Eighteen months ago they sacked Mauricio Pochettino, the club’s best manager in decades, hired the anti-football Jose Mourinho in a move that went completely against their traditional ethos of attacking football, sacked him too after a little over a year and the week before a final, and then left the club to flounder to the end of the season under caretaker manager Ryan Mason despite his being hardly out of short pants.
That’s Tottenham: the debacle so far. And it’s showing no signs of getting any better.
The way club chairman Daniel Levy has conducted the search for a new manager has been shambolic. Firstly, he was rebuffed by his top choices of Leipzig’s Julian Nagelsmann (who went to Bayern, in a move that I think will go awry) and Brendan Rodgers, who chose to stay at Leicester City. That second failure was telling about the state of Spurs; when the Leicester manager, with all due respect to Leicester as a club, isn’t even giving you a second thought as a so-called ‘big club’ something is up.
Then, in possibly the most embarrassing move of all, Levy tried to entice back Pochettino, the man who less than two years ago he had unceremoniously shown the door. He was told by Pochettino’s current club, PSG, where he could shove that idea, but still. Not a good look to be trying to get back with your ex.
But wait, there’s more.
Levy then tried to get Antonio Conte. I mean, seriously??? There were so many red flags and yet he still tried it on. Conte, first of all, is a serial winner, while Spurs are … not. Furthermore, Conte just left Inter Milan, the club he had just led to its first league title in a decade, in a huff because he wanted more investment in and control over the club than what was on offer. Investment and control are not things that Levy offers to anyone except himself (which is part of Spurs’ current problem, but anyway). Spurs and Conte were a match made in hell, as demonstrated by the speed with which the Italian manager told Levy to get stuffed the moment they started discussing what improvements the squad needed.
And so we come to the most recent of Spurs’ failed negotiations: Paulo Fonseca. Firstly, Fonseca was Tottenham’s fifth choice manager. At best. He seemed a perfectly competent choice though, and negotiations were progressing well; they got as far as new signings, according to the BBC. Yesterday, though, Spurs suddenly pulled out of talks with him seemingly due to the sudden availability of Gennaro Gattuso, whose managerial achievements so far have been the winning of a sum total of one Italian Cup in five jobs. That five jobs becomes six if you include his three-week stint at Fiorentina, which he just walked away from due to what he viewed to be a lack of investment – sound familiar?
EDIT: Since I started writing this post Gattuso is out of the running. Utterly shambolic.
So where does all of that leave Spurs? As a club that looks to be twisting aimlessly in the wind with no idea of what they’re doing, where they want to go or how they’re going to get there.
Worsening the situation is the question of Harry Kane’s future. After years of trying to haul the club into elite status, Spurs’ captain and talisman wants out. He wants to win something before he retires and sees no likelihood of that happening at Tottenham any time soon.
Watching Levy flail around between trying to bring back the club’s old manager, entice a bunch that aren’t interested, and turning down those that are is hardly going to make him change his mind.
