Chelsea’s manager, Enzo Maresca, has provided insight into the strategy that helped his team defeat Paris Saint-Germain 3–0 in the FIFA Club World Cup final.
A top-flight team with “one of the best managers,” Maresca’s Chelsea side successfully overcame the formidable French champions, whom he regards as the “best in the world.” He expressed his delight with the way his squad performed.
During his post-match press conference, Maresca revealed that their main tactics were a man-to-man marking system and an aggressive high press designed to stifle PSG’s build-up play.
With two goals from Cole Palmer and one from João Pedro, Chelsea enjoyed a three-goal lead at halftime after dominating PSG with an outstanding first-half performance.
Following João Neves’ red card late in the game for pulling Chelsea defender Marc Cucurella’s hair, PSG ended the Club World Cup final with ten men.
Speaking in his post-match interview, Maresca said:
“There are three midfielders; two of them were in charge of Reece [James] and Moi [Caicedo] at that point, and Vitinha was in charge of Enzo [Fernández]. Analysing them, we saw that was a good opportunity to exploit that space, and we scored a goal on that side.
“It was just a game plan. As we’ve said many times, we try to use different game plans and help the players be in positions where they can give everything. Today, it worked quite well.
”But overall, I think—as I just said—it was the effort from the whole team, all the players, and I’m very happy, especially for them, because they deserve this moment.”
Chelsea responded admirably to PSG’s intense press by being extremely combative and using tight man-to-man marking—a strategy that ultimately won them the game.
”We tried to plan the game thinking things were going to go well. We had the same mindset today. The idea was to go man-to-man. I think PSG are so good that if you give them time, you’re going to struggle.
“In my personal opinion, you have to press them very intensely. I think in the first 10 minutes, we were able to do that. In our ideal world, we’d do that for 90 or 95 minutes, but we knew that due to the weather conditions, it wasn’t possible to maintain it for that long. But we tried to be very aggressive and not give them time.”
