Enzo Maresca joining Chelsea will be met with little more than a sigh and a shrug…despite leading the Foxes back into the Premier League, his style of play has failed to win over everyone.

• Leicester manager Enzo Maresca is expected to join Chelsea imminently
• He guided Leicester back to the Premier League in his first season in charge
• Sunday League, table football, pub football… how Pep’s influence trickled down the pyramid – Listen to It’s All Kicking Off Podcast

You’d think, wouldn’t you, that seeing the manager who just promoted your team being ripped off by Chelsea might finish you off a bit.

A big team approaching your exciting young manager before he has a chance to keep you in the Premier League. What’s the point, it’s a joke and so on.

For me, however, and many other Leicester City supporters, the news that Enzo Maresca is leaving for Stamford Bridge was met with a sigh and a shrug. ‘It is him? What a shame. Well, it doesn’t matter. Is recycling this Thursday or next?

Maybe it should annoy me more. Maresca is, above all, an excellent coach. He is a disciple of Pep Guardiola and it showed. He thinks like him, he talks like him, he wants his defenders to reverse and his goalkeepers to step into the defensive line like him. He even looks like him and has a nice beard like him. It was Poundshop Pep and that’s what Leicester needed.

Maresca inherited a relegated, soul-torn club with a divide between supporters, players and the Leicester hierarchy wider and seemingly more irreparable than it had been for a long, long time.

Leicester went from being the club that everyone outside the Big Six saw as a beacon of how to run a non-elite team – title winners, FA Cup winners, Community Shield winners – to being relegated to the seventh biggest wage bill in the Premier League. .

Maresca galvanized everyone. New faces, new style, new feel. The players seemed to enjoy wearing a Leicester shirt again. All aboard the Marshal.

Click here to resize this module

It helps, of course, when you win 13 of your first 14 league games, but that was because of Maresca. No fans expected that, really, after James Maddison, Harvey Barnes and Youri Tielemans left in the summer. Instant promotion was the only target and in the end he delivered it with a title.

So why wasn’t the news of his departure met with universal grief and anger?

For starters, Leicester are used to losing men to Chelsea. N’Golo Kante, Danny Drinkwater, Ben Chilwell. Maresca is just the next. And this is a club once built on selling a key player every season and investing the money. When they stopped doing that for a summer under Brendan Rodgers, the foundations started to crumble. Unless your name is Jamie Vardy, we’re used to saying goodbye.

For all his achievements this season as well, Maresca has never really wowed all the Leicester fans with his style. Like mentor Guardiola, Maresca is all about dominance and control. Only Southampton, Guardiola’s City and Notts County have had more possession in the league this season than Leicester.

Maresca thinks of football like chess. This will never be accepted by all Leicester fans. Many, yes, as supporters chant that Leicester will go “straight backwards” by playing football “Enzo’s way”. But never all. This is a fan base that still remembers winning the Premier League with 42% possession.

Times change, but some will always prefer Whac-A-Mole to chess.

Those who didn’t like Maresca’s style hated him even more as Leicester went from a camp destined for promotion by March with a record number of points to one that had lost six of 10 by the end of April , because Maresca refused to deviate from his. stone tablet.

When Leicester finally secured promotion, there was as much a sigh of relief as a leap of joy.

The thought of playing like this – and only like this – in a relegation battle next season was enough to give those naysayers bad luck. Especially when that season is expected to start with a significant points deduction.

Leicester’s finances are in turmoil. They have lost £215m in the last three Premier League seasons. Penalties, regardless of the league they ended up in, were always likely to follow.

Chelsea will have to pay Leicester around £10m for Maresca. That’s money Leicester need to start balancing their books.

There is also a sense that Leicester could, for now, be better off with someone more pragmatic and less determined to help them through what lies ahead. Now, perhaps, is not the time for chess.

So thanks for the season, Enzo. Thanks for the promotion and thanks for the memories. All the best at Chelsea. Given time, I think you’ll do well. I hope so. Anyway, time to throw the bins out.