There was a news story this week about a team of a hundred scientists who have spent nine years analysing a single cubic millimetre of mouse brain. The one hundred scientists have finally published their results. And those results are basically: “Whoah, have you seen this stuff?”
What they found inside the cubic millimetre of mouse brain was an eternity of wiring, just miles and miles of tiny wire to be untangled, pictured in the accompanying article clumped into a single mass, like a pan of mouse brain vermicelli left overnight in the sink.
The point of the study was to offer some clues in the study of the human brain. Given this is around a thousand times bigger than its mouse equivalent the group was forced to conclude it would take centuries to untangle the wiring inside a complete human brain. That box under the bed crammed with scart cables and old Blu-ray player leads might seem a bit confusing. The human brain, well, the human brain is basically unknowable.
It is tempting to conclude this must be the kind of thing Enzo Maresca thinks about as he lies awake at night staring at the ceiling, sifting data, poring over the impossibility of eradicating petty human variables, of ensuring Tosin Adarabioyo remembers at all times he is just an avatar of a system, that Levi Colwill knows he’s nothing more than a unit of athletic flesh.
You really think it’s a logical option for Robert Sánchez to pass the ball forward? How about if I told you a single 100 gram serving of squirrel brain contains enough wire to stretch from Stamford Bridge to Venus, that its possibilities are endless and uncontrollable? What then?
Or perhaps not. In the buildup to Thursday’s game against Legia Warsaw, the same day the mouse-brain report dropped, Chelsea’s website published what looked like a revelatory article. It was headlined “Enzo Maresca: ‘Football belongs to the fans’”, above a picture of a beaming Maresca, arms wide in a tender, priestly gesture, raising the prospect of some kind of Scrooge-style overnight conversion from scowling possession-ball to joy, freedom and the possibilities of a fully unleashed Noni Madueke.
On closer inspection the article turned out to be a fine and sympathetic piece of work from the club admin, who managed to pack that line about fans into the headline, sub-head and opening sentence, but was forced before the opening paragraph was out to get on to the stuff he really wanted to say about how fans are only vital when they support you, how football is in fact “more complicated” than this.
Chelsea duly reeled off another strange performance against Legia, losing at home while taking 72% possession, making 721 passes, and playing like a team having a half-grasped conversation with itself about maths. And Maresca is a fascinating figure right now, both the funniest single entity in the Premier League (if you don’t have to watch the games) and a test of what this thing is supposed to mean.
His best quality is that amazing air of self‑possession, the look of cultivated disdain, the smile that suggests the entire choreographed descent into mouse-brain football is just another step in his own vast, unknowable plan. And while he, Enzo, will not judge you for your inability to grasp this, he will in fact still massively judge you, despise you, and make passive aggressive remarks about you in a TV interview.
Maresca’s entire professional identity is based around tactics, an ideologue’s preference for controlled buildup play from the back. Also, baiting the press. He loves, and passionately believes in baiting the press. Not to mention counterpressing then falling back quickly, like a squadron of police tactically running away from some teenagers.
Chelsea fans tend to like forceful, direct football. Conflict of some kind always seemed inevitable. But more widely Maresca is a key part in the conversation about boring football. When people talk of Pep clones, of robot-ball nihilists, they’re talking about Maresca, and perhaps also that other brooding technocrat Rubin Amorim, who was pictured last week watching his players train from a hundred yards away behind a fence, glowering at the distant rondos like a divorced dad at sports day.
This is all probably cyclical, a symptom of the league running out of content, or just a general intolerance for levels of ambient boredom that are now painful to the over-stimulated modern idiot-brain. But it is also fascinating to watch, mainly because Maresca is willing to go to war with club’s own fans over this.
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Last week he spoke in glowering tones about “the environment”, implying a failure to grasp the complexity of his methods, like a footballing Doctor Manhattan, out there doing naked blue physics, concerned solely with matters beyond your human comprehension,
There are two obvious questions here. Why are so many managers convinced that a single idea about football must be right, this sense that there are indeed eternal truths in the universe, and that these involve slow buildup play and/or the use of wing-backs? And more widely, how have Chelsea walked into this contradictory state of affairs, the party club, a casino made entirely from fireworks, which then considers it sensible to appoint Martin Luther as manager.
Looking for logic from this version of Chelsea is probably pointless.
This is a place where the accounts department has long since embarked on the compliance equivalent of drinking your own urine. Where it’s considered a good idea to hire a coach for your attacking assets who is ideologically bent on making them less not more starry, on turning them into drones, like buying a prized watch and covering it with gaffer tape because you just really, really believe in gaffer tape.
More interesting is Maresca’s unpopularity now in the stadium and on the internet. It is probably fair to say actual, long-standing legacy fans are a mixed blessing for the more speculative Premier League owners, who want you to like football just enough to buy it, to click, to subscribe, but not enough to feel you have any say in what happens.
None of this means Maresca will necessarily be sacked, although failure to make the Champions League might seal it. He remains a powerful indicator of how much grasp of basic detail these glazed and distant Chelsea owners possess, or indeed how much the detail matters right now beyond holding a seat at the table.
What seems to matter more is that Chelsea’s fans are asserting their primacy in the experience, the needs, the wants, the feelings of those in the physical space. It remains to be seen if this can have any effect, whether the manager will be given time to untangle the wiring a little more. Or whether he is actually correct in the thing he didn’t really say, that football does still belong to its fans. In this sense, and this sense alone, Maresca at Chelsea remains a fascinating slow-burn drama.
