The Chelsea job is football’s version of being selected for human sacrifice… I’ll eat my hat if Enzo Maresca sees out his five-year contract, writes OLIVER HOLT

It is a moment, I am sure, of great celebration for Enzo Maresca. A moment when he has been appointed head coach of Chelsea, a moment when all his brilliant work at Leicester City in the season just passed has been recognized and rewarded with a promotion to one of the most important jobs in the game. .

But it is difficult to look at what awaits him at Stamford Bridge without worrying about him. Not in the financial sense, of course. The five-year deal that has brought him and his small army of staff to west London should set him up for life. However, his career prospects are at stake.

Because coaching Chelsea, under the current management of Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali, is the closest thing to The Impossible Job that exists in English football at the moment.

Getting the job is cause for celebration, of course, as long as you’re aware that it’s the football version of being selected for human sacrifice. It’s an honor, they treat you like a God for a while, they flatter you and make you fat.

And then one of the two co-sports directors says it’s your fault you’re not making sense of the chaos and someone invites you to dinner at a nice restaurant in Mayfair and turns off the lights.

Perhaps a sense of foreboding was the reason it took some time for Maresca to put the finishing touches to the deal that made him Chelsea’s new boss, although whether he really is the boss is a moot point in itself.

Apparently, the manager being the boss is a pretty old-fashioned idea at Chelsea. Maresca has been selected as Mauricio Pochettino’s successor partly because he is said to be happy to be part of a “collaborative structure” at the club, a cog in a wheel.

A ‘collaborative structure’ is just business speak for telling Maresca that he won’t be in charge. A ‘collaborative structure’ is business speak that means the suits are going to run the show.

The impression, certainly, is that it will be Boehly and Eghbali who will make the decisions, abetted by co-sports directors Paul Winstanley and Laurence Stewart. Maresca’s path in the food chain.

When you consider some of the other talent available, including strong characters such as former Chelsea boss Thomas Tuchel and former Brighton manager Roberto De Zerbi, it appears that Maresca has been brought in for his malleability as well as his coaching ability.

However, that coaching ability aside, the way his appointment is being talked about makes it seem like his number one quality is that he won’t make waves. Which seems like a strange premise to try to get Chelsea back to being a powerhouse in the game.

On the other hand, when you have an owner like Eghbali, who likes to appear in the locker room from time to time and you have a group of people above you in the pecking order, knowing your place will be crucial.

It is difficult to imagine Pochettino, De Zerbi or Tuchel accepting such a subordinate role, but perhaps that simply means Maresca is more prepared to be a consensus politician at the club’s Cobham training ground.

As for the five-year contract, you’ll have to excuse me for being cynical about that too. I only have one hat and I am quite fond of it, I don’t wear hats but I will eat it if Maresca ends that five-year contract.

I would be surprised if it lasts two years. My best guess is that it will make it to next season. So perhaps Chelsea’s owners are feeling overly generous. Maybe they feel too optimistic. Or perhaps there are a series of termination clauses written into that contract.

After all, Boehly and Eghbali have gone through five permanent and interim coaches since they bought the club two years ago. When you get through so many marriages, you surely learn some lessons.

I hope Maresca gets it. I hope he succeeds for his sake and the Chelsea fans’ sake. But the reality is that he is not nearly as well qualified as his three full-time predecessors, Tuchel, Graham Potter and Pochettino, to understand Chelsea.

Maresca’s frontline experience is tantamount to being sacked after a season in Serie B with Parma, taking charge of Manchester City’s Elite Development Squad, and a season in the Championship with Leicester, when the odds were hugely in his favor. favor due to the template I had. inherited.

He has worked with Pep Guardiola, which nowadays counts almost as much as fitting into a “collaborative structure”. There are legion of coaches who enjoy the reflected glory of being Pep’s teammate.

None of this is to say that Maresca is not a capable coach. His Leicester team played good football in the championship and deserved to be crowned champions. But is it really a preparation to take over a club like the current Chelsea?

The club has become the Premier League’s lost case, synonymous with misplaced self-satisfaction and endless arrogance, saddled with an estate whose idea of ​​a recruitment strategy has amounted to just over £1 billion in a shopping cart. Supermarket.

At this point, it’s worth saying that respected voices within football, men like Simon Jordan and Peterborough United owner Darragh MacAnthony, see much of what they admire in Chelsea’s new business model and are people who deserved be heard.

I’m still struggling to see it. It took until the end of the season for Pochettino to begin to make sense of the proliferation of signings that were thrown at the club and, naturally, it was at that point that Chelsea let him go.

Sometimes clubs thrive on attrition, but it’s hard to escape the conclusion that what Chelsea needed more than anything this summer was a break from the constant turmoil. They were finally making progress. They needed some continuity.

Instead, they appointed someone new and neutered him before he started by naming him head coach, not manager. They are starting again. Many reports suggest that the players are baffled by Pochettino’s treatment.

Neutrals everywhere will wish Maresca good luck, certain that he will need it.

Terzic shows grace in defeat

Last week I mentioned how I had been impressed by the generosity of Southampton’s Jack Stephens at the end of his team’s Championship play-off victory over Leeds.

This week, it was hard not to notice the grace shown in defeat by Edin Terzic, the Borussia Dortmund coach. Long after his team’s loss to Real Madrid in the Champions League final, Terzic wandered around the field congratulating the Madrid team on his victory.

He even sought out the parents of Jude Bellingham, who played for him at Dortmund, to congratulate them.

And although this risks contradicting the custom of a lifetime, José Mourinho must also be praised. The Portuguese, who was at Wembley as an expert, approached Terzic after the match and wrapped him in a long, consoling hug. It was an elegant gesture on the part of one of the great managers.

Burrow is one of the sport’s greatest heroes.

I never had the honor of meeting Rob Burrow. I didn’t even see him play.

And so it is a tribute to the second act of his remarkable life that will always remain etched in my mind as one of the sport’s greatest heroes.

His bravery in the face of his motor neurone disease diagnosis and the example he set as he continued to live his life was an example of a type of bravery that left me in awe of the man.