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18 hours ago
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Marc Cucurella is thinking back to his early days at Chelsea. Signed from Brighton for £62m in August 2022, the left-back struggled to adapt to life at a big club. Chelsea were experiencing teething problems during the opening months of the Todd Boehly-Clearlake Capital ownership and it was Cucurella’s misfortune to be held up as a symbol of the club’s apparent malaise.
It is funny to think that the Spain international was booed on to the pitch by Chelsea supporters before a Champions League match against Borussia Dortmund in February 2023. Cucurella is a cult figure these days. He is loved by the Chelsea faithful and has come a long way since that difficult first season at Stamford Bridge.
Cucurella is in a typically lively mood before Chelsea face Paris Saint-Germain in the Club World Cup final on Sunday night. He is open about his journey. The 26-year-old spent time at La Masia but did not break through at Barcelona. He went to Eibar on loan, learned the dark arts at Getafe and joined Brighton in 2021.
“Before I joined Chelsea, I played more in small clubs so you don’t feel this pressure,” Cucurella says. “When I played at other clubs, when we win I’m very happy, if we draw it’s another point, don’t get relegated. But when you come here, you feel like you need to win every game.
“The first games, I don’t feel like I enjoyed [it]. When I win, it’s very important, but when you join here, it’s like: ‘You win, OK, it’s your job,’ and you don’t celebrate. If you are at a big club you fight for a lot of things. Here you need to win every game because at the end of the season you want to play for trophies and play finals. It’s difficult to understand. You need to find the motivation in different ways.”
Cucurella felt the burden of expectation, as well as his fee weighing him down. “It was tough at the beginning because I think I’m not a player that has the quality to take the ball and change the game in one action,” he says. “I’m more of a player that needs to have the team playing well to show my qualities. The team didn’t have identity or a clear way to play. The club paid a lot of money for me so they expect that I’m a machine and I score every game!
“But I always try to improve. The most important thing, it’s difficult, but it’s to not lose my confidence. I’m the same player that I was when I signed in my first years but now I have more confidence. I trust my quality.
“It’s difficult to understand that when you play a good game, you’re not the best and when you play a bad game, you’re not the worst. You need to always try to stay in the same line. It’s an important thing to learn in the big clubs.”
Cucurella is an emblem of Chelsea’s journey out of chaos and into the upper reaches of the Premier League. The outlook changed for him when he was injured at the start of 2024. He thought long and hard about what was good for him. “My [second] game back against Leicester, I scored,” he says. “Then that evening, the national team called me because they had an injured left-back. Everything moved forward.”
There was a shift in Cucurella’s role when Chelsea found themselves 2-0 down to Aston Villa in April 2024. At half-time Mauricio Pochettino asked him to invert from left-back. Chelsea dominated the second half and drew 2-2. “Then the summer, I played the Euros, six games in an inverted role,” says Cucurella, who delivered the assist for Spain’s winner when they beat England in the Euro 2024 final.
It is almost a year to the day since that game. Cucurella has barely had a breather – the PSG game will be his 61st appearance for club and country during this most gruelling of seasons – but he keeps bounding up and down the left flank. His game has come on appreciably since Chelsea replaced Pochettino with Enzo Maresca last year. Maresca has honed Cucurella’s inverted role, bringing more out of him in the final third. He is on seven goals for the campaign, a personal best. “When I played at Getafe my maximum in a season was three or four goals,” Cucurella says. “I’m surprised. Hopefully I can score more.”
Against PSG, though, there will surely be more focus on defending. Cucurella will probably be up against the devastating 20-year-old winger Désiré Doué. Ousmane Dembélé will also move into his zone and there will be raids from Achraf Hakimi, PSG’s sensational right-back.
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Perhaps Cucurella will take confidence from Spain overcoming Dembélé’s France at the Euros and in the Nations League last month. Put that to him, though, and he responds by talking about the collective.
“I have a lot of confidence in the team,” Cucurella says. “The Benfica game, before the storm and those crazy minutes, we control [it] very good. They didn’t create anything. Palmeiras as well, they score after a very good action and it’s not that big a chance we concede. We arrive in good form, we have a lot of confidence in our players, in our teammates, in our style.”
Cucurella is honest enough to admit that PSG are the best side in the world. He is asked what he made of the European champions when they destroyed Real Madrid in their semi-final.
“Madrid made two big mistakes in two minutes, which changed the game completely,” Cucurella says. “If Madrid didn’t make these mistakes I think it would be more even but that is football. Hopefully we can learn about this. We know that they start the games very fast, very strong. Hopefully we can manage this and put the game in a way we want it to be.
“They have a lot of good players. They play good football but a final is a final and we can do our job as well. We have a good opportunity to show that we are ready. I think we are ready.”
