Marc Cucurella interview: Chelsea adaptation, a year of non-stop football and Club World Cup reflections

New York Times

10 hours ago

Just one more game. Three hundred and fifty-six days since the Chelsea squad flew to California for a five-game pre-season tour of the United States, their campaign winds up at MetLife Stadium on Sunday with the Club World Cup final, a chance to make history before a brief opportunity to rest.
They have spent the past week in New York, holed up in a hotel on Fifth Avenue but occasionally allowed out to explore between training sessions. There was the wonderful juxtaposition of a social media video showing Cole Palmer wobbling along on a scooter on Times Square, largely unrecognised by the crowds, while his face stares down from a billboard.
Cole Palmer on a scooter in Times Square. 🤷🏻‍♂️🥶pic.twitter.com/PdWRi6FYa7
— Chelsea Dodgers (@TheBlueDodger) July 12, 2025
New York is the city that never sleeps. Football is the sport that never sleeps. For Palmer, this is the third consecutive summer with a tournament that stretches well into July — the European Under-21 Championship in 2023, the European Championship in 2024, the Club World Cup in 2025 — and he will hope and expect to feature at the 2026 World Cup too. A three-week break, starting on Monday, would leave them with less than two weeks to build up for the new Premier League campaign, which starts against Crystal Palace on August 17.
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Marc Cucurella, who was part of the Spain team that beat England in that Euro 2024 final last July, says he is looking forward to a break — a Disney-themed cruise with his young family and a chance to switch off and 'not think about football'. But he is not among those who have dismissed the Club World Cup as a Mickey Mouse competition. Sunday brings the serious business of a final against a Paris Saint-Germain team widely regarded as the best in the world right now.
He and his Chelsea team-mates would not want it any other way. The winners on Sunday will be the first world champions of the tournament's new era. 'We know that if we win it, we have the badge on the shirt for a couple of years,' Cucurella told a small group of reporters at the team hotel this week. 'I know it's difficult after a long season — the (kick-off) times that we play are a bit difficult because it's very hot — but this is the first time they've done this competition so we can be the first team to win it. That would be amazing.'
It would also represent a dramatic turnaround for Chelsea and for Cucurella. For some time after his initial £56million ($75.6m) transfer from Brighton & Hove Albion in August 2022, he was cast and maligned as a symbol of the club's excesses in the transfer market.
It was a turbulent period reflected by a huge turnover of players and coaches — from Thomas Tuchel to Graham Potter to Frank Lampard (on an interim basis) to Mauricio Pochettino to Enzo Maresca — but one that Cucurella feels they have left firmly behind them.
Cucurella spoke candidly about the adversity he suffered along the way. The way he describes it, the first 18 months sound joyless — partly 'because the team maybe didn't have an identity or didn't have a clear way to play' but also because of the pressure that grew with every poor result.
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'I struggled a little,' he said. 'In the first months, I was like, 'Oh f***ing hell… .' I enjoyed it more at other clubs because when you win, you're happy all week and the feeling is very different: you win, you're very happy; you draw, it's another point, don't get relegated. But when you come here you feel like you need to win every game. The first games (at Chelsea) I don't feel like I enjoyed. You win? It's your job and you don't celebrate. It's difficult to feel this pressure.'
He looks back on an enforced lay-off with an ankle injury, around the mid-point of the 2023-24 campaign, as a blessing in disguise. It gave him an opportunity to rest, reflect, clear his head and adjust mentally to a club where he had known only turmoil to that point.
'It was a bad moment, very tough for me,' he says. 'But when I was injured, I was three months out and had a lot of time to think more about myself, what's good for me and what I need to work on. The most important thing, it's difficult, but it's to not lose confidence. I'm the same player I was in my first years (at Chelsea) but now I have more confidence in myself. I trust my quality. It can be difficult to understand that when you play a good game, you're not the best — and when you play a bad game, you're not the worst. You always need to try to stay in the same line. It's an important thing to learn in the big clubs.
'I started to enjoy my journey here after my injury. In my first (second) game back, when I played against Leicester (in the FA Cup), I scored. Then that evening, the national team called me because they had an injured left-back. Everything moved forward. In the summer I played the Euros, then we won the Euros and I got a lot of confidence from that. I came here in the summer and everything was better.'
Cucurella feels the turnaround began towards the end of that 2023-24 season, under Pochettino, but that things have improved further since Maresca took over. 'The manager arrived with a lot of energy and good ideas and helped me a lot,' he says. 'We had a good season. It's true that for a couple of months we lost a bit of energy and lost some confidence but in general we achieved everything we wanted: we wanted Champions League (qualification) and we did it; we won the Conference League and this is another step for us.'
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At 26 he is already a European champion with Spain. He has the opportunity to become a world champion — not just with Spain again next summer but with Chelsea. From being derided in some quarters after that big-money move, he has become one of the most admired left-backs in the game, a whole-hearted, rigorous defender who makes key contributions going forward.
Even so, Sunday's final looks like a step up. In wide areas, PSG have some of the most dangerous players in world football — not just Bradley Barcola, Desire Doue, Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, or indeed Lee Kang-in or Ibrahim Mbaye off the bench, but also Achraf Hakimi and Nuno Mendes charging forward from full-back. Some of their performances since the turn of the year, notably in the 5-0 thrashing of Inter in the Champions League final and the 4-0 defeat of Real Madrid in the Club World Cup semi-final on Wednesday, have been irresistible.
Cucurella was asked whether he feels PSG are a class above every other team in the world right now. 'I think so,' he said. 'They have shown themselves as this sort of team all season. They have a lot of good players. They play good football. But I think a final is a final and we deserve to be there against a tough team. This is an opportunity to show we have a good team, we have a profile for big things and hopefully we can win.'
He looked back on Chelsea's Club World Cup experience. 'We suffered a lot because we lost against Flamengo and a lot of people criticised us,' he said. 'The Benfica game (in the round of 16) with the storm and the crazy minutes after that. But we stuck together and we knew that if we stuck to our plan, we would get better. We deserve to stay here. We (Chelsea and PSG) have shown we are the two best teams in the competition.'
The tournament has had its critics, but Cucurella says it has surpassed his expectations, which it appears were not exactly sky-high. 'I think the experience was good, to be fair,' he says. 'I think I expected worse. If you get to the final, you feel better. If you get here and you lose in the knockouts or the first round, that's tough because you feel, 'Oh, I lose my holiday, I lose my time'. But yeah, I think it can be a good experience.
'It's true that it's the first time and maybe they need to adjust some things, small details. But I think in general, I enjoy it a lot. We have the opportunity to play here in America in a big competition against teams that normally you don't play against, other than friendlies. We had the chance to go out and know the city. For me it's a very good experience.'
The idea has been floated in FIFA circles that the Club World Cup could be expanded further, to 48 teams, or become a biennial tournament — a suggestion FIFA president Gianni Infantino did not dismiss when The Athletic asked him about the possibility at a media event in New York on Saturday morning.
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Would a Club World Cup every two years be too much? 'Maybe yes,' Cucurella said. 'I think every four years is OK, in my opinion, because it's not too repetitive or too boring. I understand that if people watch games for 12 months, then you don't enjoy it. Imagine if the World Cup was played every summer. It isn't (wouldn't be) the same. The World Cup is once every four years and people expect this. If they get some time off or some rest, I think people enjoy more of the games.'
But it probably says something about Chelsea's journey over the course of this season, as much as about the Club World Cup, that Cucurella and his team-mates are bounding into Sunday's final with a spring in their step — certainly when you compare it to their mood and their body language in the darkness of the winter months. Just one more game and a chance to make history and then a brief opportunity to rest and recharge before the madness starts up again just a few weeks later.