{"id":8966,"date":"2025-05-30T03:04:22","date_gmt":"2025-05-30T03:04:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/?p=8966"},"modified":"2025-05-30T03:04:22","modified_gmt":"2025-05-30T03:04:22","slug":"chelsea-aim-high-after-conference-league-win","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/?p=8966","title":{"rendered":"Chelsea aim high after Conference League win"},"content":{"rendered":"
The UEFA Conference League was not where Chelsea wanted to be, but their triumph in Wroclaw could prove to be a turning point for a club that had lost their trophy-winning habit.<\/p>\n

The Premier League team beat Real Betis 4-1 on Wednesday, recovering strongly from being outplayed in the first half by their Spanish opponents.<\/p>\n

Chelsea manager Enzo Maresca’s second-half substitutions lifted his team but an inspired Cole Palmer was the catalyst for victory, producing two pinpoint crosses for Enzo Fernandez and Nicolas Jackson.<\/p>\n

Jadon Sancho’s fine finish made it 3-1 and Moises Caicedo added a fourth in stoppage time to give Chelsea their first silverware since Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital acquired the club in May 2022 from Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich.<\/p>\n

During the past three years the owners have spent more than \u00a31 billion ($1.3 billion) on promising young talent, but until now have had little to show for it.<\/p>\n

Chelsea had been clear favourites to win Europe’s third-tier club competition from the start, enabling Maresca to field youth and fringe players.They rampaged through the group phase, outclassing teams with a fraction of their resources such as Noah, Astana and Shamrock Rovers.<\/p>\n

Maresca spoke on the eve of the final in Poland about how he had stressed the importance of the Conference League to his players.<\/p>\n

He will not need to persuade them next season as they are back where they feel they belong, the Champions League, following a fourth-place finish in the Premier League.<\/p>\n

‘Winning mentality’<\/p>\n

Maresca, in his first season at Stamford Bridge, said he hoped winning the Conference League would be a launchpad for bigger and better.<\/p>\n

“Hopefully, it can be a starting point to build a winning mentality,” he said. “You need to win games. You need to win competitions. “And for sure, the trophy we won tonight is going to make us better.<\/p>\n

But also, I’m very proud about the path or the journey we have done in the Premier League.<\/p>\n

“For me, it’s the most difficult competition in the world. You have to be consistent in 38 games. And these players, they showed it.” Maresca had a rollercoaster first season after replacing Mauricio Pochettino.<\/p>\n

His team were within touching distance of eventual Premier League champions Liverpool in mid-December before stumbling badly.<\/p>\n

But they found an extra gear towards the end of the campaign, negotiating a tricky run-in to finish in the Champions League spots.<\/p>\n

“For sure, we have improved a lot since we started,” said former Leicester boss Maresca. “We also start to win games in an ugly way. “That is something with a young squad that you struggle to do that.”<\/p>\n

The Italian has been keen to highlight the extreme youth of his expensively assembled squad.<\/p>\n

The average age of his starting side was the youngest in a single Premier League campaign.<\/p>\n

It is too early to predict whether they will return to those heady heights but the Conference League is a start.<\/p>\n

Next on the agenda is a trip to the Club World Cup in the United States, for which Chelsea qualified by winning the 2021 Champions League.<\/p>\n

“Now we have 10 days off, 10 days where we need to recover energy, and then we’re going to start the Club World Cup,” said Maresca.<\/p>\n

“The target is to go game by game, try to go step by step, but at this moment we don’t have any target for the Club World Cup.<\/p>\n

“Now the only target is to recover energy, because the season has been very long.”<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The UEFA Conference League was not where Chelsea wanted to be, but their triumph in Wroclaw could prove to be a turning point for a club that had lost their trophy-winning habit. The Premier League team beat Real Betis 4-1 on Wednesday, recovering strongly from being outplayed in the first half by their Spanish opponents. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8966","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8966","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8966"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8966\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8966"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8966"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}