Club World Cup team guide – Chelsea: Expensively assembled fringe contenders or a serious threat?

New York Times

5 hours ago

FIFA Club World Cup champions in 2022, Chelsea are relishing the chance to make history by winning the first edition of Gianni Infantino's expanded tournament in the United States.
Group D opponents Los Angeles FC, Flamengo and Esperanto de Tunis will inspire little fear in Enzo Maresca's expensively assembled squad, but even if they match expectations and advance as winners, the degree of difficulty will rise sharply in the knockout stage for a club emerging from two seasons outside the UEFA Champions League.
Chelsea are determined to show the best version of themselves in the Club World Cup, and not just because of the lucrative financial rewards on offer. This tournament also presents a golden opportunity to reclaim their seat at elite club football's top table after a bumpy few years.
Follow the Club World Cup on The Athletic this summer…
A stirring end to the season has Chelsea feeling very good about themselves as they head to the United States.
Maresca's young team ground out the results they needed to secure a fourth-place finish on the final day of the Premier League campaign, then justified their status as overwhelming favourites to win the UEFA Conference League with a comprehensive dismantling of Real Betis in the final in Wroclaw.
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Chelsea's group stage opposition at the Club World Cup may remind them of the level of team they faced in the Conference League en route to beating Betis. It will certainly be closer to that than to the weekly examinations that Maresca's side encounter in the Premier League, which may allow them to ease their way into their best rhythm.
It would be foolish to discount Chelsea as threats to win the competition — this is a club who have won every major domestic and European honour and their golden age lasted for much of the first quarter of this century. But with different owners, a relatively inexperienced coach and the youngest squad in the competition, they are best classified as fringe contenders.
Chelsea qualified for this summer's Club World Cup by lifting the Champions League in May 2021. That triumph in Porto feels like a lifetime ago, given just how much has happened at Stamford Bridge since: sanctions, a club sale and an almost total overhaul on and off the pitch. Club captain Reece James is the only surviving member of that team in Maresca's squad.
In the first three years of its ownership, the consortium led by Clearlake Capital and Todd Boehly has moved fast and broken things. Virtually every trace of the Roman Abramovich era has gone and the revolution has been painful, with Chelsea plummeting to 12th in the Premier League in 2022-23 and finishing sixth in 2023-24 while spending aggressively on transfers.
A fourth-placed finish this season, coupled with a first trophy for Clearlake and Boehly to celebrate, creates the impression that the new Chelsea that will grace the Club World Cup stage is ready to compete again, even if it looks nothing like the old one.
Chelsea play a Pep Guardiola-influenced style: a possession-focused, positional game. The nominal starting formation is a standard 4-3-3 but one of Maresca's full-backs will usually 'invert', often into the base of midfield and sometimes into one of the attacking half-spaces.
In possession, the goal is for Chelsea to arrange themselves with a three-man defence and a three-man attack with a midfield box between them, creating the possibility for overloads around opposing formations. The goalkeeper is also encouraged to act as an '11th outfielder' in possession to facilitate playing out through and around pressure.
Maresca's aim is to control games by creating numerical superiority on the ball.
Maresca has risen fast to the Chelsea job. A midfielder who enjoyed a decorated but nomadic playing career, he was encouraged to go into coaching by Manuel Pellegrini when the two men were at Malaga in 2011. Seven years later, Pellegrini got Maresca on to a Premier League touchline, hiring the Italian as part of his backroom staff at West Ham United.
No wonder, then, that Maresca still calls Pellegrini his 'professional dad'. Guardiola, however, has been every bit as impactful on his coaching journey, both in the season Maresca spent coaching Manchester City's elite development squad to the Premier League 2 title in 2020-21 and in Maresca's experience as Guardiola's assistant in the 2022-23 treble-winning campaign.
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Those stints at City bookended a short, failed spell as coach of Parma and primed Maresca for his next opportunity to strike out on his own. He made the most of it, guiding Leicester City to promotion from the Championship as title winners in 2023-24 and attracting admirers among the Chelsea hierarchy in the process.
Maresca was a bold choice to succeed Mauricio Pochettino at Stamford Bridge, and his first season at Chelsea had plenty of challenges — not least the open hostility of supporters less than enamoured with his style of play at times. But he delivered a top-four Premier League finish and a trophy, and comes into the Club World Cup in a strong position.
He may have looked out of sorts for much of 2025, but Cole Palmer remains the undisputed star of this Chelsea team.
That reality was underlined by his thrilling assists for the two goals that turned the Conference League final on its head: the first a beautiful in-swinging cross with his left foot on to the head of Enzo Fernandez, the second a brilliant turn followed by a pinpoint delivery with his right to meet Nicolas Jackson's run to the near post.
'I was just sick of getting the ball and going backwards and sideways,' Palmer explained after the match. He is the only Chelsea player capable of changing a game simply at his whim.
There are a number of candidates given the youth of Chelsea's squad, but the player most supporters will be intrigued to watch in the U.S. is Andrey Santos. The dynamic Brazilian has blossomed on loan at BlueCo sister club Strasbourg and could bring some much-needed physicality and goal threat to Maresca's midfield.
Chelsea fans have cultivated a vibrant repertoire of songs about their team, individual players and rival clubs over their long history. One particularly rousing supporter anthem is Carefree, bellowed to the tune of the English hymn Lord of the Dance':
Carefree, wherever you may be,
We are the famous CFC,
And we don't give a f**k,
Whoever you may be,
Cos we are the famous CFC.
Four years ago, when The Athletic asked this precise question of Chelsea fans on X, the answer was emphatic, with Tottenham Hotspur garnering 58.6 per cent of the vote.
Spurs serve both as Chelsea's favourite punchline and their preferred punching bag. It's one of football's stranger rivalries that dates back to the 1960s, when Tottenham — with the help of Chelsea youth products Jimmy Greaves and Terry Venables — triumphed in a 1967 FA Cup final meeting and were seen as the more glamorous and successful club.
The roles have long since reversed, but the animosity endures.
Chelsea were the first club (along with Arsenal) to wear numbered shirts for a league match, against Swansea Town on August 25, 1928.
Chelsea have not been the neutral's easiest choice since the 1990s, when they charmed with Gianfranco Zola and a cosmopolitan collective of charismatic veterans. Abramovich's disruptive billions instead made them compelling villains and the vast transfer spending of Clearlake and Boehly has done little to endear them to anyone not affiliated with Stamford Bridge.
But if you want a reason to cheer for Chelsea, just watch Palmer. His nonchalant genius is of the Gianfranco Zola lineage, and forms the essence of why football is worth your time.
(All kick-offs ET/BST)
(Top photos: Eurasia Sport Images, Charlotte Wilson/Getty; design: Kelsea Petersen/The Athletic)