Unlikable Manager Loses Job At Detestable Club

Enzo Maresca is out at Chelsea. Thus brings a close to another weird chapter in the weirdest club's recent history. The upside for the legion of Chelsea haters is that the particular weirdness and grossness of the club's present predicament provides ample material to further stoke the flames of hate. But the downside, as ever, is that it probably won't even matter, as both Maresca and Chelsea look to fashion their twin Ls into a pair of Ws.

There are no good guys involved here. Maresca is for my money one of the more unlikable coaches in a profession that, across sports, tends to select for unlikability. He comes off like the textbook sideline tyrant, smug and preening in moments of success, insincere in moments of humility, absolutely certain that all triumphs redound to himself and all failures owe to either those below or above him who did not heed his commands. For much of his Chelsea tenure—a job he got mostly due to his proximity to Pep Guardiola during his one season as a Manchester City assistant—the Italian was content to play the puppet for the Blues' notoriously meddlesome bosses, handing playing time to the players the club had most heavily invested in, shamefully contributing to the ostracization campaigns against the players the club wanted to bully out of their contracts. Maresca surely assumed that his "successes" at the end of last season (not blowing a top-four finish, winning the hardly hallowed Conference League and Club World Cup trophies) would carve for himself some more power of his own, which appears to have been what motivated his recent public criticisms of how the club is being run. What he found out, however, was that the same puppeteer's hand he'd welcomed up his ass earlier would be quick to fling him off the minute he stopped moving his mouth along with the fingered instructions. No one should weep that this guy is out of a job.