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Roofer
Enzo Maresca explains how he is rebuilding Leicester City
By Rob Tanner
2h ago
“I used to cook, mainly Italian dishes. My wife always said that she fell in love with me because I cooked at the beginning. Not now, because there is no time.”
The last six months have been full-on for Enzo Maresca. No time for indulging his love of cooking or listening to one of his favourite Italian musicians, Pino Daniele.
He has been mostly living at the Seagrave training ground, devoting his time to rejuvenating the Leicester City squad he inherited and revolutionising the way they play following their shock relegation from the Premier League.
When he does get the chance he relaxes with his wife and four young children and, on the rare occasions they go out, he might enjoy “one, two, three, four, five glasses of red wine”.
“It’s the moment that I like.”
There will be little chance to relax this Christmas with the games coming thick and fast as Leicester look to cement their place at the top of the Championship after a record-breaking first half of the season. Saturday afternoon’s 3-0 win over Rotherham Birmingham United meant that Leicester moved on to 58 points (six points clear of second-placed Ipswich Town and 13 points clear of third-placed Leeds United), with 19 wins from 23 games, becoming the fastest side to reach that tally since the division’s rebrand as the Championship in 2004-05.
Although the job is only half done, Maresca deserves to raise a glass and savour what he has achieved in six months. Despite his busy schedule, he takes the time to sit down with The Athletic, as he promised he would, and explain just how he is rebuilding Leicester City.
Maresca chatting to The Athletic (Rob Tanner/The Athletic)
Leicester were not the only club showing an interest in Maresca when the Italian was No 2 to Pep Guardiola at Manchester City as they tried to win the treble.
“Since probably January and February last year, some clubs started to contact me, but I said the same thing to all of them,” Maresca says.
“It wasn’t the right time. I was focused on Manchester City. Every game was becoming a cup final as we chased Arsenal and had big Champions League games against Bayern Munich and Real Madrid.
“But there came a moment when I had to make a decision.”
Luckily for Leicester, that moment came in June. In many ways, it was a leap of faith for both parties. Maresca had the reputation as a talented coach but his managerial experience was limited — he got the sack after six months in charge of Parma in Serie B — and following relegation, the job at Leicester was a huge task for even the most seasoned managers.
Maresca celebrating Man City’s Champions League win with Jack Grealish (Tom Flathers/Manchester City FC via Getty Images)
Seven senior players left on free transfers and, inevitably, their best talent would be poached by Premier League clubs. There was plenty of work to be done just to stabilise Leicester, let alone plot a way back to the Premier League.
James Maddison went to Tottenham Hotspur for more than £40million ($50m) and last season’s top scorer Harvey Barnes moved to Newcastle United for about £38m. Timothy Castagne (to Fulham) was the only other first-team departure that commanded a fee, but Youri Tielemans, Caglar Soyuncu, Daniel Amartey, Jonny Evans, Ayoze Perez, Nampalys Mendy and Ryan Bertrand all left. Boubakary Soumare, January arrival Victor Kristiansen and academy product Luke Thomas departed on loan.
“When a club is relegated it is because something has not been working and needs change,” Maresca says. “There were many things to do, no doubt.
“I had to change the mindset of the players. I had to understand if the players still here could switch from last season to this one, which isn’t easy, and convince new players to come to the Championship.
“Leicester is a perfect club in the Premier League. In the Championship, it’s a hard job because you need to win. You cannot join Leicester thinking that you are going just to do something, you need to win.
“No one mentioned promotion, though. I swear, when I first met the chairman (Aiyawatt Srivaddhanaprabha) and Jon Rudkin (director of football) they never said we had to get promoted. The only thing they said is that we want to change our style. We want to build something new and we’re going to sign a three-year contract now.
“If we can reach the target the first year, perfect. Otherwise, we go second year and we see then. But the problem with this club is that in the Championship you have the pressure that in one year, two years, in a short time, you need to come back (to the Premier League).”
The first thing Maresca did was seek the advice of some of the senior members of the squad, such as Marc Albrighton and Jamie Vardy, then new arrivals Conor Coady and Harry Winks, former England internationals who arrived from Wolverhampton Wanderers and Tottenham.
“You ask the senior players and they give you their opinion, but it is their perception so you have to analyse everything in general all around the club and understand the problems they had last season or maybe two years ago,” Maresca says.
It was not just the senior players, Maresca reached out to the members of the squad who had not featured under Brendan Rodgers, who believed their futures lay elsewhere, to offer them a fresh start.
Vestergaard has played a key role in Maresca’s team (Hannah Fountain – CameraSport via Getty Images)
“When you build something you have to start with the base and this was a new journey,” he says. “There were three or four players, one of them was Jannik (Vestergaard), who didn’t play. We also had JJ (James Justin) and Ricardo (Pereira), who were injured so they were like new players.
“I don’t know what happened last year, I wasn’t here, but I wanted it to be a fresh start, like for Wilf (Ndidi) who we play differently. We all start new and together.”
Wilfred Ndidi has been given a new lease of life under Maresca after a troubled campaign last season under Brendan Rodgers and then Dean Smith.
Playing in a higher role alongside Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall as two central midfielders, with Winks as the sole pivot just behind them, he has been given more freedom to win the ball higher up the pitch and has registered four goals and six assists in 21 appearances in all competitions. The move has also benefitted Dewsbury-Hall too, who made nine assists — no one in the Championship has registered more — and scored seven goals.
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From day one, Maresca set about introducing his brand of possession-based football, implementing his vision of how his team would play. Vestergaard’s redemption from total outcast under Rodgers has been such that supporters have now taken to calling him Vestergod.
Justin flourished under Rodgers — making his senior England debut in a 1-0 defeat against Hungary in June 2022 — but struggled badly for fitness after a cruciate ligament tear in 2021 and then a ruptured Achilles tendon in 2022.
The versatility of Justin, who is equally adept in either full-back position, can sometimes play against him but Maresca has slowly eased him back into the fold on the left. On-loan Manchester City full-back Callum Doyle has been sidelined with a knee injury and captain Ricardo Pereira is key to Maresca’s system as an ‘inverted’ right-back.
“I know I don’t allow JJ to show himself 100 per cent — he loves to get up and down the pitch from full-back,” Maresca says. “He is better at doing that than doing what he’s doing with us, but he has to adapt. It is not our way. They have to be open-minded and want to learn.”
The start was intense with double training sessions and multiple video analysis sessions. Training was filmed using cameras on the first team pitches and Maresca would talk his players through what they were working on during the post-training debriefs.
Maresca says he found all the players, even the ones who thought they would be leaving, receptive to soaking up the information.
“It is important that the training is not boring, that it’s always dynamic,” he says. “It has to be new every day and the players have to be curious, they want to see and understand.
“When I played, sometimes we did the same things day after day, but we (players) always wanted to do something new. It’s always trying to learn something new to develop the players, regardless of their age.
“We used the videos a lot but only for 50 minutes at a time. It is important that the players understand why you are asking them to do something, not just telling them what to do.”
It is still early days for Maresca and his men, so the instructions and explanations continue even in matches.
“For instance, (against Birmingham) in the second half, Wilf was on my side of the pitch in front of me,” Maresca says. “Most of the time I was shouting, ‘Wilf, stay there, don’t move, don’t move, don’t work, stay there because probably it is the right place to be’.
“It is important to explain to them and help them understand.”
Inevitably, there will have been doubters within the ranks, but Maresca revealed up to six players who had initially said they wanted to move on were changing their minds as they became invested in the process.
“After one week, maybe 10 days, I spoke with some of the players that I knew were leaving or thinking of leaving, and they started to say ‘I’m not sure now to leave because I enjoy every day’,” he says. “They could see that the idea is to enjoy the ball and to play.
“One of the players that was happy, and I was happy with, was Patson Daka, but there was no space for him (in the team). From day one, I was always speaking to him. I liked his attitude, but I had two good strikers (Vardy and Kelechi Iheanacho) and they were playing and the team was winning.
“But because of the way he behaved, when we had problems with our strikers, he plays. It’s fantastic.”
Maresca’s passion has shone through (Michael Regan/Getty Images)
Maresca is friendly and jovial with his squad and has an open-door policy for players needing to share issues, on and off the pitch. But none of them has been left in any doubt about what he expects.
“What I don’t like and I don’t negotiate over is bad behaviour or lack of respect towards me, my staff or team-mates,” he says. “But I like to be open. I like to speak with the players about general things. Anything they need. No problem.”
Leicester’s winning start has surprised everyone, including Maresca, but he says he realised his side could play how he wanted soon after joining.
“It was the pre-season game against Liverpool,” he says. “The first 20 minutes. After the the game, I said, ‘F**king hell guys’ because it was such a short time together before that. We played so well for the first 15-20 minutes.
“And it’s not just because I know it’s Liverpool, I know how difficult it is, even in pre-season, and I know how intense they are but after that first 20 minutes, I said, ‘We can play’.
“In terms of results and consistency, it surprised me, but it has surprised everyone, right?”
When Maresca was appointed he had an unexpected caller — Claudio Ranieri, the Italian coach who had led Leicester to their incredible title success of 2016. He wished him well, but had a word of warning.
“Claudio was so kind and talked about the club,” Maresca says. “He said don’t forget I won the Premier League and the year after, after three or four months, they sacked me. In the end, we know that it is business for the club.”
Ranieri’s achievements have been restored to the training ground (Laurence Griffiths/Getty Images)
There was one other significant move Maresca made when he arrived at Seagrave. He wanted a reminder of Ranieri’s success on show, to remind everyone of what the club was capable of achieving.
On the walls as the players arrived, there were images of the FA Cup and Community Shield wins under Rodgers, but nothing to signify the 5000-1 miracle, which had not sat well with some of those who had been involved in that triumph.
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Maresca changed that.
“I said many times that this facility here is one of the best in the world,” he says, sitting in a meeting room overlooking the first team training pitch. “But I thought it could only be better in one way, so I said to the club, to the owner, ‘In the last 10 years, Leicester has won three of the most important titles in England — Premier League, FA Cup and Community Shield. Why don’t you put the trophy in the reception?’.
“The people that arrive every morning; the players, me as manager, everyone will see it. That says to everyone in the last 10 years, this club has done this! I’m not talking about the last 100 years! The last ten!
“The players, the manager and the people that are here, they can realise even better what kind of club this is!”
Maresca knows already.
