Chelsea are a shambles! Enzo Maresca's shock sacking has exposed Blues' 'project' as amateurish and without direction

Chelsea's 3-0 win at home to Barcelona in the Champions League towards the end of November was meant to herald the start of a new era. A 1-1 draw with Premier League leaders Arsenal, playing with one man fewer for the majority of the match, only backed up that assumption. The young Blues seemed to be maturing, but it was merely another false dawn.

Following a miserable December, Chelsea sit fifth in the Premier League table. That wouldn't be a disaster in isolation, but given the expectations placed upon them heading into the final month of 2025, it was extremely underwhelming. Maresca's men had also dropped back down to 13th in the Champions League standings, below Tottenham and Newcastle, after losing away at Atalanta a fortnight on from toppling Barca.

Since beating Burnley 2-0 at Turf Moor on November 22, Chelsea have embarked on a run of one win in seven Premier League matches, taking seven points from a possible 21. The gap to Arsenal, whom some Blues supporters believed their team to be on par with after their most recent meeting, is now 15 points.

Chelsea's two stalemates with Bournemouth best represented the extent of their on-field issues. The 0-0 at the Vitality Stadium was an entirely forgettable affair in which both sides failed to create much of note, while the 2-2 back at Stamford Bridge was hectic beyond belief. For such an expensively assembled team, it still blows hot and cold far too often.

The youthful core that Chelsea's BlueCo owners and their raft of recruiters have taken such pride in assembling still seriously lacks leadership. Maresca's side sit bottom of the Premier League fair play table having already accrued 34 yellow cards and four red cards.

Nicolas Jackson was often made out to be one of the worst offenders in this regard, though it's telling that the team's disciplinary problems have persisted and even worsened since he was forced out of the club to Bayern Munich on loan. The new serial offender has turned out to be Moises Caicedo, whose stock has dropped since he emerged as a Player of the Year contender through the opening third of the season.

Caicedo's fourth-minute booking in Tuesday's draw was his fifth of the Premier League season, picking up a suspension ahead of Sunday's crucial trip to Manchester City. It will be his second ban of the domestic campaign thus far too having already missed three matches for a sending off against Arsenal, where he was tipped to go toe-to-toe with the Gunners' own nine-figure midfielder Declan Rice.

Maresca may have privately felt the team needed to kick this habit, but his continual public insistence surely only empowered his players to continue in their troublesome ways.

This time last season, Chelsea were going through a similar sort of slump. They had climbed to second in the Premier League table, two points behind eventual champions Liverpool, and showed glimpses of a team ready to make a leap from top-four or five contenders to one in and around the title picture.

They then followed this up by being one of the first teams in history to talk their way out of a title race. Every interview and every press conference felt like a political campaign to get that pressure off the club's back. Lo and behold, Chelsea won two of their 10 Premier League games from mid-December to the end of February. Sound familiar? It is becoming tradition for this iteration of Chelsea to get their fans' hopes up before spectacularly letting them down again over the winter.

There is a new bad habit that the Blues need to kick as well - their woeful record on defending set pieces. Despite devising a whole department for them, led by former Brentford dead-ball guru Bernardo Cueva Martinez, they cannot defend them very well. Their main kryptonite has been long throws, with a league-high four conceded from them this season.

Chelsea have dropped more points from winning positions at home than any other team, giving them a reputation as a side with a soft underbelly. Maresca had to be held accountable for that, but given the insistence upstairs that only long-term results matter, could he really be blamed for not cultivating a culture?

At the end of the day, the best teams have the best players. To simplify the bigger picture, Chelsea simply don't have enough top-quality stars, especially when you factor in they've spent billions trying to rebuild their way back to contention.

There are too many middling players who don't move the needle. Cole Palmer and Caicedo are standouts in their positions, Estevao Willian is an extremely exciting prospect, and Reece James (when fit) and Marc Cucurella are also excellent options, but beyond them, much of Maresca's squad is of a similar standard.

Are Liam Delap and Joao Pedro any better up top than the ousted Jackson? What's the differential between Pedro Neto, Alejandro Garnacho and Jamie Gittens? Are they even any better than Noni Madueke, who was sold to Arsenal with seemingly little fuss but is already popular at a better team? Who is Chelsea's best centre-back? Why allocate so much money towards players who won't immediately improve the first-team squad for at least a couple of years?

Through 18 months in charge, Maresca never seemed to know what his best Chelsea team looked like. BBC Sport calculated he made substitutions faster than any other Premier League manager and he made the most changes to his starting lineups this season. It was a thankless task trying to keep everyone happy.

Chelsea used to fight for titles year in, year out. That's because it largely didn't matter who the manager was - Roberto Di Matteo won the Champions League and Avram Grant was a slip away from the same feat - just that they had incredible talent to see them through. It's a far cry from their state nowadays.

In Germany, football clubs have a tradition of wheeling out their directors and other members of the hierarchy to speak to the press alongside the head coach. This is most noticeable at Bayern Munich, where Vincent Kompany is regularly flanked by director of sport Max Eberl and sporting director Christoph Freund. They offer thoughts and insight into matters which may not necessarily concern the manager, such as squad building and transfers.

During his time at Tottenham - before he blew his lid in his final presser, that is - Antonio Conte bemoaned that he had to be the face of the club and no one else was being held publicly accountable. Maresca made suggestions that he felt the same way without explicitly saying that, though did reveal last month he felt a lack of support after defeat to Atalanta, which seemed to have been the beginning of the end for him.

Chelsea, more than any club in England, should be adopting a policy where the sporting directors front for the media. So much is made of their recruitment, so much praise is bestowed upon Laurence Stewart and Paul Winstanley, yet we never see or hear from them. If Maresca's job was deemed untenable, then theirs should be on the line as well. The club have spent nearly four years trying to establish a new identity which is drifting further away from their previous one of winning at all costs and for no good reason.

The owners would do well to convince a better manager to come and work for them in this regime of haphazard planning in the name of 'the project'. BlueCo have now cycled through Maresca, Thomas Tuchel, Graham Potter and Mauricio Pochettino as permanent managers, as well as Frank Lampard as an extended caretaker. All while having nowhere near the success of the previous regime upstairs.

Whoever Chelsea's new manager is, they will still have some positives to look at. The mad scramble for Champions League qualification is so jumbled that even this terrible run of form has barely dented their hopes of finishing in the top four or five. There is a Carabao Cup semi-final with Arsenal to look ahead to, though at this rate that may prove a real baptism of fire.

Winning cures everything. More so than any playing style, that has been 'the Chelsea way' of the modern era and is exactly why the fanbase has soured so swiftly. If the owners are serious about success in the short term as well as the long term, they would also use the January transfer window to bring in some more ready-made players to help steer the team's young heads.

That's all nice and easy when written down. But do you actually believe in this Chelsea and its operations to make something of 2025-26 now?