When Antonio Conte quit as Tottenham head coach during his last press conference, it was clear he thought Tottenham Hotspur were a broken club.
The players, the culture, the lack of a winning mentality – nothing was taboo when Conte voiced grievances he’d allegedly kept quiet for months.
Whether or not you agreed with much of what came out of his mouth, it’s clear there are major issues at the north London club that need to be resolved.
The Athletic breaks down some of Conte’s claims and examines what needs to change if Tottenham are to end their recent boom-and-bust cycle…
Curb “Player Power”
One of the most revealing moments in Conte’s infamous St Mary’s tirade was his insistence that Tottenham’s players are a protected species. When Conte was suggested that his contract situation wasn’t helping the club, he slammed the blanket and said it was just another example of players being given ‘alibis’ and ‘excuses’ to keep them from being blamed.
He clearly believes Spurs’ last few managers have been undermined by a powerful dressing room and has to believe he will follow the same path. “I saw the managers Tottenham had,” he said. “You risk disrupting the manager’s figure to protect the other situation [the players]every moment.”
So is that true? Is this a club where the players wield so much power that even some of the most decorated managers in the game can’t handle the situation?
Partly yes.
Jose Mourinho, Nuno Espirito Santo and now Conte have clearly stated that they have not been able to keep the squad long enough to lead to sustained success. Both Mourinho and Conte scored plenty of buy-in early on, but this soon faded. They found that they could not contain the enthusiasm of the players for long. And when the members of the squad got fed up, the performances and results went down and the manager paid for it.
Conte said Spurs players were given ‘alibis’ and ‘apologies’ (Picture: Getty)
This seems consistent with at least one definition of “player power”. The team needs to know by now that if they don’t like a manager or his methods, it will be him, not them, paying with his job. You could say it’s awful or that modern football just works that way, but it’s part of the dynamic at Spurs.
But then why have Tottenham put themselves in a position where they have a semi-permanent group of players who know how to throw their weight around, with a revolving door of big-name but short-term managers?
You have to look at the club’s strategy.
The way you fight player power is by supporting your manager. After all, power is a zero-sum game. And if you support the manager to decide who comes and goes from the players, then he has the power and not the dressing room.
If Tottenham had backed Mauricio Pochettino to get rid of the players he didn’t want, he would have had the upper hand over the squad. But by keeping those players in place, Tottenham effectively handed over Pochettino’s power to the dressing room. And with every layoff since, that momentum has only increased.
It now feels like it’s going to be very difficult to reverse the process of the last four or five years and get that power back from the dressing room. The only way to do that would be to appoint a new, long-term manager and give him the power to get rid of the players he doesn’t want. Something that just feels like far away.
Jack Pitt Brooke
Put the focus back on player development
Staying on the subject of Tottenham’s players, Conte last weekend accused his side of being “selfish”, essentially saying they lack motivation and accountability and are allowed to get too comfortable.
Many listeners agreed, citing the club’s frequent turnover in his job as evidence of how players consistently underperform. Conte even seemed to hint that the squad was unmanageable, pointing to the struggles of his predecessors as well as his own.
If you believe this to be true, the only solution is to completely overhaul this squad – which, as suggested above, is highly unlikely.
Fortunately, the solution lies in finding the right head coach.
The players have underperformed at various points and have to take some of the blame for the current mess, but give them a boss who genuinely believes in them and is committed to improving them and I’m confident that things will turn out all right will look different.
Remember there was very little fanfare surrounding the likes of Jan Vertonghen, Kyle Walker and Danny Rose prior to Pochettino’s arrival. Or look over to Liverpool under Jurgen Klopp. Players like Andrew Robertson and Georginio Wijnaldum were relegated from the Premier League with other clubs for a number of years before winning the title and Champions League with Klopp as manager.
Mauricio Pochettino helped players like Kyle Walker develop gradually (Picture: Getty)
With very few exceptions, when you find the right chemistry between top players and their manager/head coach, results will follow.
Despite being elite in some respects, Conte had very little interest in developing Tottenham’s younger players and as he was only on a short-term contract it was far more attractive to sign established players who could deliver for him straight away.
But look around the roster and, frankly, do you see an unmanageable group of players? Harry Kane, Oliver Skipp, Eric Dier, Ben Davies… these are anything but annoying characters or ones that are often described as “selfish”. And can one really say that world champions Hugo Lloris and Cristian Romero lack mental toughness?
Overhauling the roster might sound like a solution, but it’s amazing how the same players can improve with the right manager.
Getting this appointment right will completely change the way players are viewed. Just like Tim Sherwood’s dilettantes got busy under Pochettino or the relegation duo Robertson and Wijnaldum became “mentality monsters” for Klopp.
As one of the slogans of Bill Clinton’s 1992 US presidential campaign almost put it: “It’s the head coach, fool.”
Charlie Eccleshare
What is it: Win Now or Tottenham DNA?
So, to help players shed some of the labels they’ve been given, what kind of manager should Tottenham choose next?
It’s been the key question Spurs have faced in recent years and it doesn’t feel like they got the right answer at the moment.
Broadly speaking, the club’s strategy since 2019 has been to abandon the slow build-up of the Pochettino years and instead opt for high-quality, short-term managers.
Style of play, young players, it’s all gone out the window. The plan was to win as soon as possible. And the hope was that by appointing a manager who had won before, their “winning mentality” would rub off on the players. That was the logic of Mourinho, then after Nuno’s stop-gap, again with Conte. But three and a half years after Pochettino’s sacking, all Spurs must show they can reach the 2020-21 Carabao Cup final and finished fourth last season.
Mourinho was only 17 months on the job and Conte just 16. These last few years have been a period of instability, unhelped by the appointment of managers who pretend Tottenham are a step backwards for them and fail to make long-term commitments. Signing Conte to a short-term 18-month contract and then allowing him to expire this season has proven to be a huge mistake.
Antonio Conte signed an 18-month contract with Spurs and it never seemed likely that it would be extended (Picture: Getty)
Perhaps these appointments were a genuine attempt to make the most of the prime years of Kane and Son Heung-min, two of Spurs’ finest players of modern times. But the reality now is that Kane has a year left on contract and Son may be past his prime after turning 30 last summer.
And what makes Spurs’ strategic linchpin so hard to digest for many of their fans is that in the process they were told the club was doing the exact opposite.
Chairman Daniel Levy promised in May 2021 – a month before he was appointed Nuno – that Tottenham would return to their DNA, which he defined as “free-flowing, attacking and fun football” and playing young players. That’s what Spurs fans wanted, but almost two years later they’ve seen precious little of it.
So the question remains whether the club will now opt for another big-name manager, hoping whoever can do what Mourinho and Conte failed to do or finally bite the bullet in a bid to rebuild in the long term of the club. Many fans would prefer the latter plan, even if it means some teething troubles in year one as a new playstyle is introduced.
But Tottenham have put so much time, energy and money into this policy that it doesn’t feel like they’re changing course.
Perhaps the answer we get this week is another big-name manager who Spurs hopes is the one whose stardust is sticking to this Teflon team.
Jack Pitt Brooke
Refine recruitment strategy
Proper recruitment is fundamental to the success of any club and Tottenham have made major efforts to overhaul this area in recent years.
Fabio Paratici was brought in from Juventus in the summer of 2021 to modernize operations and last summer Gretar Steinsson, Andy Scoulding and Leonardo Gabbanini joined senior positions following the departure of Steve Hitchen, director of technical performance.
Paratici has had his critics since taking over, but his record of signings at Spurs has generally been good. Romero, Dejan Kulusevski and Rodrigo Bentancur were the standout buys while others such as Pedro Porro and Pape Matar Sarr appear promising. Paratici has also done what most Tottenham supporters wanted and focused on signing younger players as the club looks to build for the future and move away from the Pochettino era.
But this is where the Spurs ran into trouble.
It doesn’t work to have a football director with one strategy and a head coach with a completely different one.
Take the opposite approach to signing the left-back last summer: Paratici brought in Destiny Udogie (then 19 and immediately returned on loan to selling club Udinese), while Conte preferred to reunite the then 33-year-old Ivan Perisic.
On the other hand, right-back Djed Spence was signed (a player of similar age and profile to Udogie) who was released by Conte as a ‘club signing’ and loaned out in January after barely playing. We saw something similar that same month when Arnaut Danjuma went on loan, only for Conte to have given him a total of 11 Premier League minutes since then and then said: “I feel sorry for him.”
This is not how a club’s recruitment operation should work.
Djed Spence struggled for playing time before joining Rennes on loan (Picture: Getty)
It’s okay that there are differing opinions among those making transfer decisions, and it’s okay to use a range of different players – one could even argue that the purchases of Udogie and Perisic are simultaneously the present and future of Spurs secured at this position. But that only really works if it’s a conscious strategy. As it is, such a split between head coach and football’s chief executive is counterproductive and has led Spurs to situations with both Conte and Mourinho where the manager has been presented with players he doesn’t want.
That’s when you end up with “club signings” like Spence or, in Mourinho’s case, the likes of Gareth Bale’s return on loan (then dubbed “Daniel’s deal”), which he didn’t really want and ended up ostracizing for long periods .
If Spurs are to progress, they need to find a way to reconcile the thinking of their head coach and their director of football. Likewise, hiring a win-now manager only makes sense if you’re also hiring win-now players. This was a fundamental split during the Mourinho and Conte eras and led to the idea that Tottenham were trying to be Chelsea but on the cheap.
Having a strategic vision and sticking to it is fundamental if Spurs are to outmaneuver their rivals, who almost all spend more on both players and their wages than they do.
Charlie Eccleshare
Do more to quell the “profit before fame” claims
The idea that Tottenham puts profit before sporting success is a central argument of the “ENIC Out” brigade.
is it fair That probably depends on your perspective. On the one hand, Spurs have spent hundreds of millions of pounds on transfers in recent years, supporting their head coach last summer in a way they had never done before. It’s hard to say a club isn’t investing in the player-side when they’ve spent £60m ($73.4m today) on a player at Richarlison who isn’t even an automatic starter.
On the other hand, owners ENIC’s critics say Spurs have stalled because they missed opportunities to sign players that would have taken them to the next level – most relevantly during the Pochettino years when the hierarchy was rebuilding the club Stadions at the expense of prioritized additions at a time when the team was tantalizingly close to winning the biggest prizes.
This is where the argument about ENIC crystallized – the feeling that the infrastructure, like building an elite training ground and then a stadium, was more important than winning the cup on the pitch.
Those in favor of ENIC would argue that the two go hand in hand and that by laying those very solid foundations, the Tottenham owners have given them a much better chance of winning things in the future. Also remember that Spurs were in a comparable position to Everton, bobbing around in midfield before they started making these types of investments. Now look at where the two clubs are.
These days, we’re seeing the profits before fame argument play out when Spurs are seen as a priority when prioritizing events that maximize profits at the stadiums – this summer’s Beyonce and Lady Gaga concert series is considered by some to be the most outrageous.
A personal view is that if the results on the pitch were better, people would care a lot less about this type of business. But when Spurs consistently fail to win things, it becomes easier to say it’s partly down to skewed priorities at board level. Are these commercial ventures really affecting the player side? It’s hard to say definitively, but most neutral observers close to the situation point out that there’s a fairly clear demarcation line between those employees who focus on these types of matters and those who do deal with football issues.
What doesn’t help is when public statements like Levy’s at the start of last season seem to over-emphasize the commercial and even non-profit community side. Referring to “boxing, NFL, rugby and concerts” in the second paragraph of his chairman’s message, he welcomed fans en masse again after over a year of playing games behind closed doors due to the COVID-19 pandemic, speaking so little about real football considered wrong by Levy’s critics.
On the pitch, the debate between winning and glory plays out as it prioritizes the cup competitions and attempts to qualify for the lucrative and status-heavy Champions League with a trophy-less top four finish.
This came to a head earlier this month when Conte rested a number of his regulars for the FA Cup Round of 16 against Sheffield United, only to keep them fresh for a Premier League game against Wolverhampton three days later, according to Wanderer. Many Spurs fans were very frustrated by this and wondered why a club who have not won a trophy since February 2008 felt they could deprioritize the FA Cup in this way.
There is no easy answer here as to what the priority of a club like Tottenham should be, but the Sheffield United debacle highlighted once again the division between many of their supporters and the club’s decision-makers (in this case, the head coach). This was all the more pronounced as the club’s Champions League run had been so thrilling this season, and then a week after losing to Bramall Lane they were bolstered by a terribly poor round of 16 loss to AC Milan.
Why, the argument goes, should Spurs prioritize qualifying for the Champions League when they approach the competition so tamely once they play there?
Again, there are no easy solutions to how a club without an unlimited budget can approach juggling multiple competitions, but there needs to be greater awareness of how much winning one of the trophies (or even trying to do so in earnest) can mean would help cushion the profits-over-glory proposals below.
Charlie Eccleshare
Realign all elements of the club
Football clubs need unity to function. They consist of four distinct parts: the manager, the players, the board and the fans. In any truly successful club, all four pull in the same direction, with broadly similar expectations and goals. People in football call this “alignment”.
Spurs had that in the peak years of the Pochettino era. He had a clear vision of how his Spurs side should play: aggressive, pushing football with young, hungry players. The dressing room agreed, as did the audience, and it also aligned with the board’s strategic goals. It was the happiest and best period in Tottenham’s modern history.
Since then, however, the parts have all moved in different directions. The board has appointed short-term managers who, as mentioned above, briefly but not long won over the squad. The kind of football these managers dished up rarely went over well with the public. And the overall impression was a club with its four different parts, all pulling in different directions.
Spurs don’t have the same sense of togetherness that they did five or six years ago (Picture: Getty)
Tottenham could become a powerful force again, but only if they rebuild that sense of unity that they had thrown away.
That has to start at the top of the club with a clear vision of what they want to be and where they want to go. Then they need to appoint a head coach that fits that vision. If this coach can convince the players to accept his football, the crowd will follow him. They don’t need instant results or even instant improvements, they just need to feel like there’s an idea to believe in.
That sounds theoretical, but it’s also true in practice: Spurs could finish fourth or even third this season, and yet few of their fans will have liked it. They would overtake the 2014/15 season – Pochettino’s first when they finished fifth, six points behind the top four but showing clear signs of progress and a developing style of play – at any moment.
This may sound far from here, but things can change quickly.
Just look at Manchester United playing under Erik ten Hag in their first season. In a matter of months he has instituted a style of play, sidelined players who don’t believe in it and now has the full approval of the dressing room and crowd. Or look down the street. Arsenal backed a young manager with a clear idea, allowed him to pick the players he wanted and now find themselves with that electric sense of total unity across the company.
It’s a shame that the four years since Tottenham Hotspur Stadium opened have coincided with a rather miserable time on the pitch for the team. The stadium changed everything for the club financially, but the crowd that fills it could make a big difference on the pitch too.
They just need to be faced with something to believe in.
Jack Pitt Brooke
(Photo above: Tottenham Hotspur FC via Getty Images)