- Maresca was confirmed as the new manager at Stamford Bridge on Monday
- The Italian will bring with him coach Marcos Alvarez, who is a strict dietician
- Click here to follow Mail Sport’s Euro 2024 WhatsApp Channel for all the latest breaking news and updates from Germany
Chelsea‘s players will be bracing them for a big change in their diets after the appointment of Enzo Maresca as their new first-team manager.
Maresca was confirmed as the new Stamford Bridge boss on Monday on a five-year contract, after leading Leicester to promotion from the Championship in his first senior job in English football.
Maresca is bringing his Leicester staff members with him, including fitness coach Marcos Alvarez – who has earned a reputation as a strict dietician.
Alvarez, 53, has previously worked at Sevilla, Parma and Tottenham – which is where he became renowned for closely monitoring the dietary habits of the players.
At Spurs, where he worked alongside Juande Ramos, Alvarez banned sauce, fruit juice, cake and salt and pepper. Meanwhile, last season at Leicester, he took fried eggs off the breakfast menu.
The changes at Tottenham quickly lead to a number of first-team players rebelling and asking security staff members to sneak McDonald’s in during pre-season.
Captain Ledley King was even sent by team-mates to plead with the coaching staff to revert the changes – though his pleas fell upon deaf ears.
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Ramos and Alvarez had found success in their methods while working together at Sevilla before making the switch to north London in October 2007.
Ramos spoke exclusively with Mail Sport back in 2014 and suggested that a number of the Spurs first-team stars were ‘fat’ prior to their arrival.
‘It was incredible,’ he said of the food made available to the squad.
‘It was like a wedding buffet. Cakes, pastries, sauces. Honestly, and I say this with no bitterness at all, there were players who were… well, fat. They were sedantary.
‘In a sportsman the physical condition has to be perfect because you live off your body. Your food is your fuel. If I eat a cake, I’m putting in diesel; an athlete needs to be putting in super fuel.
‘There was some resistance of course — a lad who is 22, 23 years old, with cash in his pocket thinking, ‘And this guy’s coming here telling me what to eat’, we could see that.
‘We trained out in Chigwell and there is a McDonald’s and we would see them there, eating hamburgers and drinking Coca-Cola’.
Alvarez himself also spoke on the situation at Spurs and detailed how the team was ‘100 kilos overweight’.
Speaking to Sky Sports at the time, Alvarez said: ‘The truth is, the first buffet I saw, I took photographs of it because it was very interesting. Lots of sauces, a lot of cakes, chocolate muffins, a box full of sweets. So we tried to put things right.
‘When we arrived, we realised that the team was carrying excess baggage. I made a very simple comparison with the Sevilla team that we had been working with and, taking into account the size of the players, the team was basically 100 kilos over. So I immediately talked to Tottenham and we set the wheels in motion to change things.’
Former Spurs star Jamie O’Hara – who now works as pundit on talkSPORT – reflected on the strict rules during an appearance on the radio show.
O’Hara said: ‘When Juande Ramos came in, he bann ed ketchup and any sauce. He was big on it. It was dry pasta, chicken and that was for the whole time he was there.
‘We went on a pre-season trip and that was tough when there’s no sauce to anything. You’re just eating dry chicken, pasta. I remember the security guy, Alan Dixon who is still there now, used to sneak the boys out and get McDonald’s.
‘He was funny on the salt as well. No salt and pepper at dinner. It did make a difference because he did get the stats up and we were running more, but in the end you lose the players because eventually they say ‘I’ve had enough of this’.
Alvarez was the man behind all these changes and, ahead of his arrival at Chelsea, it’s expected that there could be similar changes made in west London.
Last season, Blues boss Mauricio Pochettino also monitored the diets of his players but however was far less strict compared to Alvarez in regard to sweet treats.
The Argentine even held a 130-person BBQ – involving sausages, steaks and a variety of dishes from different countries – at the club’s training ground in March.