How Marc Cucurella fought through hell to adjust to Chelsea’s ‘expectation of winning’

As Marc Cucurella engaged in one of his last press duties of what has felt like an interminable season, the focus of a table of journalists at a New York hotel, the left-back’s minute tally for the campaign sat at 4,912 for club and country. He’ll expect to hit the 5,000 mark on Sunday - a figure only the most indispensable can achieve.

“I feel very good to be fair,” he insists, showing the spirit he’ll need against the challenge of the electrifying PSG starlet Desire Doue. But as he stares down the prospect of ending a year of almost constant football as a world champion, Cucurella can only reflect on the imperative adjustment in mentality that brought him to this point, now one of the most relied-upon, revered starters in the Chelsea team.

Of course, it wasn’t always this way. Cucurella’s career at Stamford Bridge got off to a nightmare start. Joining from Brighton in a deal worth £63m in August 2022, the Spaniard was thrown into the deep end of a side that “didn’t have an identity”, with new owner Todd Boehly’s all-guns-blazing transfer approach and spontaneous managerial turnover plummeting the club into a place of on-pitch instability.

“I’m not a player that has the quality to take the ball and change the game in one action,” Cucurella admits. “I’m more of a player that needs to have the team playing well to show my qualities. So at the beginning it was very tough because the team maybe didn’t have an identity or a clear way to play.” His performance struggles, reflective of an entire team that floundered to a dismal 12th that season, led to the fans getting on his back.

There was an atmosphere of expectation at Chelsea that acted as a stark shift from what Cucurella, whose senior career prior to the Premier League consisted of stints at Getafe and Eibar, two Spanish sides whose priority in LaLiga was simply survival. With the step up in quality and stature came the diminishing value of victory. “You win? Ok, it’s your job and you don’t celebrate,” Cucurella says. He struggled to get his head around this.

“In first months I was like ‘oh f***ing hell’. I enjoyed it more at other clubs because when you win, you are happy all week and the feeling is very different. But if you are at a big club, you need to understand this and 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 this and you need to find the motivation in different ways.”

Cucurella was taken out of the Chelsea firing line in February 2023, removed from the squad by manager Graham Potter - a fellow faltering ex-Seagull - to give the Spaniard a momentary mental reprieve. At this juncture, Cucurella was at rock bottom. It wasn’t until another low point that things began to turn around.

“I started to enjoy my journey here after my injury,” Cucurella says, reflecting on being sent for ankle surgery in December 2023. “When I was injured, I was three months out, and then I had a lot of time to think about myself and to know me better and what is good for me and what I needed to work on more. This is probably the moment that changed my career.

“Yes, it was a bad moment, it was very tough for me. But then after this injury, my first game back when I played against Leicester, I scored. Then that evening, the national team called me because they had an injured left-back. Everything moved forward.”

After finally earning some plaudits at Chelsea as one of the bright sparks of the underwhelming Mauricio Pochettino era, Cucurella rose to the occasion on the international stage. Among the litany of Spanish standouts that downed the competition - including England in the final - at Euro 2024, he helped guide his nation to triumph in a first major tournament since the days of Vicente del Bosque. He was playing with confidence and it showed, now with the maturity and understanding of what it takes to be a winner.

In a matter of months, Cucurella went from being booed by his own fans to beloved, now only drawing the ire of the opposition. He’s become arguably the best left-back in the Premier League, a staple of Enzo Maresca’s fledgling regime with a newfound penchant for finding the net - last season netting seven goals from his regular forays forward. But knowing how public perception can change at the flip of a switch at this level, he remains to determined not to let the noise get to him again - whether positive or negative.

“The most important thing, it’s difficult, but it’s to not lose my confidence,” Cucurella says. “I’m the same player that I was when I signed in my first years. 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.”

From a man who once struggled to come to terms with the expectation of winning, Cucurella now verges on immortality with the Blues. There is one game left of this behemoth of a season, and it’s against European champions PSG in the inaugural Club World Cup final. Contrary to the tournament’s detractors, the stakes are high for Cucurella, who wants his place in history. “All the people will remember us because it's the first club to win this trophy.”

But as the 2024/25 campaign ticks over to 329 days, a duration indicative of an over-crowded football calendar, Cucurella will not let Sunday’s outcome impact what little time he will have dedicated to spending with his family. He’s a father and husband first, and promises to switch off from football entirely once the tournament is concluded, having only three weeks of downtime at his disposal before he’s required for pre-season.

“I have spent a lot of time away from my kids,” he says. “We have booked a cruise with the kids with Disney. I will need to watch all the cartoons, just enjoy what they want to do. Try to spend time with them. The most important thing is that when I’m with them I don’t think about football and I think only to enjoy these moments.”

Watch every Fifa Club World Cup game free on DAZN. Sign up here now.