Chelsea's positional fluidity stifled PSG, providing Maresca with a blueprint for next season

New York Times

18-07-2025

Not many teams keep a clean sheet against Paris Saint-Germain.
In a long, quadruple-winning 2024-25 season, Luis Enrique's side had failed to score on just five occasions before the Club World Cup final, but each of those shut-outs were qualitatively different from the blueprint that Enzo Maresca laid out for Chelsea on Sunday.
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'The message was quite clear. We won the game in the first 10 minutes,' Maresca told reporters after the 3-0 victory. 'The message before the game was, 'Let them understand we are here to win the game'. It set the tone of the game.'
It was a statement that would not be out of place in a Sunday league dressing room, with players imploring their team-mates to 'let them know you are there early' as an act of hostility. But Chelsea's aggression out of possession was a crucial factor in their victory as they snapped into challenges and got tight to their Parisian opponents, particularly in the first half.
PSG's fluid positional rotations have the capacity to twist anyone's blood, as so many of Europe's elite sides have found out in recent months. Luis Enrique's side can pull your defensive shape apart to create space with their movement. However, space does not score goals.
Chelsea's adaptable defensive performance matched the fluidity that PSG looked to implement in possession. They were aggressive with it, but it was clear that every action they did off the ball, they performed with conviction.
This was clear from the opening exchanges, when Trevoh Chalobah tracked midfielder Fabian Ruiz's run across the pitch to receive the ball. By shutting the passing option off at source, Fabian was unable to gain possession as PSG continued to circulate the ball elsewhere.
Chelsea were not entirely man-for-man across the pitch, but it was crucial that their centre-backs tracked their runners all the way when they were getting touch-tight to their markers — even if it meant being in unnatural positions at times.
Below, you can see Ousmane Dembele dropping as far as left-back to find a pocket of space, but Chalobah follows him all the way to force him into a simple pass, while Chelsea briefly shuffle across to form a temporary back three.
There were countless other examples, with Chalobah's centre-back partner Levi Colwill doing exactly the same in stepping out from the defensive line to stop any danger before it grew — dovetailing excellently with midfielder Moises Caicedo, who would drop into Chelsea's back line to plug any gaps opened by his team-mate.
This was even more prominent with an example later in the first half, where you would be forgiven for thinking that it was Colwill who was playing as Chelsea's defensive midfielder and Caicedo as left centre-back, based on this image.
With the threat that PSG are known to pose in wide areas, similar communication was needed on the flanks.
Wingers tracking their runners is a tale as old as time, but the extent to which Marc Cucurella and Pedro Neto shut down the space and stuck to their jobs will have pleased Maresca as much as any of the three goals his team scored.
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With barely four minutes on the clock, Cucurella pushes high to track Desire Doue's run, dropping deep. As Marquinhos winds up to play the ball over the top, the Chelsea player deepest is Neto — who has followed Achraf Hakimi's run back to his own penalty area, nodding down the long ball for Robert Sanchez to collect.
Such was Neto's desire to get back defensively, that Chelsea formed a back five at times to block the space. The image below shows the outcome of a strong first 20 minutes out of possession, with no PSG player properly inside Chelsea's compact block as they look to circulate the ball once more.
It was not exactly beautiful football at times — with Chelsea comfortable playing the percentage game by whacking it upfield and starting again in the first half — but it was no less effective.
It required plenty of communication, lots of pointing and a fair share of shuttle runs, but Chelsea laid the foundation for their performance in the opening stages, just as Maresca declared.
In fairness, their out-of-possession approach was equally as impressive in their semi-final clash with Fluminense, but that was based more on high pressing from the midfield and forward line.
With the fluidity of PSG's movement, Chelsea were unable to use defensive triggers in the same way to start a coherent press across the whole team. Instead, they opted to embrace the chaos with their front-footed one-v-one battles.
As much as anything, Maresca can use Chelsea's Club World Cup final victory as a platform to show how much he can adapt tactically and curate a game plan to beat any side in European football. Such flexibility was the order of the day across the whole tournament, with Maresca using this summer to establish new ideas and strengthen the buy-in he has within the squad.
Will they use an identical tactic next season in similar, high-profile games? That remains to be seen, but the defensive discipline that Chelsea showed is what they can carry into the new campaign.
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'For me, the biggest achievement this season is that exactly one year ago, no one was talking about Chelsea for football (reasons), but talking about the big squad, big money,' Maresca said on the Friday before the final.
'Now, no one is talking about this, but they are talking about the way we play, and the way we win games. This is personally the biggest achievement of this season.'
With two trophies won in less than two months, you can understand why there is now greater focus on the club's on-pitch matters.