union features heavily in Maresca's paper, and one can imagine that Chelsea's former owner Roman Abramovich and chief executive Marina Granovskaia were as impressed as Boly and Vedad Eghbali.
He could become just the seventh Italian to take charge at Stamford Bridge – two of them have won the league, one the Champions League and one the Europa League – and, with the possible exception of West Bromwich's Roberto Di Matteo, all were in charge under different owners who were more experienced than Maresca and spent more money in a more streamlined and effective way.
Maresca is expected to join the team after Leicester threatened the 100-point barrier and won the Championship. He was one game away from tying the 104-year-old record for most second division wins in a single season (32). Some call this Marescaball. His manager at Coverciano would probably define it as a Maresca piece.
On the surface, he seems part of a new wave of Italian coaches who promoted Francesco Farioli at Ajax and settled on Thiago Motta at Juventus. He was at the famous Manchester dinner with Guardiola, Roberto De Zerbi, Daniele De Rossi and Aleksandar Kolarov, but not as Pep's guest, but as one of his assistants. The halo effect of working with a Catalan can attract employers. Mikel Arteta's success at Arsenal, having left Guardiola's staff, led Parma to offer Maresca, who had been coach of City's elite development team, a job.
Maresca had a difficult time as Parma manager (George Wood/Getty Images)
That didn't work.
Maresca inherited a team in disarray, overspent (80 million euros!) by new American owners on unknown talent from around the world (especially Argentina and Romania), unable to pinpoint what had gone wrong and firing several managers in his first year. There was so much fluidity that even a player with potential like Joshua Zirkzee failed to thrive, and Parma was surprisingly relegated. Maresca was asked to pick up the pieces of Serie B and, more specifically, to piece together a squad of a few dozen players. Sound familiar?
Despite boasting the highest wage bill in the second division, Maresca was sacked within months, having left Parma narrowly outside the Serie C relegation play-out zone with 17 points from 13 games.
Looking back, Maresca called it a “positive experience”, although his frustrations were with a lack of patience (“They gave me a three-year contract, but you sign multi-year contracts because you have an idea of a project behind it”) and unrealistic expectations (“No one ever told me we should get promoted to Serie A in my first year, especially when you're going to have 15 or so new players in the summer”).
Yet while the local media criticised him for using players such as Simon Sohm out of their natural positions and complained about too much transfer activity causing confusion, he had the nerve to claim that “with the three players we selected in the January transfer window, Parma would have made the play-offs”.
The trauma he suffered under Ennio Tardini made Maresca hesitant to take over at Leicester last summer. “I was a bit worried,” he told Gazzetta dello Sport. “It was similar to Parma: a big club had been relegated and there was a lot of pressure to bounce back quickly.”
But Leicester started the season at a record pace and finished the first half of the season with 58 points – testament to Maresca's influence and the spending that led the Premier League to refer the club to an independent committee for suspected breaches of the PSR and to their failure to submit audited financial statements to the league for the 2022-23 season (while they were in the top flight).
Automatic promotion has not been smooth sailing. After a 3-1 win over Swansea in January, Maresca expressed frustration at the King Power's frustration with the sleepy side of his tiki-taka style: “Maybe if we keep winning and winning at home, people think it's easy. But it's not easy. I came to this club to play with this mindset and the moment that mindset is ever in doubt, I'll be gone the next day. It's that clear, there's no doubt about it.”
He was not pleased that Chelsea recalled Cesare Casadei and failed to sign Stefano Sensi on loan from Inter Milan after Wilfred Ndidi was injured. Leicester had collected 39 points in the second half of the season, enough to take the top spot, but their performance looked set to worsen after losses to Middlesbrough, Leeds and Queens Park Rangers in the spring.
In contrast to Ipswich Town, who overperformed on their return to the Premier League after a 22-year absence, Leicester lived up to expectations. After all, Jamie Vardy's 18 goals in the Championship still seemed like a cheat code, even now at the twilight of his career. Chelsea, on the other hand, clearly agree with Maresca that promotion was not as easy as it seemed. Frankly, it's still a surprise that Chelsea and their former midfielder have reconciled.
Returning to chess terminology, both teams found themselves in a Zugzwang situation, where any move weakens one's position and risks checkmate, but inaction is not an option. Chelsea, for example, did not have to sack Pochettino. Maresca was under no obligation to leave Leicester.
Now that there is no room for doubt, it is natural to doubt these grandmasters.
(Top photo: David Rogers/Getty Images)
