Very much questions for the gaffa; but he just thinks the players are "selfish" and the fans "impatient".
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Manager Antonio Conte
- Thread starter Fattynomates
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Very much questions for the gaffa; but he just thinks the players are "selfish" and the fans "impatient".
The common denominator being the player’s mentality?
Any chance of a copy paste. Too cheap to pau Athletic sub
Time well spent.
Three holes in the ground!!! Learn something new every day. Thanks for this!
I don't think it's tactical, they have turned off the brain after the 3-1, convinced that the match was won.
typical attitude of the workers on Friday afternoon before the weekend (weekend = Nationals break)
That is how they are coached and set up to play- thats why his rant is so absurd - the selfish players are merely doing what is drilled into them!
Th match of the day footage was interesting. They showed we switched to a 451 and rigidly stuck to it.
Either the players are suffering a mystical mass delusion whereby they all had the same idea at the same time, or they were told to do that.
How Conte’s Tottenham turned ‘toxic’: The tension he brought has proven too much
Jack Pitt-BrookeMar 24, 2023
The first time Antonio Conte interviewed to be Tottenham Hotspur’s head coach, in May 2021, he could not have been clearer with Daniel Levy about who he was and what he wanted.
Conte promised to get Spurs fit, organised and hungry again, to drive the team in his direction. All Conte demanded in return was honesty, warning that if he ever felt lied to he would walk. Conte said that if Tottenham had any doubts at all, they should not appoint him because he was who he was and would not change for anyone.
It was actually Conte who pulled out of those talks, feeling that it was too soon after leaving Inter Milan to jump straight back into management, but five months later he decided to take the job anyway. It was always a strange marriage between Conte and Levy, two men with polarised views on how to run a football club and opposing visions for what they wanted Tottenham to be. And now, after 16 months, it is in its final moments.
Conte is on his way out after effectively making his own position untenable on Saturday evening in an unprecedented press conference, railing against his “selfish” players who play only “for themselves”.
Each party will likely be relieved to be rid of the other so they can go back to doing things their own way. Levy and Conte knew exactly what they were letting themselves in for, even if it suited them at times to act as if everything was going to be ok. Maybe both parties will reflect that they compromised too much for an unlikely marriage that should never have been considered in the first place.
Conte may well leave Tottenham in a better position than he found them — they are fourth in the league with 10 games left this season. He can point to the improvement he has delivered, and the fulfilment of those early promises to get Spurs fit and organised again.
But what is so frustrating about the Conte era is that the early promise on the pitch has ultimately come to nothing. The first half-season, from November 2021 until the end of last term, was unquestionably a triumph of coaching and management. Conte inherited a team going nowhere, instantly imposed his personality and drove them up the table to fourth place. By the end of last season, Spurs were playing as well as they had since the peak years of Mauricio Pochettino.
With a summer transfer window and full pre-season behind him, the hope was that Conte could build on that momentum and launch a new era of success. Instead, Tottenham have regressed.
It did not take long for the mood to deteriorate. Conte’s relentless public criticism of club policy eroded all goodwill. Fabio Paratici became more important than ever as the only senior club figure with whom Conte was still close. The players became increasingly fed up with Conte’s repetitive training and restrictive tactics. The words “toxic” and even “rotten” kept coming up in conversations with dressing-room sources, who have been granted anonymity to protect relationships. Some even commented privately that the mood was far worse than it was in the final days of Jose Mourinho.
And even Mourinho never went for the players in public as brutally as Conte did in the St Mary’s media room.
When Conte arrived at Tottenham in November 2021, he faced the same question Mourinho had two years previously. How do you teach a club that never wins trophies how to win? How can a coach who has won the lot instil winning standards elsewhere?
The answer for Conte, even more than for Mourinho, was friction. He would be painfully, brutally honest with everyone at the club: players, staff, even the fans. It would not be pleasant — vital medicine rarely is — but it would inspire the reaction he needed. This tension is what the club wanted at first, for people to feel challenged and on their toes after a few years of drift. They had elite facilities but they knew they needed an atmosphere and ethos to match. It was time to remove everyone from their comfort zone. This was a football club crying out for leadership and direction.
So it was the right sort of friction when Conte marched into the training ground offices on his first day and told staff they had a major problem: the food. He had seen one player eating nachos on his first day and could not accept it from his team. No more heavy food like nachos or sandwiches after training. No more ketchup or mayonnaise. No more cooking with too much butter and oil. Fruit was making a comeback.
And it was the right sort of friction after Conte’s first game against Vitesse Arnhem when he told his players he was proud of them, but that he could never again accept out-of-shape players with bad physical conditioning. He knew that five first-teamers were overweight and that was anathema to him. The players were left with no doubt that they had to start making sacrifices and suffering together.
Just in case the players did not clock the message in private, Conte made it public, too. When they lost his fourth game in charge to NS Mura, Conte said in the press conference that, at Tottenham, “the level is not so high”. It was the first but by no means the last time Conte gave the impression coaching Tottenham was beneath him and that they were lucky to have him. In the early optimism of autumn 2021, it felt like the kind of home truths Tottenham needed to hear.
It was certainly the right sort of friction when Conte got hold of the players on the training ground. Spurs had been heading in the wrong direction for at least two years. They were under-trained, under-motivated, unfit and devoid of any real structure with or without the ball. They had regressed in every facet of the game since the peak years of Pochettino. The decline started in his last year, worsened under Mourinho and bottomed out under Nuno.
All of a sudden Conte walked in with a plan. He had been studying videos of Spurs and knew he needed to fix the defence with a back three. He drilled the players day in, day out with his shape exercises and 11-against-zero games. He sat them in front of videos for hours and ran them as hard as he could to get them into shape. Back then, this was exactly what they needed and wanted.
And it worked. There was an immediate uplift in performances and results. The squad was not fully ready to play his football yet — Lucas Moura had to start on the right of the front three because Kane and Son were not in a condition to press — but the early signs were good. When Son scored Spurs’ second against Brentford on December 2, finishing off a counter-attack that went from Davinson Sanchez to Son to Kane to Sergio Reguilon and back to Son, people marvelled at how quickly the players had learned Conte’s patterns. Conte quickly proved more able than his last two predecessors to improve the players through his coaching, which was exactly what Tottenham had hoped for.
But it was also clear Spurs were not at the level Conte demanded. Everyone was taken aback by how furious he was after a 1-1 draw against Southampton just after Christmas. And after a dispiriting defeat to Chelsea in January — one of three in 18 days — Conte made clear again how poor he thought his squad was, repeatedly insisting they were “in the middle” rather than at the top.
What Conte wanted were new players.
Recruitment was a constant issue, the clearest sign of the conflicting visions of Conte and the club. Levy, it must be remembered, never promised that Tottenham would suddenly be able to throw big money at new players. But Conte rarely missed an opportunity to tell the world he wanted them to bring in experience, while it was the club’s policy to target young players. The first time this split came into the public eye was the January 2022 window. It did not start well: Conte wanted Adama Traore as a wing-back, Levy was unconvinced, Traore went to Barcelona instead.
Ultimately, it took the expertise of Paratici to bridge the two visions of Conte and Levy. At the end of the January window, he went back to Juventus and landed Dejan Kulusevski on an 18-month loan and Rodrigo Bentancur for just €19million (£16.7m; $20.2m), plus €6million in possible add-ons. These were Conte-ready players signed for Tottenham-friendly prices. Both came straight into the team and it was a turning point for the Conte era. The first game Bentancur and Kulusevski started together was the 3-2 win at Manchester City, which launched Spurs’ big push for fourth.
For Conte to criticise the club during the transfer window was one thing. There was an acceptance inside the building that this was just Conte’s way and that he would always make their lives uncomfortable trying to get what he wanted. But Conte could not help himself, even when the window was closed. In February, he went on Sky Italia and said Spurs’ January window was “not easy”, pointing to how he lost four players and only gained two. It did not go down well and Conte was banned from giving interviews to Italian broadcasters.
Much of the Conte era — and certainly the first season — felt like a tussle between two competing impulses. He could be a brilliant coach, capable of getting his players fit, hungry and schooled in a style of play that was effective and efficient. But his dark moods and outbursts — when the friction got too much — wrecked any sense that everyone was pulling in the same direction.
That much was clear after Turf Moor on February 23 when Spurs lost 1-0, their fourth league defeat in five games. Conte lost it afterwards, repeatedly doubting whether he could turn Tottenham around and sounding like he was on the brink of resignation less than four months into the job. At the time, multiple sources close to the situation said they didn’t expect Conte to still be at the club the following season. But the other side of Conte won out: Spurs won six out of their next seven in the league, the only defeat being a 3-2 loss at Manchester United in which they were the better team.
Despite an April wobble — taking one point from two games against Brighton and Brentford — Spurs finished the season strongly, beating Woolwich 3-0 and then winning their last two games to seal fourth place.
We should not lose sight now of what a triumph that was for Conte. Spurs were genuinely excellent over the second half of last season, far better than they ever were this time around. When they demolished Newcastle United and Aston Villa in consecutive weeks in April, it felt as though everything had clicked. Conte had fulfilled all his promises to Levy: the players were fit, the defence was fixed (having conceded just five goals in their final 11 league games) and everyone was pulling together in service of his idea. They were hard to score against and with Son, Kane and Kulusevski up front, hard to stop on the break. (Not that Conte would ever want their football described that way.)
As Spurs put five past Norwich City on the last day of last season, the promise was obvious. This was the best Spurs team for four years. Levy was happily telling people that Conte was the best manager he had ever worked with. The issue was whether the positive momentum of the team could override the internal contradictions of this unlikely partnership.
Because the football was only part of the story. Off the pitch, the question was whether Conte would stick around or whether he would decide he had done his bit for Spurs and walk away. The fact this was even discussed just seven months after Conte arrived underlined the fragility of the marriage. So, too, did the short-term contract.
No one did more to fuel the speculation than Conte himself. From one press conference to the next, he repeatedly refused to commit to seeing out his contract. He knew the sense he was doing Tottenham a favour by coaching them was politically convenient to him. In truth, he may well have believed it, and wished that he was at Real Madrid or Manchester United instead. In April, there were reports linking Conte to PSG. He angrily denied that he wanted the job, but once again refused to offer any commitment to Spurs beyond the season. Even after the win at Norwich City that secured Champions League football, he would not say he was staying. He never once turned down an opportunity to leverage this uncertainty in public.
It felt as if the friction and tension Levy wanted Conte to bring to Tottenham was being turned on Levy himself.
Conte decided to stay in the end. No other big clubs wanted him. He was well paid by Spurs, had succeeded in the first part of his work there and, at that moment, appeared to have everything lined up as he wanted. Everyone could agree to keep this happy show on the road.
But when the summer window opened, the fundamental difference between what Conte wanted and what the club could provide still had to be bridged.
Tottenham tried to compromise and do things differently to keep Conte happy. ENIC arranged a £150million equity injection, which made things easier. They gave Ivan Perisic — one of Conte’s players from Inter — a two-year contract worth £180,000 per week, something they would never normally do. They spent an initial £50m on Richarlison, who was not even a guaranteed starter, and another £25m on Yves Bissouma. They acted early and proactively to get Conte his players before the tour to South Korea.
Not that Conte was bowled over, saying after the first game of the season he was “really surprised” to read it was unusual for Spurs to do their business early. Tottenham also left four unwanted players at home rather than taking them on tour, something they would not normally do — another compromise in Conte’s direction.
At the time it felt like a good window. Spurs had been nimble and imaginative, and had improved their squad. But even this was not exactly what Conte wanted.
He craved a top-quality left-sided centre-back (like Alessandro Bastoni, another of his former Inter players) and they instead signed Clement Lenglet on loan. He wanted a world-class right wing-back (even he knew there was no point in asking for Achraf Hakimi) and they ended up with Djed Spence. Even before Spence’s signing was confirmed, Conte was ruthless in telling journalists on the pre-season tour of Korea that he had not asked for Spence and that he was being signed by the club instead. By branding Spence as a “club signing”, Conte instantly undermined his chances of succeeding at Spurs.
Tottenham ultimately signed six senior players last summer (plus Destiny Udogie, who was instantly loaned back to Udinese) but, with the benefit of hindsight, how many of them improved Conte’s team? Perisic was the only obvious upgrade and even he has turned out to be a disappointment. And if Conte wanted to show that fourth place was not their ceiling, he did not quite have the players to do it.
But even if you take a pessimistic view of the transfer window to explain why Tottenham could not compete with Woolwich and Manchester City, it is much harder to find an explanation for how this season has played out.
The results were not the problem, at least at the start. Tottenham began the season solidly enough, beating Southampton comfortably on the opening day and not losing in the league until they went to the Emirates on October 1, having started the day just a point behind league leaders Woolwich. But anyone who watched them play could sense something was off; that this was not the same team that looked so difficult to stop in the second half of last season. They started games slower, were leakier at the back and lacked any sort of zip or edge up front.
It felt in those opening weeks as if a correction was due to come. Either Spurs would start doing the things they did last year, performances would improve and the good results would continue, or the results would change for the worse. Spurs were abysmal in a 2-0 defeat at Manchester United, then lost at home to Newcastle. They started almost every game poorly. Sometimes they could turn it around, with thrilling wins against Bournemouth, Marseille and Leeds just before the World Cup. Sometimes they could not.
Spurs finished the first half of the season respectably enough, in fourth, and won their Champions League group, too. But they had not produced a single convincing 90-minute performance all season. The hardest game they had won was away to Brighton. It was a mystery to everyone at the club where their form had gone. So what happened?
If you wanted to defend Conte, you could point to some unique circumstances working against him. The World Cup was a distraction that affected the whole spine of his team. Cristian Romero has been nowhere near the same player this season, but at least he has a World Cup winner’s medal to show for it. To varying degrees, the World Cup seems to have taken something from others, too.
Kulusevski, the most creative player in the team, missed two months with a hamstring injury and has not looked the same player since. Two of the stalwarts of the past few years — Son and Hugo Lloris — also saw their form collapse in the first half of the season. Son looked like a completely different player from the man who won the Golden Boot last season, taking fewer shots and scoring with a far smaller percentage of them. To date, he has only scored in four league games all season. It is hard to think of a more dramatic loss of form from a top player in recent Premier League history. Lloris, too, has struggled, making high-profile handling errors that put Spurs into unrecoverable positions in their defeats to Newcastle, Woolwich and Aston Villa.
If Conte was afflicted by one or two of these circumstances, you might say he was unfortunate. But when most players’ form collapses like this, there has to be a broader cause. And the reality of the situation at Tottenham is that very few of the players have been enjoying their football this season, as confidence has slowly but steadily drained from a group that performed so well just a year ago.
Part of this is to do with the style of play. When Conte arrived last season, the players were crying out for structure and that is what he brought. But players do not like to play like that forever. This season, a feeling has developed among the squad that they would rather play with more freedom rather than be stuck in Conte’s rigid 3-4-3. This will sound fickle and it probably is. This is a similar Spurs squad who went from feeling overtrained by Pochettino to undertrained by Mourinho at some speed.
They had complaints about Conte’s training, too. At the start, they loved it, of course, even if at times Conte’s intensity could leave some players a little confused by his instructions. But by this season they found themselves bored by the predictable, repetitive exercises. It was a common complaint from players that they would actively look forward to international breaks just so they could finally do something different.
Some at the club were also unhappy with Conte’s habit of providing very little notice for when training sessions would take place, which made planning difficult for players and staff alike. Medical and sports science staff would often not know their schedules more than a few days beforehand. Clubs always prefer a manager who provides the schedules well in advance. Conte’s short-notice methods left the club unable to organise a warm-weather training camp during the World Cup break, because all the best venues had been booked by clubs who planned ahead.
Part of the issue was with Conte himself. There are some coaches with exceptional people skills who know how to get through to struggling players, to put an arm around their shoulders and lift their confidence at difficult times. Conte is not one of them. Even his greatest advocates would admit motivating players out of a slump is not one of his strengths.
But plenty of Spurs players have seen their confidence and form drop and look as if they needed precisely the sort of personal motivation that does not come easily to Conte.
We also have to remember this has been a uniquely difficult season for Conte on a personal level. The loss of Gian Piero Ventrone in October hit the whole club hard, but especially Conte and the members of staff who had worked with him for years. Ventrone, more than anyone, was the man who would give players a hug and try to lift them individually. Later in the season, two other close friends — Gianluca Vialli and Sinisa Mihajlovic — passed away, while Conte himself missed a lot of games in February as he recovered from gallbladder surgery in Italy.
Conte certainly cannot be solely blamed for how bad the mood became. He has suffered, too.
Hanging over this whole season — and in fact, the entire Conte era — has been Conte’s contractual situation.
When Spurs tied him to a short-term deal it was in the hope that a new long-term contract could be agreed, but that meant going into this season with the clock ticking. As time went on, questions were inevitable from inside and outside the club as to whether Conte would be sticking around.
Conte had his doubts. He enjoyed elements of the Tottenham job, especially the quality of the facilities. He loves the daily process of training, competing and winning, so much so that some people who know him well say he is “addicted” to it. But he still ultimately sees himself as a coach who competes for league titles rather than for fourth place. And during a difficult year, he missed life at home in Italy, where his family stayed.
Talks started before the World Cup and, back then, there was confidence at the club they could secure Conte’s future. Talks resumed again on December 12, but by this point, Conte’s mind was already close to being made up. He did not want to sign a new deal and tie himself to a long-term future at Spurs. He just wanted to end the season strongly enough to be able to paint his time at the club as a success.
But it put Spurs in a strange position, with the head coach running his contract down and the club unwilling to take control of the situation. That added to a sense of drift; of not knowing how to plan beyond the summer. And no one picks up on these feelings quicker than a dressing room.
Even if many of the players stopped enjoying playing for Conte long ago, they were broadly willing to go along with it as long as it was delivering results. They knew what Conte had achieved in his career and felt privileged to work with such a decorated coach. But as results faltered, the mood started to turn. And Conte never showed any interest in trying to repair it.
Conte’s repeated insistence that Spurs were not set up to compete irritated staff (Photo: Getty)
By the second half of this season, the mood inside the camp, according to multiple training-ground sources granted anonymity to protect relationships, was “toxic” or even “rotten”. The tension Conte had brought to the club had finally proved too much. Players were physically and mentally worn out, fed up and bored. Staff were frustrated by Conte’s public criticisms of the medical team and transfer policy, his abrasive manner, his repeated insistence that Spurs were not set up to compete.
Training-ground sources have also pointed to the fact that even if players do not consciously stop playing for a manager, their incentives change as soon as they know he will be gone by the end of the season. Naturally, they would lose some of their motivational edge.
There was even a feeling from some who remembered the last few months of Mourinho’s tenure that the last few months of Conte were worse than the dismal spring of 2021. There was a widespread feeling in the camp by the end that Conte simply did not want to be there any more. He cut an increasingly isolated figure, with only one ally left at the club in Paratici, and no other close relationships he could fall back on. Players felt that the energy and passion from his first season, which they had responded so well to, had gone. The way Conte confronted Thomas Tuchel in August, which they loved, now felt like a distant memory.
In Conte’s first season, the players also appreciated how willing Conte had been to defend them all in public. But when Conte hammered his players at Southampton for being “selfish” and only playing “for themselves”, it brought into the open how broken the relationship was between manager and squad, even if some fans and pundits agreed with the sentiment. Conte knew he was going, but wanted to make sure he got his retaliation in before he was sacked. Most Spurs managers eventually lose the dressing room. Conte ensured that this time the dressing room had lost him first.
It was telling that the best league run of the season — and this is a low bar — was four wins out of five in February, achieved when Conte was largely absent. Spurs even beat Manchester City and Chelsea at home, the only times this season they have beaten another big club. The pressing question was what effect Conte’s return would have. And at this point it felt like an open question: some gloomily predicted that the relatively upbeat mood would soon darken once Conte was back. But some players were still backing Conte at this point, and hoped his return would give the squad a lift. Ultimately the pessimists were proved right, with Conte’s return only hastening his departure.
And even the uptick in form while Conte was in Italy — like Mourinho’s five straight wins in February and March 2021 — was not enough to halt the dramatic slide of the head coach’s standing in the eyes of the fans. During Conte’s first season, his name was often sung by the crowd, and during the 3-0 battering of Woolwich there seemed to be a genuine connection between him and the supporters. But this season they lost patience, not only with the football but with the sense that Conte was not fully committed to the job. It was telling how even when Spurs beat Chelsea, with Conte recovering at home from surgery, his name was never chanted by the crowd.
His reputation has not recovered from the FA Cup exit to Sheffield United, when Kane and Romero were rested and Spurs lost 1-0 to a much-changed Championship side. It showed how little Conte cared about the cups and it was a point of no return for Conte with his public. The next week, Spurs limped out of the Champions League, losing 1-0 on aggregate to an average AC Milan side, barely putting them under any pressure. When Conte replaced Kulusevski with Davinson Sanchez, with Spurs chasing a goal to stay in the competition, the decision was booed. Everyone remembered the reaction to Nuno replacing Moura with Steven Bergwijn in his last game, the moment that effectively ushered in the Conte era at Spurs. Some fans left the stadium that night singing the name of Mauricio Pochettino.
The serial winner had failed to deliver a trophy to Tottenham.
Don’t even need to read the article. You know what it says.
Bad mood in the locker room.
Players tired if touch training sessions
Tactics too hard
Etc etc.
We gotta get some leadership in here because these players are fucking toxic and will just take down the next manager too
We've done that under Conte since he came, defensively we go 541 (not 451) and try to stop teams playing through us. Worked well last season and the beginning of this season and generally isn't a problem - we've just had more individual errors and players like Dier reverting to type after playing well initially under Conte.
It should also be noted that the first two Soton goals came when we weren't set and we got caught fast asleep after half time and just after we scored the third.
The most annoying thing about Dublin's 'analysis' was that he made out it was a new thing and the cause of all our woes when that really isn't true.
Watch Woolwich out of possession, they drop into a very similar position, everyone behind the ball, back in their own half.
Can someone clarify what " turgid " means in the context of our football ?