“It drives him crazy”, intensity, search for perfection… Maupay talks about the De Zerbi method

Whether it is his flamboyant style of play, which he is trying to instill in OM, or his method and attention to detail that he is refining with his new players, the eruptive Roberto De Zerbi leaves no one indifferent in Marseille. The 45-year-old Italian has attracted several players with his name and reputation alone who would probably never have come without him to rub shoulders with the fervour of the Phocaean city and the volcano of the Vélodrome.

“He is very intense”

“As soon as I spoke with him, it was like an obvious choice,” admitted the latest recruit of the Marseille transfer window, Neal Maupay, also a strong-willed player, during his presentation to the press on Monday. “I had a lot of feedback from my former teammates at Brighton. They all told me the same thing when they saw it in the press. I received a lot of phone calls from people saying: ‘Go for it! You’re going to have a great time, the coach is a monster, tactically he’s incredible, he’s going to help you improve’. It wasn’t even ‘do you want to come?’ but rather ‘when am I coming, tell me when and I’m there’.”

“It drives him crazy!”

Having arrived from Everton to replace Faris Moumbagna’s serious injury, Neal Maupay was able to see during his first training sessions under his new coach everything that had been said to him about this coach and his vision of football.

“He’s definitely very intense. And again, I think that with the cameras (the morning session was open to the press), he held back a little,” smiled Neal Maupay. “He’s passionate. He already lifts everyone up. There are days when training isn’t intense, we just play football, there’s no real intention. With him, no, it starts in the warm-up where he’s behind us. I think that’s very important to help us progress. There’s always a goal to the session and the exercises he sets up. You can see it as soon as there’s a bad pass, a bad positioning of one meter, it drives him crazy. It’s this attention to detail and this search for perfection that can help us progress very quickly.”

- RMC Sport