Enzo Maresca has revealed details of a training ground summit held between Chelsea players and staff last month, at which he laid out his ambition to qualify for the Champions League this term. Publicly, Maresca has always been coy about Chelsea’s aims for his debut campaign and insisted no specific demands were made by the club hierarchy when he took the job last summer.
![[Enzo Maresca at a press conference before Chelsea's trip to Aston Villa]](https://static.standard.co.uk/2025/02/21/12/36/enzomaresca21022025a-jpg.jpeg?quality=75&auto=webp&width=960)
On Friday, though, the Italian finally admitted that he has set his players the target of finishing in the top four and thus guaranteeing a return to Europe’s elite competition for the first time since 2022/23. That goal was made clear internally a month ago, when Maresca summoned all staff at the club’s Cobham training ground to a meeting in the canteen.
“I went to bed, at 11pm or 12pm and I woke up at 4am, 5am,” he said. “I couldn’t sleep more and I started to think. “I thought it could be a good idea in the morning to arrive and pull all the people together in the building and share this message.
“So I arrived here at 7am and I text Kev [Kevin Campello, head of football operations]. I said: ‘Kev, everyone in the canteen at 10am’. “I prepared a meeting with all the people inside the building, the kitchen staff, groundsmen, kit men, everyone inside the building. I asked them to push until the end because our target was to bring this club back into the Champions League.”.
In all, around a hundred members of staff were in attendance, including the entire first-team squad, with Maresca keen to ensure his young players recognised the efforts of those working behind the scenes. “I said to the players in that meeting that when I arrive here in the morning at 7am, there are people from the kitchen cutting the fruit in the same way. Cut, cut, cut, cut,” he explained.
“There are people behind who you cannot see, who are working every day to help you to reach your target. It’s true. “The kitchen people are preparing breakfasts, and they are doing it all perfectly. The players, they do not see that. I tried to convince them that there are people behind who work hard and we need to push together to reach our target.”.
The Blues’s miserable run of form since just before Christmas has seen them slip to sixth, but they remain just a point behind Manchester City in fourth, while fifth looks increasingly likely to be enough for Champions League qualification, with English clubs heading the race for an extra spot in next season’s competition.
Still, Maresca needs a response from his players heading into Saturday’s meeting with Aston Villa, having accused them of lacking desire in last weekend’s thrashing at Brighton. “From now on, every team is playing for some target,” he added. “We are going to face tomorrow Aston Villa, they are playing for the Champions League. And the game after, Southampton, they are playing to avoid relegation. Then Leicester, relegation.
