Definately, I’ve heard an announcement will be made next week!
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Just saw the Sky Sports News yellow ticker, Nuno seen leaving the training ground screaming "stick it up your bollocks!"
They are trying to talk Paratici down from the sky-walk. More to follow.
I was replying to someone suggesting ex Chelsea managers are all doomed to fail at Spurs.
To be honest, any serious club would have started their search well before then!
Apologies just getting tired of people who are slagging off Nuno before he has even started
Reading that through, it seems like we had many of the right options on our agenda, and I understand why some didn't pan out, but Levy's still ended up making two really flawed appointments from a club (Spurs) compatibility standpoint, when much better fitting options were very possible.
theathletic.com
Even in a season in which Tottenham went top of the league, collapsed, joined the Super League, sacked Mourinho, replaced him with 29-year-old Ryan Mason and lost a cup final, this 72-day search for a manager will be the phase that stands out.
It has been fascinating and at times dramatic, but it has also damaged the standing of a club for so long seen as a byword for intelligent decision-making. And it has brought back the old questions: what is Tottenham’s identity, and what are they trying to be?
It all started on the morning of Monday, April 19.
The eyes of the world were on the launch of the Super League, announced late the previous night. But even as Daniel Levy was involved in this attempt to rip up the fabric of football, he still had a season to save. Spurs had just drawn 2-2 away to Everton and Levy was desperate to push the team back towards the Champions League places over the 2020-21 campaign’s last six games.
With Mourinho preferring to prioritise the Carabao Cup final the following Sunday over the midweek league game with Southampton that preceded it, Levy finally decided to cut his losses on an expensive failed experiment. Tottenham had appointed a “proven winner” to help them take the final step, but the club had only gone backwards instead. So Mourinho was gone, Mason was in, and the hard work began on finding the new permanent successor.
The model, at this point, was the man Mourinho had replaced 18 months earlier. The feeling was that Tottenham needed to get back to the Pochettino era, and find a new man who could replicate his strengths: a modern, aggressive style of play, a commitment to fitness, a positive coaching environment that improved every player, and above all a sense of unity between the squad, the fans and the club. If Tottenham could not get Pochettino back from his new gig as Paris Saint-Germain coach — and there was little talk of this in April — they wanted someone as similar to him as possible.
But late April and early May was a difficult time for Levy, given how much time he had to spend clearing up the mess from the failed Super League and attending to club finances amid the long-running pandemic. So responsibility largely fell to Steve Hitchen, Spurs’ technical performance director, to draw up a list of available candidates who fitted the bill.
Some attractive candidates were not attainable.
Tottenham have admired Julian Nagelsmann for years and the 33-year-old RB Leipzig coach would have been perfect for the job. But by the time they had a vacancy, he was already too close to signing for Bayern Munich for the next five seasons. He was announced at Bayern on April 27, eight days after Mourinho was sacked.
Brendan Rodgers would have been very attractive too, having come very close to getting the Spurs job in 2012 before he decided to leave Swansea City for Liverpool instead. But Tottenham never got the sense this time that he was interested in leaving Leicester City for them.
Other candidates were considered but then discarded. Southampton’s collapse in the second half of last season counted against Ralph Hasenhuttl, as did the fact Spurs wanted a coach who created a positive atmosphere with the players.
There was some early interest in appointing a young English coach who could rebuild Tottenham over the next four or five years, bringing through a new generation of young players. They considered Fulham’s Scott Parker but thought this was too soon for a man with just over two years of first-team management behind him. More consideration was given to Graham Potter, who has transformed the style of play at Brighton & Hove Albion, but only has two seasons of Premier League coaching experience himself.
Looking abroad, they spoke to Ralf Rangnick, who has pioneered the growth of pressing football in Germany over the last decade, but who was maybe more of a fit for a director of football role rather than as their next head coach. They looked at Roberto Martinez, busy preparing for the European Championship with the world’s No 1-ranked team Belgium, but they knew things had gone sour for him at Everton, and wondered if he was a big enough name for the club.
Near the head of Hitchen’s initial shortlist of candidates was Erik ten Hag.
Here was a candidate who was almost a perfect match for the criteria Levy had laid out. In his three and a half years in charge of Ajax, he had got them playing precisely the sort of attractive front-foot football Spurs wanted, football that showed how much Ten Hag had learned working under Pep Guardiola at Bayern Munich from 2013 to 2015.
His Ajax side had high attacking full-backs, pressing midfielders and forwards who were trusted to create. That style propelled Ajax on their famous run to the semi-finals of the Champions League in spring 2019, eliminating Real Madrid and Juventus before they were knocked out, somehow, by Pochettino’s Spurs. Ten Hag won the Dutch double that season and did it again in 2020-21. He is rated by those who know him as an intelligent, impressive individual who had done well to win over the early doubters in Amsterdam to build something special.
Tottenham sounded out Ten Hag and knew that he was interested.
Ajax extended his contract on April 30, but that did not fundamentally change the dynamic. If Spurs moved for him at the right time, they would be able to get him, and the Dutch giants would not stand in his way. But as many boxes as Ten Hag ticked, he was never the leading candidate in this process, only ever an attractive alternative.
The lead candidate from the first stage of the process, back in early May, was Hansi Flick.
On April 17, two days before Mourinho was sacked, Flick had announced he was to leave Bayern Munich. He had only been in the post for 18 months but in that time had won the German double, Champions League, UEFA Super Cup and Club World Cup at his first attempt, and was on the way to retaining the Bundesliga too. And he had done so playing a brand of hyper-aggressive front-foot football that was more in keeping with Hitchen’s ideas and Levy’s promises than any other available candidate.
Flick had been heavily linked with replacing Joachim Low as the German national team manager after this summer’s Euros, having worked with Low as his assistant from 2006 to 2014. But Tottenham spoke to him repeatedly about becoming their next head coach. They liked his vision of the game, his coaching pedigree and his human qualities. They liked his young assistant Danny Rohl, who was the genius behind Hasenhuttl’s Southampton before he moved to Bayern in the summer of 2019. They liked Flick’s CV, having been sporting director of both the German FA and Bundesliga club Hoffenheim, sensing that this gave him a broader view of the job.
Flick, by this stage, was receiving interest from all around Europe for next season, including from Barcelona. But he did not want to work in a language other than English and German, and so Spain was never a likely destination. Of all the clubs interested in him, Spurs was the best fitting option, but they never did quite enough to convince him to join.
In the middle of May, Flick told Tottenham he would be taking over the Germany national team job after all. He was officially announced as Low’s post-Euros successor on May 25.
After these early attempts to find a new version of Pochettino, why not go for the man himself?
Even 18 months after his sacking by Levy, Pochettino still enjoys a good relationship with plenty of people at the club, speaking to them frequently. The fact he was appointed as the new head coach of Paris Saint-Germain at Christmas has not changed that.
During a difficult first half-season in charge of PSG, Pochettino would vent his frustrations about his new life to his old friends and colleagues in London. He was confronted with the same political issues predecessor Thomas Tuchel had faced in the job, the fact that the head coach was never going to be as powerful as sporting director Leonardo at that club. He had to try to build a shared ethos between players inhabiting very different worlds, from Neymar on €36 million per year net, down to the rest. And he had to do it all without fully settling down, living in a Paris hotel while his family were still in London.
People at Tottenham started to wonder whether they could tempt Pochettino back to the club. Nobody could fulfil Levy’s promises about Tottenham “DNA” better than the man who created Spurs’ modern identity in the first place.
Throughout May, Hitchen was speaking to Pochettino about a possible return, and when he returned to his home in north London after PSG’s season finished on May 23, those talks intensified. The Argentinian was torn on the matter: one large, emotional part of him was desperate to return to Tottenham, where he was so loved by the fans, where he had real power within the club, and where everything seemed to make sense. At the same time, another part of him was reluctant to walk out on PSG, and players as gifted as Kylian Mbappe, after such a short spell there.
Tottenham knew Pochettino might have to force his way out of PSG to rejoin them. And they knew that even then, PSG still had it in their power to say no. Sure enough, the French side bristled at the suggestion they were going to lose their new head coach against their will. There was some frustration in Paris that Spurs, scrambling around for a solution to satisfy their fans, would try to turn the head of another club’s head coach like this. “Tottenham may be looking to start a fire in somebody else’s house to deflect from their own arson,” one source there said.
PSG had endured enough disruption already, sacking Tuchel and getting Pochettino in at mid-season. They insisted very clearly that no matter how tempted Pochettino might be by a romantic return to Tottenham, and a suspected doubling in his salary, he would be going nowhere. Pochettino had a contract, and he would be held to it.
From this point, it was clear there was little Pochettino or Tottenham could do. By the last weekend in May, PSG club president Nasser al Khelaifi had spoken to Pochettino and told him he was going nowhere. PSG pushed on with their plans for summer, with deals for Georginio Wijnaldum and Achraf Hakimi lined up, and Tottenham realised Pochettino was staying put.
Tottenham could have pressed on with their original list at this stage and appointed Ten Hag. While PSG are rich enough to reject any approaches for their head coach, Ajax aren’t. If Spurs had gone back in for Ten Hag in May, giving Ajax enough time to appoint a replacement, they would have got him. But Levy had other ideas.
The end of the season had been a difficult time for Levy as he dealt with the Super League fallout, strained relations with the fans, club finances, and other issues away from the pitch. But by the end of May, he was able to focus on a new plan for the running of the club.
The idea had been suggested to Levy that he should recruit a new senior football executive, a big figure to whom he could delegate football decisions. He had been told that Fabio Paratici, who had helped to orchestrate much of Juventus’ success over the last few years, was on his way out in Turin. If Pochettino had taken the job in late May then the old structure would have remained, but once that idea was dead, Levy seized on the opportunity to bring some new football expertise in.
He began to explore the Paratici move at the end of May, but with Pochettino now off the table, he still needed a coach. And Paratici knew just the man for the job.
Antonio Conte was not exactly in tune with Levy’s promises to appoint a coach for a rebuild focusing on young players. But he is certainly one of the top five coaches in the world. And on May 26, the day Paratici left Juventus, Conte also left newly-crowned Serie A champions Inter Milan. He was looking for a new job and made clear via intermediaries he was interested in the Tottenham one.
Suddenly a new plan was coming together. Paratici and Conte had a good relationship from their time working together at Juventus. Conte often falls out with the clubs he works for, but he didn’t with Paratici. And if Paratici could help to deliver a coach as good as Conte, he could get Spurs challenging for trophies again in his first season in charge.
In the first week of June, Levy pressed on with this new plan. When Conte discussed the role with Tottenham, he was hugely impressive, and spoke like a man who wanted the job. He talked in detail about his ambitions and his plans, how he would get the players fitter — something the club is especially keen on right now — and organise them defensively again. Conte has a reputation for being demanding but there were no issues raised over his salary or terms.
But in that interview, Conte also warned the club that if they had any doubts about signing him, they should not do it. He believed that as long as he was allowed to drive this project as he wanted, then it would work, and hinted that if he ever felt that the club lied to him, he would walk out, just as he’d just done at Inter.
After this call, there was confidence at Tottenham a deal could be done, and that they had found a manager far better and more successful than many they had looked at over the course of the process. Even if Conte was not exactly a natural fit for their initial criteria. But as that week went on, and the two parties should have been moving towards a final agreement, it was clear that Conte was having second thoughts. By June 4, the move was off.
Why exactly Conte pulled out remains unclear.
One theory is that he did not think Spurs would be able to raise enough money in a depressed marketplace to fund the signings he thought they needed. Another is that Conte doubted their capacity to truly compete for trophies in the next few years. Levy, it should be said, knew how badly the club’s finances had been hit by the pandemic and did not want to over-commit to spending this summer if that meant putting Tottenham’s sustainable model at risk.
The collapse of the Conte talks effectively put Spurs back at square one.
They were starting again, and this time it was Paratici who was in charge. Given the size of the role he was coming into, with oversight on all football decisions, it was only natural that he would have control of the head coach appointment process. Talks continued over the next week with club officials flying out to Turin for more discussions on June 8.
Paratici turned his attentions to Paulo Fonseca. The Portuguese coach, who Spurs had considered at the start of their search, was available having left Roma at the end of last season. He may not have the cachet of Pochettino or Conte but he ticked some of Levy’s boxes. His Shakhtar Donetsk and Roma teams played some attractive football, in keeping with Levy’s initial promises. His three consecutive Ukrainian doubles proved he built teams to win, too.
So Paratici stayed in Italy to hold talks with Fonseca in Milan over the role, and on June 11 — the day the Euros kicked off down in Rome — a deal was agreed for the 48-year-old to sign a two-year contract with the option of a third. Next day, Paratici was announced as Spurs’ new “Managing Director, Football”, with Levy confirming he would be “heading up the football side of the club”. The contracts were sent over to Fonseca, and the hope at that point was he would be unveiled early the following week.
Only the final details were left to be discussed. Paratici arranged one more summit with Fonseca on June 14 and 15 in the Italian resort of Como. They would talk pre-season plans, about ideas for the squad and for the transfer window. The issue of backroom staff was still unresolved. Tottenham wanted Fonseca to bring two coaches of his own, to work alongside two who would be provided by the club.
But over the course of those two days, Paratici changed his mind. There were disagreements about transfer policy. There was no clear plan for the backroom staff. Fonseca felt Levy’s vision of attacking football was at odds with Paratici’s insistence that they fix the defence. Fonseca then flew off from Milan to Kyiv for a family holiday, unimpressed with Tottenham’s prevarication, and sensing something had changed in the negotiations. Indeed, by this point, Paratici had decided to look elsewhere.
The next day, Jorge Mendes called Paratici. The two are close after Paratici masterminded Juventus buying Mendes’ leading client Cristiano Ronaldo from Real Madrid in 2018. Mendes said Gennaro Gattuso was going to walk out on his deal to coach Fiorentina, which he’d only signed a couple of weeks earlier. Gattuso and Fiorentina had fallen out over the club’s reluctance to push for Mendes clients Sergio Oliveira, Jesus Corona and Goncalo Guedes in the transfer market.
Paratici was a big admirer of Gattuso’s work as a coach, in his recent spells at AC Milan and Napoli. If Paratici had stayed at Juventus this summer, he would have brought Gattuso in to replace Andrea Pirlo. But Paratici left and the club brought back Max Allegri instead. So Paratici moved fast.
Paratici met Gattuso and was impressed. Gattuso is a charismatic, persuasive man, and while he does not have the coaching CV of Conte, in his last few jobs he has been popular with his players, and has a good backroom staff behind him. The hope was that he would have the personality and drive to push Tottenham forward for the next few seasons. The next morning, June 17, Gattuso’s departure from Fiorentina was confirmed. By that afternoon, everything was in place for him to take over at Spurs.
But when news broke of Gattuso’s imminent appointment, Tottenham fans were furious. And not just because he had not achieved enough in his brief spells at Pisa, Milan and Napoli to justify getting the job.
Pointing to sexist and homophobic statements Gattuso had made in the past, as well as his downplaying of racist abuse, a #NoToGattuso movement gathered pace on Twitter. Very quickly, the club were bombarded by impassioned fans saying that appointing Gattuso would be utterly incompatible with the values of the club.
The Athletic is aware of one fan who emailed Levy to say he was “disheartened to see you thinking about hiring Gattuso as manager”, “not because of his style of play or anything, but like I’m sure you’ve seen, his statements previously surrounding women in football and his stance on same-sex marriage”. The supporter went on to request that, if Gattuso did get hired, the Italian should address his previous comments in a video for supporters.
Before that Thursday was over, Levy pulled the plug on the move.
It was a bruising week for Tottenham, even more so than the failures to land either Pochettino or Conte.
Spurs had been close to two candidates — neither of them as prominent or attractive as Pochettino or Conte — and pulled out on both of them. By the end of the week, Paratici and Levy were back at square one yet again.
When Levy and Paratici started working on the final phase of the process, Levy was clear on one thing. He did not want to conduct this part of the search in public.
Tottenham were stung by how much of this process had become public knowledge, and were determined that the successful completion of their head coach search would not be leaked out anywhere.
Levy led another meeting on Monday, June 21 to assess where Spurs could turn next. They discussed remaining candidates from the original shortlist. They wanted to be thorough and explore all their options. But it was too late to get Ten Hag out of Ajax. Parker was leaving Fulham for Bournemouth. Martinez and Roberto Mancini were impressing at the Euros, but the timing did not align. No national federation would release their manager to negotiate in the middle of a tournament, and the start of pre-season was two weeks away.
The strongest of those initial candidates now was Potter. Tottenham liked him and his style of play, but they also knew the timing might not be quite right for either party. And given Potter’s release clause, getting him out of Brighton would not be cheap.
Paratici had another idea: going back to Nuno. (Nuno, like Gattuso, is a Mendes client.) Paratici had been a long-term admirer of his coaching career, and his work in Portugal and Spain before his successful spell at Wolves. Paratici argued that Nuno’s teams played better football than some thought, and pointed to how he had coached improvements from many of his Wolves side. Levy was not initially sold, but Paratici made a strong case. By the end of last week, Nuno had edged past Potter and was the new favourite for the job.
Negotiations were not too complex and an initial two-year deal was agreed. One final meeting this Tuesday, June 29, confirmed that Nuno was the club’s choice. He might not have been the man Levy wanted at the start of the process, but it was now almost July and all other credible options had been exhausted. That night, Paratici finally flew into London, to officially start the job he been effectively doing for the past month.
The next day, Wednesday, Nuno arrived to sign the deal pose for photos in Spurs gear.
“I’ve spoken already about the need to revert back to our core DNA of playing attacking, entertaining football,” said Levy, who must have felt like he’d lived through the longest 72 days of his career. “And Fabio and I believe Nuno is the man who can take our talented group of players, embrace our young players coming through and build something special.”
Tottenham’s fans did not appear universally convinced, but at least, after over two months, their club finally have a manager again.
The longest 72 days of Daniel Levy's career: Inside Tottenham's epic manager hunt
From Jose to Nuno, via Flick, Ten Hag, Pochettino, Conte, Fonseca, Gattuso and more - it has been a bizarre summer at Tottenham Hotspur
theathletic.com
Even in a season in which Tottenham went top of the league, collapsed, joined the Super League, sacked Mourinho, replaced him with 29-year-old Ryan Mason and lost a cup final, this 72-day search for a manager will be the phase that stands out.
It has been fascinating and at times dramatic, but it has also damaged the standing of a club for so long seen as a byword for intelligent decision-making. And it has brought back the old questions: what is Tottenham’s identity, and what are they trying to be?
It all started on the morning of Monday, April 19.
The eyes of the world were on the launch of the Super League, announced late the previous night. But even as Daniel Levy was involved in this attempt to rip up the fabric of football, he still had a season to save. Spurs had just drawn 2-2 away to Everton and Levy was desperate to push the team back towards the Champions League places over the 2020-21 campaign’s last six games.
With Mourinho preferring to prioritise the Carabao Cup final the following Sunday over the midweek league game with Southampton that preceded it, Levy finally decided to cut his losses on an expensive failed experiment. Tottenham had appointed a “proven winner” to help them take the final step, but the club had only gone backwards instead. So Mourinho was gone, Mason was in, and the hard work began on finding the new permanent successor.
The model, at this point, was the man Mourinho had replaced 18 months earlier. The feeling was that Tottenham needed to get back to the Pochettino era, and find a new man who could replicate his strengths: a modern, aggressive style of play, a commitment to fitness, a positive coaching environment that improved every player, and above all a sense of unity between the squad, the fans and the club. If Tottenham could not get Pochettino back from his new gig as Paris Saint-Germain coach — and there was little talk of this in April — they wanted someone as similar to him as possible.
But late April and early May was a difficult time for Levy, given how much time he had to spend clearing up the mess from the failed Super League and attending to club finances amid the long-running pandemic. So responsibility largely fell to Steve Hitchen, Spurs’ technical performance director, to draw up a list of available candidates who fitted the bill.
Some attractive candidates were not attainable.
Tottenham have admired Julian Nagelsmann for years and the 33-year-old RB Leipzig coach would have been perfect for the job. But by the time they had a vacancy, he was already too close to signing for Bayern Munich for the next five seasons. He was announced at Bayern on April 27, eight days after Mourinho was sacked.
Brendan Rodgers would have been very attractive too, having come very close to getting the Spurs job in 2012 before he decided to leave Swansea City for Liverpool instead. But Tottenham never got the sense this time that he was interested in leaving Leicester City for them.
Other candidates were considered but then discarded. Southampton’s collapse in the second half of last season counted against Ralph Hasenhuttl, as did the fact Spurs wanted a coach who created a positive atmosphere with the players.
There was some early interest in appointing a young English coach who could rebuild Tottenham over the next four or five years, bringing through a new generation of young players. They considered Fulham’s Scott Parker but thought this was too soon for a man with just over two years of first-team management behind him. More consideration was given to Graham Potter, who has transformed the style of play at Brighton & Hove Albion, but only has two seasons of Premier League coaching experience himself.
Looking abroad, they spoke to Ralf Rangnick, who has pioneered the growth of pressing football in Germany over the last decade, but who was maybe more of a fit for a director of football role rather than as their next head coach. They looked at Roberto Martinez, busy preparing for the European Championship with the world’s No 1-ranked team Belgium, but they knew things had gone sour for him at Everton, and wondered if he was a big enough name for the club.
Near the head of Hitchen’s initial shortlist of candidates was Erik ten Hag.
Here was a candidate who was almost a perfect match for the criteria Levy had laid out. In his three and a half years in charge of Ajax, he had got them playing precisely the sort of attractive front-foot football Spurs wanted, football that showed how much Ten Hag had learned working under Pep Guardiola at Bayern Munich from 2013 to 2015.
His Ajax side had high attacking full-backs, pressing midfielders and forwards who were trusted to create. That style propelled Ajax on their famous run to the semi-finals of the Champions League in spring 2019, eliminating Real Madrid and Juventus before they were knocked out, somehow, by Pochettino’s Spurs. Ten Hag won the Dutch double that season and did it again in 2020-21. He is rated by those who know him as an intelligent, impressive individual who had done well to win over the early doubters in Amsterdam to build something special.
Tottenham sounded out Ten Hag and knew that he was interested.
Ajax extended his contract on April 30, but that did not fundamentally change the dynamic. If Spurs moved for him at the right time, they would be able to get him, and the Dutch giants would not stand in his way. But as many boxes as Ten Hag ticked, he was never the leading candidate in this process, only ever an attractive alternative.
The lead candidate from the first stage of the process, back in early May, was Hansi Flick.
On April 17, two days before Mourinho was sacked, Flick had announced he was to leave Bayern Munich. He had only been in the post for 18 months but in that time had won the German double, Champions League, UEFA Super Cup and Club World Cup at his first attempt, and was on the way to retaining the Bundesliga too. And he had done so playing a brand of hyper-aggressive front-foot football that was more in keeping with Hitchen’s ideas and Levy’s promises than any other available candidate.
Flick had been heavily linked with replacing Joachim Low as the German national team manager after this summer’s Euros, having worked with Low as his assistant from 2006 to 2014. But Tottenham spoke to him repeatedly about becoming their next head coach. They liked his vision of the game, his coaching pedigree and his human qualities. They liked his young assistant Danny Rohl, who was the genius behind Hasenhuttl’s Southampton before he moved to Bayern in the summer of 2019. They liked Flick’s CV, having been sporting director of both the German FA and Bundesliga club Hoffenheim, sensing that this gave him a broader view of the job.
Flick, by this stage, was receiving interest from all around Europe for next season, including from Barcelona. But he did not want to work in a language other than English and German, and so Spain was never a likely destination. Of all the clubs interested in him, Spurs was the best fitting option, but they never did quite enough to convince him to join.
In the middle of May, Flick told Tottenham he would be taking over the Germany national team job after all. He was officially announced as Low’s post-Euros successor on May 25.
After these early attempts to find a new version of Pochettino, why not go for the man himself?
Even 18 months after his sacking by Levy, Pochettino still enjoys a good relationship with plenty of people at the club, speaking to them frequently. The fact he was appointed as the new head coach of Paris Saint-Germain at Christmas has not changed that.
During a difficult first half-season in charge of PSG, Pochettino would vent his frustrations about his new life to his old friends and colleagues in London. He was confronted with the same political issues predecessor Thomas Tuchel had faced in the job, the fact that the head coach was never going to be as powerful as sporting director Leonardo at that club. He had to try to build a shared ethos between players inhabiting very different worlds, from Neymar on €36 million per year net, down to the rest. And he had to do it all without fully settling down, living in a Paris hotel while his family were still in London.
People at Tottenham started to wonder whether they could tempt Pochettino back to the club. Nobody could fulfil Levy’s promises about Tottenham “DNA” better than the man who created Spurs’ modern identity in the first place.
Throughout May, Hitchen was speaking to Pochettino about a possible return, and when he returned to his home in north London after PSG’s season finished on May 23, those talks intensified. The Argentinian was torn on the matter: one large, emotional part of him was desperate to return to Tottenham, where he was so loved by the fans, where he had real power within the club, and where everything seemed to make sense. At the same time, another part of him was reluctant to walk out on PSG, and players as gifted as Kylian Mbappe, after such a short spell there.
Tottenham knew Pochettino might have to force his way out of PSG to rejoin them. And they knew that even then, PSG still had it in their power to say no. Sure enough, the French side bristled at the suggestion they were going to lose their new head coach against their will. There was some frustration in Paris that Spurs, scrambling around for a solution to satisfy their fans, would try to turn the head of another club’s head coach like this. “Tottenham may be looking to start a fire in somebody else’s house to deflect from their own arson,” one source there said.
PSG had endured enough disruption already, sacking Tuchel and getting Pochettino in at mid-season. They insisted very clearly that no matter how tempted Pochettino might be by a romantic return to Tottenham, and a suspected doubling in his salary, he would be going nowhere. Pochettino had a contract, and he would be held to it.
From this point, it was clear there was little Pochettino or Tottenham could do. By the last weekend in May, PSG club president Nasser al Khelaifi had spoken to Pochettino and told him he was going nowhere. PSG pushed on with their plans for summer, with deals for Georginio Wijnaldum and Achraf Hakimi lined up, and Tottenham realised Pochettino was staying put.
Tottenham could have pressed on with their original list at this stage and appointed Ten Hag. While PSG are rich enough to reject any approaches for their head coach, Ajax aren’t. If Spurs had gone back in for Ten Hag in May, giving Ajax enough time to appoint a replacement, they would have got him. But Levy had other ideas.
The end of the season had been a difficult time for Levy as he dealt with the Super League fallout, strained relations with the fans, club finances, and other issues away from the pitch. But by the end of May, he was able to focus on a new plan for the running of the club.
The idea had been suggested to Levy that he should recruit a new senior football executive, a big figure to whom he could delegate football decisions. He had been told that Fabio Paratici, who had helped to orchestrate much of Juventus’ success over the last few years, was on his way out in Turin. If Pochettino had taken the job in late May then the old structure would have remained, but once that idea was dead, Levy seized on the opportunity to bring some new football expertise in.
He began to explore the Paratici move at the end of May, but with Pochettino now off the table, he still needed a coach. And Paratici knew just the man for the job.
Antonio Conte was not exactly in tune with Levy’s promises to appoint a coach for a rebuild focusing on young players. But he is certainly one of the top five coaches in the world. And on May 26, the day Paratici left Juventus, Conte also left newly-crowned Serie A champions Inter Milan. He was looking for a new job and made clear via intermediaries he was interested in the Tottenham one.
Suddenly a new plan was coming together. Paratici and Conte had a good relationship from their time working together at Juventus. Conte often falls out with the clubs he works for, but he didn’t with Paratici. And if Paratici could help to deliver a coach as good as Conte, he could get Spurs challenging for trophies again in his first season in charge.
In the first week of June, Levy pressed on with this new plan. When Conte discussed the role with Tottenham, he was hugely impressive, and spoke like a man who wanted the job. He talked in detail about his ambitions and his plans, how he would get the players fitter — something the club is especially keen on right now — and organise them defensively again. Conte has a reputation for being demanding but there were no issues raised over his salary or terms.
But in that interview, Conte also warned the club that if they had any doubts about signing him, they should not do it. He believed that as long as he was allowed to drive this project as he wanted, then it would work, and hinted that if he ever felt that the club lied to him, he would walk out, just as he’d just done at Inter.
After this call, there was confidence at Tottenham a deal could be done, and that they had found a manager far better and more successful than many they had looked at over the course of the process. Even if Conte was not exactly a natural fit for their initial criteria. But as that week went on, and the two parties should have been moving towards a final agreement, it was clear that Conte was having second thoughts. By June 4, the move was off.
Why exactly Conte pulled out remains unclear.
One theory is that he did not think Spurs would be able to raise enough money in a depressed marketplace to fund the signings he thought they needed. Another is that Conte doubted their capacity to truly compete for trophies in the next few years. Levy, it should be said, knew how badly the club’s finances had been hit by the pandemic and did not want to over-commit to spending this summer if that meant putting Tottenham’s sustainable model at risk.
The collapse of the Conte talks effectively put Spurs back at square one.
They were starting again, and this time it was Paratici who was in charge. Given the size of the role he was coming into, with oversight on all football decisions, it was only natural that he would have control of the head coach appointment process. Talks continued over the next week with club officials flying out to Turin for more discussions on June 8.
Paratici turned his attentions to Paulo Fonseca. The Portuguese coach, who Spurs had considered at the start of their search, was available having left Roma at the end of last season. He may not have the cachet of Pochettino or Conte but he ticked some of Levy’s boxes. His Shakhtar Donetsk and Roma teams played some attractive football, in keeping with Levy’s initial promises. His three consecutive Ukrainian doubles proved he built teams to win, too.
So Paratici stayed in Italy to hold talks with Fonseca in Milan over the role, and on June 11 — the day the Euros kicked off down in Rome — a deal was agreed for the 48-year-old to sign a two-year contract with the option of a third. Next day, Paratici was announced as Spurs’ new “Managing Director, Football”, with Levy confirming he would be “heading up the football side of the club”. The contracts were sent over to Fonseca, and the hope at that point was he would be unveiled early the following week.
Only the final details were left to be discussed. Paratici arranged one more summit with Fonseca on June 14 and 15 in the Italian resort of Como. They would talk pre-season plans, about ideas for the squad and for the transfer window. The issue of backroom staff was still unresolved. Tottenham wanted Fonseca to bring two coaches of his own, to work alongside two who would be provided by the club.
But over the course of those two days, Paratici changed his mind. There were disagreements about transfer policy. There was no clear plan for the backroom staff. Fonseca felt Levy’s vision of attacking football was at odds with Paratici’s insistence that they fix the defence. Fonseca then flew off from Milan to Kyiv for a family holiday, unimpressed with Tottenham’s prevarication, and sensing something had changed in the negotiations. Indeed, by this point, Paratici had decided to look elsewhere.
The next day, Jorge Mendes called Paratici. The two are close after Paratici masterminded Juventus buying Mendes’ leading client Cristiano Ronaldo from Real Madrid in 2018. Mendes said Gennaro Gattuso was going to walk out on his deal to coach Fiorentina, which he’d only signed a couple of weeks earlier. Gattuso and Fiorentina had fallen out over the club’s reluctance to push for Mendes clients Sergio Oliveira, Jesus Corona and Goncalo Guedes in the transfer market.
Paratici was a big admirer of Gattuso’s work as a coach, in his recent spells at AC Milan and Napoli. If Paratici had stayed at Juventus this summer, he would have brought Gattuso in to replace Andrea Pirlo. But Paratici left and the club brought back Max Allegri instead. So Paratici moved fast.
Paratici met Gattuso and was impressed. Gattuso is a charismatic, persuasive man, and while he does not have the coaching CV of Conte, in his last few jobs he has been popular with his players, and has a good backroom staff behind him. The hope was that he would have the personality and drive to push Tottenham forward for the next few seasons. The next morning, June 17, Gattuso’s departure from Fiorentina was confirmed. By that afternoon, everything was in place for him to take over at Spurs.
But when news broke of Gattuso’s imminent appointment, Tottenham fans were furious. And not just because he had not achieved enough in his brief spells at Pisa, Milan and Napoli to justify getting the job.
Pointing to sexist and homophobic statements Gattuso had made in the past, as well as his downplaying of racist abuse, a #NoToGattuso movement gathered pace on Twitter. Very quickly, the club were bombarded by impassioned fans saying that appointing Gattuso would be utterly incompatible with the values of the club.
The Athletic is aware of one fan who emailed Levy to say he was “disheartened to see you thinking about hiring Gattuso as manager”, “not because of his style of play or anything, but like I’m sure you’ve seen, his statements previously surrounding women in football and his stance on same-sex marriage”. The supporter went on to request that, if Gattuso did get hired, the Italian should address his previous comments in a video for supporters.
Before that Thursday was over, Levy pulled the plug on the move.
It was a bruising week for Tottenham, even more so than the failures to land either Pochettino or Conte.
Spurs had been close to two candidates — neither of them as prominent or attractive as Pochettino or Conte — and pulled out on both of them. By the end of the week, Paratici and Levy were back at square one yet again.
When Levy and Paratici started working on the final phase of the process, Levy was clear on one thing. He did not want to conduct this part of the search in public.
Tottenham were stung by how much of this process had become public knowledge, and were determined that the successful completion of their head coach search would not be leaked out anywhere.
Levy led another meeting on Monday, June 21 to assess where Spurs could turn next. They discussed remaining candidates from the original shortlist. They wanted to be thorough and explore all their options. But it was too late to get Ten Hag out of Ajax. Parker was leaving Fulham for Bournemouth. Martinez and Roberto Mancini were impressing at the Euros, but the timing did not align. No national federation would release their manager to negotiate in the middle of a tournament, and the start of pre-season was two weeks away.
The strongest of those initial candidates now was Potter. Tottenham liked him and his style of play, but they also knew the timing might not be quite right for either party. And given Potter’s release clause, getting him out of Brighton would not be cheap.
Paratici had another idea: going back to Nuno. (Nuno, like Gattuso, is a Mendes client.) Paratici had been a long-term admirer of his coaching career, and his work in Portugal and Spain before his successful spell at Wolves. Paratici argued that Nuno’s teams played better football than some thought, and pointed to how he had coached improvements from many of his Wolves side. Levy was not initially sold, but Paratici made a strong case. By the end of last week, Nuno had edged past Potter and was the new favourite for the job.
Negotiations were not too complex and an initial two-year deal was agreed. One final meeting this Tuesday, June 29, confirmed that Nuno was the club’s choice. He might not have been the man Levy wanted at the start of the process, but it was now almost July and all other credible options had been exhausted. That night, Paratici finally flew into London, to officially start the job he been effectively doing for the past month.
The next day, Wednesday, Nuno arrived to sign the deal pose for photos in Spurs gear.
“I’ve spoken already about the need to revert back to our core DNA of playing attacking, entertaining football,” said Levy, who must have felt like he’d lived through the longest 72 days of his career. “And Fabio and I believe Nuno is the man who can take our talented group of players, embrace our young players coming through and build something special.”
Tottenham’s fans did not appear universally convinced, but at least, after over two months, their club finally have a manager again.
Reading that through, it seems like we had many of the right options on our agenda, and I understand why some didn't pan out, but Levy's still ended up making two really flawed appointments from a club (Spurs) compatibility standpoint, when much better fitting options were very possible.
The longest 72 days of Daniel Levy's career: Inside Tottenham's epic manager hunt
From Jose to Nuno, via Flick, Ten Hag, Pochettino, Conte, Fonseca, Gattuso and more - it has been a bizarre summer at Tottenham Hotspur
Even in a season in which Tottenham went top of the league, collapsed, joined the Super League, sacked Mourinho, replaced him with 29-year-old Ryan Mason and lost a cup final, this 72-day search for a manager will be the phase that stands out.
It has been fascinating and at times dramatic, but it has also damaged the standing of a club for so long seen as a byword for intelligent decision-making. And it has brought back the old questions: what is Tottenham’s identity, and what are they trying to be?
It all started on the morning of Monday, April 19.
The eyes of the world were on the launch of the Super League, announced late the previous night. But even as Daniel Levy was involved in this attempt to rip up the fabric of football, he still had a season to save. Spurs had just drawn 2-2 away to Everton and Levy was desperate to push the team back towards the Champions League places over the 2020-21 campaign’s last six games.
With Mourinho preferring to prioritise the Carabao Cup final the following Sunday over the midweek league game with Southampton that preceded it, Levy finally decided to cut his losses on an expensive failed experiment. Tottenham had appointed a “proven winner” to help them take the final step, but the club had only gone backwards instead. So Mourinho was gone, Mason was in, and the hard work began on finding the new permanent successor.
The model, at this point, was the man Mourinho had replaced 18 months earlier. The feeling was that Tottenham needed to get back to the Pochettino era, and find a new man who could replicate his strengths: a modern, aggressive style of play, a commitment to fitness, a positive coaching environment that improved every player, and above all a sense of unity between the squad, the fans and the club. If Tottenham could not get Pochettino back from his new gig as Paris Saint-Germain coach — and there was little talk of this in April — they wanted someone as similar to him as possible.
But late April and early May was a difficult time for Levy, given how much time he had to spend clearing up the mess from the failed Super League and attending to club finances amid the long-running pandemic. So responsibility largely fell to Steve Hitchen, Spurs’ technical performance director, to draw up a list of available candidates who fitted the bill.
Some attractive candidates were not attainable.
Tottenham have admired Julian Nagelsmann for years and the 33-year-old RB Leipzig coach would have been perfect for the job. But by the time they had a vacancy, he was already too close to signing for Bayern Munich for the next five seasons. He was announced at Bayern on April 27, eight days after Mourinho was sacked.
Brendan Rodgers would have been very attractive too, having come very close to getting the Spurs job in 2012 before he decided to leave Swansea City for Liverpool instead. But Tottenham never got the sense this time that he was interested in leaving Leicester City for them.
Other candidates were considered but then discarded. Southampton’s collapse in the second half of last season counted against Ralph Hasenhuttl, as did the fact Spurs wanted a coach who created a positive atmosphere with the players.
There was some early interest in appointing a young English coach who could rebuild Tottenham over the next four or five years, bringing through a new generation of young players. They considered Fulham’s Scott Parker but thought this was too soon for a man with just over two years of first-team management behind him. More consideration was given to Graham Potter, who has transformed the style of play at Brighton & Hove Albion, but only has two seasons of Premier League coaching experience himself.
Looking abroad, they spoke to Ralf Rangnick, who has pioneered the growth of pressing football in Germany over the last decade, but who was maybe more of a fit for a director of football role rather than as their next head coach. They looked at Roberto Martinez, busy preparing for the European Championship with the world’s No 1-ranked team Belgium, but they knew things had gone sour for him at Everton, and wondered if he was a big enough name for the club.
Near the head of Hitchen’s initial shortlist of candidates was Erik ten Hag.
Here was a candidate who was almost a perfect match for the criteria Levy had laid out. In his three and a half years in charge of Ajax, he had got them playing precisely the sort of attractive front-foot football Spurs wanted, football that showed how much Ten Hag had learned working under Pep Guardiola at Bayern Munich from 2013 to 2015.
His Ajax side had high attacking full-backs, pressing midfielders and forwards who were trusted to create. That style propelled Ajax on their famous run to the semi-finals of the Champions League in spring 2019, eliminating Real Madrid and Juventus before they were knocked out, somehow, by Pochettino’s Spurs. Ten Hag won the Dutch double that season and did it again in 2020-21. He is rated by those who know him as an intelligent, impressive individual who had done well to win over the early doubters in Amsterdam to build something special.
Tottenham sounded out Ten Hag and knew that he was interested.
Ajax extended his contract on April 30, but that did not fundamentally change the dynamic. If Spurs moved for him at the right time, they would be able to get him, and the Dutch giants would not stand in his way. But as many boxes as Ten Hag ticked, he was never the leading candidate in this process, only ever an attractive alternative.
The lead candidate from the first stage of the process, back in early May, was Hansi Flick.
On April 17, two days before Mourinho was sacked, Flick had announced he was to leave Bayern Munich. He had only been in the post for 18 months but in that time had won the German double, Champions League, UEFA Super Cup and Club World Cup at his first attempt, and was on the way to retaining the Bundesliga too. And he had done so playing a brand of hyper-aggressive front-foot football that was more in keeping with Hitchen’s ideas and Levy’s promises than any other available candidate.
Flick had been heavily linked with replacing Joachim Low as the German national team manager after this summer’s Euros, having worked with Low as his assistant from 2006 to 2014. But Tottenham spoke to him repeatedly about becoming their next head coach. They liked his vision of the game, his coaching pedigree and his human qualities. They liked his young assistant Danny Rohl, who was the genius behind Hasenhuttl’s Southampton before he moved to Bayern in the summer of 2019. They liked Flick’s CV, having been sporting director of both the German FA and Bundesliga club Hoffenheim, sensing that this gave him a broader view of the job.
Flick, by this stage, was receiving interest from all around Europe for next season, including from Barcelona. But he did not want to work in a language other than English and German, and so Spain was never a likely destination. Of all the clubs interested in him, Spurs was the best fitting option, but they never did quite enough to convince him to join.
In the middle of May, Flick told Tottenham he would be taking over the Germany national team job after all. He was officially announced as Low’s post-Euros successor on May 25.
After these early attempts to find a new version of Pochettino, why not go for the man himself?
Even 18 months after his sacking by Levy, Pochettino still enjoys a good relationship with plenty of people at the club, speaking to them frequently. The fact he was appointed as the new head coach of Paris Saint-Germain at Christmas has not changed that.
During a difficult first half-season in charge of PSG, Pochettino would vent his frustrations about his new life to his old friends and colleagues in London. He was confronted with the same political issues predecessor Thomas Tuchel had faced in the job, the fact that the head coach was never going to be as powerful as sporting director Leonardo at that club. He had to try to build a shared ethos between players inhabiting very different worlds, from Neymar on €36 million per year net, down to the rest. And he had to do it all without fully settling down, living in a Paris hotel while his family were still in London.
People at Tottenham started to wonder whether they could tempt Pochettino back to the club. Nobody could fulfil Levy’s promises about Tottenham “DNA” better than the man who created Spurs’ modern identity in the first place.
Throughout May, Hitchen was speaking to Pochettino about a possible return, and when he returned to his home in north London after PSG’s season finished on May 23, those talks intensified. The Argentinian was torn on the matter: one large, emotional part of him was desperate to return to Tottenham, where he was so loved by the fans, where he had real power within the club, and where everything seemed to make sense. At the same time, another part of him was reluctant to walk out on PSG, and players as gifted as Kylian Mbappe, after such a short spell there.
Tottenham knew Pochettino might have to force his way out of PSG to rejoin them. And they knew that even then, PSG still had it in their power to say no. Sure enough, the French side bristled at the suggestion they were going to lose their new head coach against their will. There was some frustration in Paris that Spurs, scrambling around for a solution to satisfy their fans, would try to turn the head of another club’s head coach like this. “Tottenham may be looking to start a fire in somebody else’s house to deflect from their own arson,” one source there said.
PSG had endured enough disruption already, sacking Tuchel and getting Pochettino in at mid-season. They insisted very clearly that no matter how tempted Pochettino might be by a romantic return to Tottenham, and a suspected doubling in his salary, he would be going nowhere. Pochettino had a contract, and he would be held to it.
From this point, it was clear there was little Pochettino or Tottenham could do. By the last weekend in May, PSG club president Nasser al Khelaifi had spoken to Pochettino and told him he was going nowhere. PSG pushed on with their plans for summer, with deals for Georginio Wijnaldum and Achraf Hakimi lined up, and Tottenham realised Pochettino was staying put.
Tottenham could have pressed on with their original list at this stage and appointed Ten Hag. While PSG are rich enough to reject any approaches for their head coach, Ajax aren’t. If Spurs had gone back in for Ten Hag in May, giving Ajax enough time to appoint a replacement, they would have got him. But Levy had other ideas.
The end of the season had been a difficult time for Levy as he dealt with the Super League fallout, strained relations with the fans, club finances, and other issues away from the pitch. But by the end of May, he was able to focus on a new plan for the running of the club.
The idea had been suggested to Levy that he should recruit a new senior football executive, a big figure to whom he could delegate football decisions. He had been told that Fabio Paratici, who had helped to orchestrate much of Juventus’ success over the last few years, was on his way out in Turin. If Pochettino had taken the job in late May then the old structure would have remained, but once that idea was dead, Levy seized on the opportunity to bring some new football expertise in.
He began to explore the Paratici move at the end of May, but with Pochettino now off the table, he still needed a coach. And Paratici knew just the man for the job.
Antonio Conte was not exactly in tune with Levy’s promises to appoint a coach for a rebuild focusing on young players. But he is certainly one of the top five coaches in the world. And on May 26, the day Paratici left Juventus, Conte also left newly-crowned Serie A champions Inter Milan. He was looking for a new job and made clear via intermediaries he was interested in the Tottenham one.
Suddenly a new plan was coming together. Paratici and Conte had a good relationship from their time working together at Juventus. Conte often falls out with the clubs he works for, but he didn’t with Paratici. And if Paratici could help to deliver a coach as good as Conte, he could get Spurs challenging for trophies again in his first season in charge.
In the first week of June, Levy pressed on with this new plan. When Conte discussed the role with Tottenham, he was hugely impressive, and spoke like a man who wanted the job. He talked in detail about his ambitions and his plans, how he would get the players fitter — something the club is especially keen on right now — and organise them defensively again. Conte has a reputation for being demanding but there were no issues raised over his salary or terms.
But in that interview, Conte also warned the club that if they had any doubts about signing him, they should not do it. He believed that as long as he was allowed to drive this project as he wanted, then it would work, and hinted that if he ever felt that the club lied to him, he would walk out, just as he’d just done at Inter.
After this call, there was confidence at Tottenham a deal could be done, and that they had found a manager far better and more successful than many they had looked at over the course of the process. Even if Conte was not exactly a natural fit for their initial criteria. But as that week went on, and the two parties should have been moving towards a final agreement, it was clear that Conte was having second thoughts. By June 4, the move was off.
Why exactly Conte pulled out remains unclear.
One theory is that he did not think Spurs would be able to raise enough money in a depressed marketplace to fund the signings he thought they needed. Another is that Conte doubted their capacity to truly compete for trophies in the next few years. Levy, it should be said, knew how badly the club’s finances had been hit by the pandemic and did not want to over-commit to spending this summer if that meant putting Tottenham’s sustainable model at risk.
The collapse of the Conte talks effectively put Spurs back at square one.
They were starting again, and this time it was Paratici who was in charge. Given the size of the role he was coming into, with oversight on all football decisions, it was only natural that he would have control of the head coach appointment process. Talks continued over the next week with club officials flying out to Turin for more discussions on June 8.
Paratici turned his attentions to Paulo Fonseca. The Portuguese coach, who Spurs had considered at the start of their search, was available having left Roma at the end of last season. He may not have the cachet of Pochettino or Conte but he ticked some of Levy’s boxes. His Shakhtar Donetsk and Roma teams played some attractive football, in keeping with Levy’s initial promises. His three consecutive Ukrainian doubles proved he built teams to win, too.
So Paratici stayed in Italy to hold talks with Fonseca in Milan over the role, and on June 11 — the day the Euros kicked off down in Rome — a deal was agreed for the 48-year-old to sign a two-year contract with the option of a third. Next day, Paratici was announced as Spurs’ new “Managing Director, Football”, with Levy confirming he would be “heading up the football side of the club”. The contracts were sent over to Fonseca, and the hope at that point was he would be unveiled early the following week.
Only the final details were left to be discussed. Paratici arranged one more summit with Fonseca on June 14 and 15 in the Italian resort of Como. They would talk pre-season plans, about ideas for the squad and for the transfer window. The issue of backroom staff was still unresolved. Tottenham wanted Fonseca to bring two coaches of his own, to work alongside two who would be provided by the club.
But over the course of those two days, Paratici changed his mind. There were disagreements about transfer policy. There was no clear plan for the backroom staff. Fonseca felt Levy’s vision of attacking football was at odds with Paratici’s insistence that they fix the defence. Fonseca then flew off from Milan to Kyiv for a family holiday, unimpressed with Tottenham’s prevarication, and sensing something had changed in the negotiations. Indeed, by this point, Paratici had decided to look elsewhere.
The next day, Jorge Mendes called Paratici. The two are close after Paratici masterminded Juventus buying Mendes’ leading client Cristiano Ronaldo from Real Madrid in 2018. Mendes said Gennaro Gattuso was going to walk out on his deal to coach Fiorentina, which he’d only signed a couple of weeks earlier. Gattuso and Fiorentina had fallen out over the club’s reluctance to push for Mendes clients Sergio Oliveira, Jesus Corona and Goncalo Guedes in the transfer market.
Paratici was a big admirer of Gattuso’s work as a coach, in his recent spells at AC Milan and Napoli. If Paratici had stayed at Juventus this summer, he would have brought Gattuso in to replace Andrea Pirlo. But Paratici left and the club brought back Max Allegri instead. So Paratici moved fast.
Paratici met Gattuso and was impressed. Gattuso is a charismatic, persuasive man, and while he does not have the coaching CV of Conte, in his last few jobs he has been popular with his players, and has a good backroom staff behind him. The hope was that he would have the personality and drive to push Tottenham forward for the next few seasons. The next morning, June 17, Gattuso’s departure from Fiorentina was confirmed. By that afternoon, everything was in place for him to take over at Spurs.
But when news broke of Gattuso’s imminent appointment, Tottenham fans were furious. And not just because he had not achieved enough in his brief spells at Pisa, Milan and Napoli to justify getting the job.
Pointing to sexist and homophobic statements Gattuso had made in the past, as well as his downplaying of racist abuse, a #NoToGattuso movement gathered pace on Twitter. Very quickly, the club were bombarded by impassioned fans saying that appointing Gattuso would be utterly incompatible with the values of the club.
The Athletic is aware of one fan who emailed Levy to say he was “disheartened to see you thinking about hiring Gattuso as manager”, “not because of his style of play or anything, but like I’m sure you’ve seen, his statements previously surrounding women in football and his stance on same-sex marriage”. The supporter went on to request that, if Gattuso did get hired, the Italian should address his previous comments in a video for supporters.
Before that Thursday was over, Levy pulled the plug on the move.
It was a bruising week for Tottenham, even more so than the failures to land either Pochettino or Conte.
Spurs had been close to two candidates — neither of them as prominent or attractive as Pochettino or Conte — and pulled out on both of them. By the end of the week, Paratici and Levy were back at square one yet again.
When Levy and Paratici started working on the final phase of the process, Levy was clear on one thing. He did not want to conduct this part of the search in public.
Tottenham were stung by how much of this process had become public knowledge, and were determined that the successful completion of their head coach search would not be leaked out anywhere.
Levy led another meeting on Monday, June 21 to assess where Spurs could turn next. They discussed remaining candidates from the original shortlist. They wanted to be thorough and explore all their options. But it was too late to get Ten Hag out of Ajax. Parker was leaving Fulham for Bournemouth. Martinez and Roberto Mancini were impressing at the Euros, but the timing did not align. No national federation would release their manager to negotiate in the middle of a tournament, and the start of pre-season was two weeks away.
The strongest of those initial candidates now was Potter. Tottenham liked him and his style of play, but they also knew the timing might not be quite right for either party. And given Potter’s release clause, getting him out of Brighton would not be cheap.
Paratici had another idea: going back to Nuno. (Nuno, like Gattuso, is a Mendes client.) Paratici had been a long-term admirer of his coaching career, and his work in Portugal and Spain before his successful spell at Wolves. Paratici argued that Nuno’s teams played better football than some thought, and pointed to how he had coached improvements from many of his Wolves side. Levy was not initially sold, but Paratici made a strong case. By the end of last week, Nuno had edged past Potter and was the new favourite for the job.
Negotiations were not too complex and an initial two-year deal was agreed. One final meeting this Tuesday, June 29, confirmed that Nuno was the club’s choice. He might not have been the man Levy wanted at the start of the process, but it was now almost July and all other credible options had been exhausted. That night, Paratici finally flew into London, to officially start the job he been effectively doing for the past month.
The next day, Wednesday, Nuno arrived to sign the deal pose for photos in Spurs gear.
“I’ve spoken already about the need to revert back to our core DNA of playing attacking, entertaining football,” said Levy, who must have felt like he’d lived through the longest 72 days of his career. “And Fabio and I believe Nuno is the man who can take our talented group of players, embrace our young players coming through and build something special.”
Tottenham’s fans did not appear universally convinced, but at least, after over two months, their club finally have a manager again.
You are too kind, Utter Shitshow would be a better description.
The biggest problem was why all of this is public. Some details may not be true but unless the Club put out a different version then that is what people believe. However it confirms my view that Nuno is a Paratici appointment and not a Levy one.Reading that through, it seems like we had many of the right options on our agenda, and I understand why some didn't pan out, but Levy's still ended up making two really flawed appointments from a club (Spurs) compatibility standpoint, when much better fitting options were very possible.
The longest 72 days of Daniel Levy's career: Inside Tottenham's epic manager hunt
From Jose to Nuno, via Flick, Ten Hag, Pochettino, Conte, Fonseca, Gattuso and more - it has been a bizarre summer at Tottenham Hotspur
Even in a season in which Tottenham went top of the league, collapsed, joined the Super League, sacked Mourinho, replaced him with 29-year-old Ryan Mason and lost a cup final, this 72-day search for a manager will be the phase that stands out.
It has been fascinating and at times dramatic, but it has also damaged the standing of a club for so long seen as a byword for intelligent decision-making. And it has brought back the old questions: what is Tottenham’s identity, and what are they trying to be?
It all started on the morning of Monday, April 19.
The eyes of the world were on the launch of the Super League, announced late the previous night. But even as Daniel Levy was involved in this attempt to rip up the fabric of football, he still had a season to save. Spurs had just drawn 2-2 away to Everton and Levy was desperate to push the team back towards the Champions League places over the 2020-21 campaign’s last six games.
With Mourinho preferring to prioritise the Carabao Cup final the following Sunday over the midweek league game with Southampton that preceded it, Levy finally decided to cut his losses on an expensive failed experiment. Tottenham had appointed a “proven winner” to help them take the final step, but the club had only gone backwards instead. So Mourinho was gone, Mason was in, and the hard work began on finding the new permanent successor.
The model, at this point, was the man Mourinho had replaced 18 months earlier. The feeling was that Tottenham needed to get back to the Pochettino era, and find a new man who could replicate his strengths: a modern, aggressive style of play, a commitment to fitness, a positive coaching environment that improved every player, and above all a sense of unity between the squad, the fans and the club. If Tottenham could not get Pochettino back from his new gig as Paris Saint-Germain coach — and there was little talk of this in April — they wanted someone as similar to him as possible.
But late April and early May was a difficult time for Levy, given how much time he had to spend clearing up the mess from the failed Super League and attending to club finances amid the long-running pandemic. So responsibility largely fell to Steve Hitchen, Spurs’ technical performance director, to draw up a list of available candidates who fitted the bill.
Some attractive candidates were not attainable.
Tottenham have admired Julian Nagelsmann for years and the 33-year-old RB Leipzig coach would have been perfect for the job. But by the time they had a vacancy, he was already too close to signing for Bayern Munich for the next five seasons. He was announced at Bayern on April 27, eight days after Mourinho was sacked.
Brendan Rodgers would have been very attractive too, having come very close to getting the Spurs job in 2012 before he decided to leave Swansea City for Liverpool instead. But Tottenham never got the sense this time that he was interested in leaving Leicester City for them.
Other candidates were considered but then discarded. Southampton’s collapse in the second half of last season counted against Ralph Hasenhuttl, as did the fact Spurs wanted a coach who created a positive atmosphere with the players.
There was some early interest in appointing a young English coach who could rebuild Tottenham over the next four or five years, bringing through a new generation of young players. They considered Fulham’s Scott Parker but thought this was too soon for a man with just over two years of first-team management behind him. More consideration was given to Graham Potter, who has transformed the style of play at Brighton & Hove Albion, but only has two seasons of Premier League coaching experience himself.
Looking abroad, they spoke to Ralf Rangnick, who has pioneered the growth of pressing football in Germany over the last decade, but who was maybe more of a fit for a director of football role rather than as their next head coach. They looked at Roberto Martinez, busy preparing for the European Championship with the world’s No 1-ranked team Belgium, but they knew things had gone sour for him at Everton, and wondered if he was a big enough name for the club.
Near the head of Hitchen’s initial shortlist of candidates was Erik ten Hag.
Here was a candidate who was almost a perfect match for the criteria Levy had laid out. In his three and a half years in charge of Ajax, he had got them playing precisely the sort of attractive front-foot football Spurs wanted, football that showed how much Ten Hag had learned working under Pep Guardiola at Bayern Munich from 2013 to 2015.
His Ajax side had high attacking full-backs, pressing midfielders and forwards who were trusted to create. That style propelled Ajax on their famous run to the semi-finals of the Champions League in spring 2019, eliminating Real Madrid and Juventus before they were knocked out, somehow, by Pochettino’s Spurs. Ten Hag won the Dutch double that season and did it again in 2020-21. He is rated by those who know him as an intelligent, impressive individual who had done well to win over the early doubters in Amsterdam to build something special.
Tottenham sounded out Ten Hag and knew that he was interested.
Ajax extended his contract on April 30, but that did not fundamentally change the dynamic. If Spurs moved for him at the right time, they would be able to get him, and the Dutch giants would not stand in his way. But as many boxes as Ten Hag ticked, he was never the leading candidate in this process, only ever an attractive alternative.
The lead candidate from the first stage of the process, back in early May, was Hansi Flick.
On April 17, two days before Mourinho was sacked, Flick had announced he was to leave Bayern Munich. He had only been in the post for 18 months but in that time had won the German double, Champions League, UEFA Super Cup and Club World Cup at his first attempt, and was on the way to retaining the Bundesliga too. And he had done so playing a brand of hyper-aggressive front-foot football that was more in keeping with Hitchen’s ideas and Levy’s promises than any other available candidate.
Flick had been heavily linked with replacing Joachim Low as the German national team manager after this summer’s Euros, having worked with Low as his assistant from 2006 to 2014. But Tottenham spoke to him repeatedly about becoming their next head coach. They liked his vision of the game, his coaching pedigree and his human qualities. They liked his young assistant Danny Rohl, who was the genius behind Hasenhuttl’s Southampton before he moved to Bayern in the summer of 2019. They liked Flick’s CV, having been sporting director of both the German FA and Bundesliga club Hoffenheim, sensing that this gave him a broader view of the job.
Flick, by this stage, was receiving interest from all around Europe for next season, including from Barcelona. But he did not want to work in a language other than English and German, and so Spain was never a likely destination. Of all the clubs interested in him, Spurs was the best fitting option, but they never did quite enough to convince him to join.
In the middle of May, Flick told Tottenham he would be taking over the Germany national team job after all. He was officially announced as Low’s post-Euros successor on May 25.
After these early attempts to find a new version of Pochettino, why not go for the man himself?
Even 18 months after his sacking by Levy, Pochettino still enjoys a good relationship with plenty of people at the club, speaking to them frequently. The fact he was appointed as the new head coach of Paris Saint-Germain at Christmas has not changed that.
During a difficult first half-season in charge of PSG, Pochettino would vent his frustrations about his new life to his old friends and colleagues in London. He was confronted with the same political issues predecessor Thomas Tuchel had faced in the job, the fact that the head coach was never going to be as powerful as sporting director Leonardo at that club. He had to try to build a shared ethos between players inhabiting very different worlds, from Neymar on €36 million per year net, down to the rest. And he had to do it all without fully settling down, living in a Paris hotel while his family were still in London.
People at Tottenham started to wonder whether they could tempt Pochettino back to the club. Nobody could fulfil Levy’s promises about Tottenham “DNA” better than the man who created Spurs’ modern identity in the first place.
Throughout May, Hitchen was speaking to Pochettino about a possible return, and when he returned to his home in north London after PSG’s season finished on May 23, those talks intensified. The Argentinian was torn on the matter: one large, emotional part of him was desperate to return to Tottenham, where he was so loved by the fans, where he had real power within the club, and where everything seemed to make sense. At the same time, another part of him was reluctant to walk out on PSG, and players as gifted as Kylian Mbappe, after such a short spell there.
Tottenham knew Pochettino might have to force his way out of PSG to rejoin them. And they knew that even then, PSG still had it in their power to say no. Sure enough, the French side bristled at the suggestion they were going to lose their new head coach against their will. There was some frustration in Paris that Spurs, scrambling around for a solution to satisfy their fans, would try to turn the head of another club’s head coach like this. “Tottenham may be looking to start a fire in somebody else’s house to deflect from their own arson,” one source there said.
PSG had endured enough disruption already, sacking Tuchel and getting Pochettino in at mid-season. They insisted very clearly that no matter how tempted Pochettino might be by a romantic return to Tottenham, and a suspected doubling in his salary, he would be going nowhere. Pochettino had a contract, and he would be held to it.
From this point, it was clear there was little Pochettino or Tottenham could do. By the last weekend in May, PSG club president Nasser al Khelaifi had spoken to Pochettino and told him he was going nowhere. PSG pushed on with their plans for summer, with deals for Georginio Wijnaldum and Achraf Hakimi lined up, and Tottenham realised Pochettino was staying put.
Tottenham could have pressed on with their original list at this stage and appointed Ten Hag. While PSG are rich enough to reject any approaches for their head coach, Ajax aren’t. If Spurs had gone back in for Ten Hag in May, giving Ajax enough time to appoint a replacement, they would have got him. But Levy had other ideas.
The end of the season had been a difficult time for Levy as he dealt with the Super League fallout, strained relations with the fans, club finances, and other issues away from the pitch. But by the end of May, he was able to focus on a new plan for the running of the club.
The idea had been suggested to Levy that he should recruit a new senior football executive, a big figure to whom he could delegate football decisions. He had been told that Fabio Paratici, who had helped to orchestrate much of Juventus’ success over the last few years, was on his way out in Turin. If Pochettino had taken the job in late May then the old structure would have remained, but once that idea was dead, Levy seized on the opportunity to bring some new football expertise in.
He began to explore the Paratici move at the end of May, but with Pochettino now off the table, he still needed a coach. And Paratici knew just the man for the job.
Antonio Conte was not exactly in tune with Levy’s promises to appoint a coach for a rebuild focusing on young players. But he is certainly one of the top five coaches in the world. And on May 26, the day Paratici left Juventus, Conte also left newly-crowned Serie A champions Inter Milan. He was looking for a new job and made clear via intermediaries he was interested in the Tottenham one.
Suddenly a new plan was coming together. Paratici and Conte had a good relationship from their time working together at Juventus. Conte often falls out with the clubs he works for, but he didn’t with Paratici. And if Paratici could help to deliver a coach as good as Conte, he could get Spurs challenging for trophies again in his first season in charge.
In the first week of June, Levy pressed on with this new plan. When Conte discussed the role with Tottenham, he was hugely impressive, and spoke like a man who wanted the job. He talked in detail about his ambitions and his plans, how he would get the players fitter — something the club is especially keen on right now — and organise them defensively again. Conte has a reputation for being demanding but there were no issues raised over his salary or terms.
But in that interview, Conte also warned the club that if they had any doubts about signing him, they should not do it. He believed that as long as he was allowed to drive this project as he wanted, then it would work, and hinted that if he ever felt that the club lied to him, he would walk out, just as he’d just done at Inter.
After this call, there was confidence at Tottenham a deal could be done, and that they had found a manager far better and more successful than many they had looked at over the course of the process. Even if Conte was not exactly a natural fit for their initial criteria. But as that week went on, and the two parties should have been moving towards a final agreement, it was clear that Conte was having second thoughts. By June 4, the move was off.
Why exactly Conte pulled out remains unclear.
One theory is that he did not think Spurs would be able to raise enough money in a depressed marketplace to fund the signings he thought they needed. Another is that Conte doubted their capacity to truly compete for trophies in the next few years. Levy, it should be said, knew how badly the club’s finances had been hit by the pandemic and did not want to over-commit to spending this summer if that meant putting Tottenham’s sustainable model at risk.
The collapse of the Conte talks effectively put Spurs back at square one.
They were starting again, and this time it was Paratici who was in charge. Given the size of the role he was coming into, with oversight on all football decisions, it was only natural that he would have control of the head coach appointment process. Talks continued over the next week with club officials flying out to Turin for more discussions on June 8.
Paratici turned his attentions to Paulo Fonseca. The Portuguese coach, who Spurs had considered at the start of their search, was available having left Roma at the end of last season. He may not have the cachet of Pochettino or Conte but he ticked some of Levy’s boxes. His Shakhtar Donetsk and Roma teams played some attractive football, in keeping with Levy’s initial promises. His three consecutive Ukrainian doubles proved he built teams to win, too.
So Paratici stayed in Italy to hold talks with Fonseca in Milan over the role, and on June 11 — the day the Euros kicked off down in Rome — a deal was agreed for the 48-year-old to sign a two-year contract with the option of a third. Next day, Paratici was announced as Spurs’ new “Managing Director, Football”, with Levy confirming he would be “heading up the football side of the club”. The contracts were sent over to Fonseca, and the hope at that point was he would be unveiled early the following week.
Only the final details were left to be discussed. Paratici arranged one more summit with Fonseca on June 14 and 15 in the Italian resort of Como. They would talk pre-season plans, about ideas for the squad and for the transfer window. The issue of backroom staff was still unresolved. Tottenham wanted Fonseca to bring two coaches of his own, to work alongside two who would be provided by the club.
But over the course of those two days, Paratici changed his mind. There were disagreements about transfer policy. There was no clear plan for the backroom staff. Fonseca felt Levy’s vision of attacking football was at odds with Paratici’s insistence that they fix the defence. Fonseca then flew off from Milan to Kyiv for a family holiday, unimpressed with Tottenham’s prevarication, and sensing something had changed in the negotiations. Indeed, by this point, Paratici had decided to look elsewhere.
The next day, Jorge Mendes called Paratici. The two are close after Paratici masterminded Juventus buying Mendes’ leading client Cristiano Ronaldo from Real Madrid in 2018. Mendes said Gennaro Gattuso was going to walk out on his deal to coach Fiorentina, which he’d only signed a couple of weeks earlier. Gattuso and Fiorentina had fallen out over the club’s reluctance to push for Mendes clients Sergio Oliveira, Jesus Corona and Goncalo Guedes in the transfer market.
Paratici was a big admirer of Gattuso’s work as a coach, in his recent spells at AC Milan and Napoli. If Paratici had stayed at Juventus this summer, he would have brought Gattuso in to replace Andrea Pirlo. But Paratici left and the club brought back Max Allegri instead. So Paratici moved fast.
Paratici met Gattuso and was impressed. Gattuso is a charismatic, persuasive man, and while he does not have the coaching CV of Conte, in his last few jobs he has been popular with his players, and has a good backroom staff behind him. The hope was that he would have the personality and drive to push Tottenham forward for the next few seasons. The next morning, June 17, Gattuso’s departure from Fiorentina was confirmed. By that afternoon, everything was in place for him to take over at Spurs.
But when news broke of Gattuso’s imminent appointment, Tottenham fans were furious. And not just because he had not achieved enough in his brief spells at Pisa, Milan and Napoli to justify getting the job.
Pointing to sexist and homophobic statements Gattuso had made in the past, as well as his downplaying of racist abuse, a #NoToGattuso movement gathered pace on Twitter. Very quickly, the club were bombarded by impassioned fans saying that appointing Gattuso would be utterly incompatible with the values of the club.
The Athletic is aware of one fan who emailed Levy to say he was “disheartened to see you thinking about hiring Gattuso as manager”, “not because of his style of play or anything, but like I’m sure you’ve seen, his statements previously surrounding women in football and his stance on same-sex marriage”. The supporter went on to request that, if Gattuso did get hired, the Italian should address his previous comments in a video for supporters.
Before that Thursday was over, Levy pulled the plug on the move.
It was a bruising week for Tottenham, even more so than the failures to land either Pochettino or Conte.
Spurs had been close to two candidates — neither of them as prominent or attractive as Pochettino or Conte — and pulled out on both of them. By the end of the week, Paratici and Levy were back at square one yet again.
When Levy and Paratici started working on the final phase of the process, Levy was clear on one thing. He did not want to conduct this part of the search in public.
Tottenham were stung by how much of this process had become public knowledge, and were determined that the successful completion of their head coach search would not be leaked out anywhere.
Levy led another meeting on Monday, June 21 to assess where Spurs could turn next. They discussed remaining candidates from the original shortlist. They wanted to be thorough and explore all their options. But it was too late to get Ten Hag out of Ajax. Parker was leaving Fulham for Bournemouth. Martinez and Roberto Mancini were impressing at the Euros, but the timing did not align. No national federation would release their manager to negotiate in the middle of a tournament, and the start of pre-season was two weeks away.
The strongest of those initial candidates now was Potter. Tottenham liked him and his style of play, but they also knew the timing might not be quite right for either party. And given Potter’s release clause, getting him out of Brighton would not be cheap.
Paratici had another idea: going back to Nuno. (Nuno, like Gattuso, is a Mendes client.) Paratici had been a long-term admirer of his coaching career, and his work in Portugal and Spain before his successful spell at Wolves. Paratici argued that Nuno’s teams played better football than some thought, and pointed to how he had coached improvements from many of his Wolves side. Levy was not initially sold, but Paratici made a strong case. By the end of last week, Nuno had edged past Potter and was the new favourite for the job.
Negotiations were not too complex and an initial two-year deal was agreed. One final meeting this Tuesday, June 29, confirmed that Nuno was the club’s choice. He might not have been the man Levy wanted at the start of the process, but it was now almost July and all other credible options had been exhausted. That night, Paratici finally flew into London, to officially start the job he been effectively doing for the past month.
The next day, Wednesday, Nuno arrived to sign the deal pose for photos in Spurs gear.
“I’ve spoken already about the need to revert back to our core DNA of playing attacking, entertaining football,” said Levy, who must have felt like he’d lived through the longest 72 days of his career. “And Fabio and I believe Nuno is the man who can take our talented group of players, embrace our young players coming through and build something special.”
Tottenham’s fans did not appear universally convinced, but at least, after over two months, their club finally have a manager again.
.....Which is for the best if this punt at a DOF system is gonna work.
I thought that too...but after reading that it does look like they did try. It's a different world at the minute, club finances Europe wide are a fucking mess and getting another club's manager isn't quite as easy as it used to be...maybe we could have pushed the boat out for Conte, but it looks like a few other clubs don't fancy the risk either...
referring more to Ten Hag and Potter than Conte, Conte was always a wild throw of the dice.
Reading that through, it seems like we had many of the right options on our agenda, and I understand why some didn't pan out, but Levy's still ended up making two really flawed appointments from a club (Spurs) compatibility standpoint, when much better fitting options were very possible.
The longest 72 days of Daniel Levy's career: Inside Tottenham's epic manager hunt
From Jose to Nuno, via Flick, Ten Hag, Pochettino, Conte, Fonseca, Gattuso and more - it has been a bizarre summer at Tottenham Hotspur
Even in a season in which Tottenham went top of the league, collapsed, joined the Super League, sacked Mourinho, replaced him with 29-year-old Ryan Mason and lost a cup final, this 72-day search for a manager will be the phase that stands out.
It has been fascinating and at times dramatic, but it has also damaged the standing of a club for so long seen as a byword for intelligent decision-making. And it has brought back the old questions: what is Tottenham’s identity, and what are they trying to be?
It all started on the morning of Monday, April 19.
The eyes of the world were on the launch of the Super League, announced late the previous night. But even as Daniel Levy was involved in this attempt to rip up the fabric of football, he still had a season to save. Spurs had just drawn 2-2 away to Everton and Levy was desperate to push the team back towards the Champions League places over the 2020-21 campaign’s last six games.
With Mourinho preferring to prioritise the Carabao Cup final the following Sunday over the midweek league game with Southampton that preceded it, Levy finally decided to cut his losses on an expensive failed experiment. Tottenham had appointed a “proven winner” to help them take the final step, but the club had only gone backwards instead. So Mourinho was gone, Mason was in, and the hard work began on finding the new permanent successor.
The model, at this point, was the man Mourinho had replaced 18 months earlier. The feeling was that Tottenham needed to get back to the Pochettino era, and find a new man who could replicate his strengths: a modern, aggressive style of play, a commitment to fitness, a positive coaching environment that improved every player, and above all a sense of unity between the squad, the fans and the club. If Tottenham could not get Pochettino back from his new gig as Paris Saint-Germain coach — and there was little talk of this in April — they wanted someone as similar to him as possible.
But late April and early May was a difficult time for Levy, given how much time he had to spend clearing up the mess from the failed Super League and attending to club finances amid the long-running pandemic. So responsibility largely fell to Steve Hitchen, Spurs’ technical performance director, to draw up a list of available candidates who fitted the bill.
Some attractive candidates were not attainable.
Tottenham have admired Julian Nagelsmann for years and the 33-year-old RB Leipzig coach would have been perfect for the job. But by the time they had a vacancy, he was already too close to signing for Bayern Munich for the next five seasons. He was announced at Bayern on April 27, eight days after Mourinho was sacked.
Brendan Rodgers would have been very attractive too, having come very close to getting the Spurs job in 2012 before he decided to leave Swansea City for Liverpool instead. But Tottenham never got the sense this time that he was interested in leaving Leicester City for them.
Other candidates were considered but then discarded. Southampton’s collapse in the second half of last season counted against Ralph Hasenhuttl, as did the fact Spurs wanted a coach who created a positive atmosphere with the players.
There was some early interest in appointing a young English coach who could rebuild Tottenham over the next four or five years, bringing through a new generation of young players. They considered Fulham’s Scott Parker but thought this was too soon for a man with just over two years of first-team management behind him. More consideration was given to Graham Potter, who has transformed the style of play at Brighton & Hove Albion, but only has two seasons of Premier League coaching experience himself.
Looking abroad, they spoke to Ralf Rangnick, who has pioneered the growth of pressing football in Germany over the last decade, but who was maybe more of a fit for a director of football role rather than as their next head coach. They looked at Roberto Martinez, busy preparing for the European Championship with the world’s No 1-ranked team Belgium, but they knew things had gone sour for him at Everton, and wondered if he was a big enough name for the club.
Near the head of Hitchen’s initial shortlist of candidates was Erik ten Hag.
Here was a candidate who was almost a perfect match for the criteria Levy had laid out. In his three and a half years in charge of Ajax, he had got them playing precisely the sort of attractive front-foot football Spurs wanted, football that showed how much Ten Hag had learned working under Pep Guardiola at Bayern Munich from 2013 to 2015.
His Ajax side had high attacking full-backs, pressing midfielders and forwards who were trusted to create. That style propelled Ajax on their famous run to the semi-finals of the Champions League in spring 2019, eliminating Real Madrid and Juventus before they were knocked out, somehow, by Pochettino’s Spurs. Ten Hag won the Dutch double that season and did it again in 2020-21. He is rated by those who know him as an intelligent, impressive individual who had done well to win over the early doubters in Amsterdam to build something special.
Tottenham sounded out Ten Hag and knew that he was interested.
Ajax extended his contract on April 30, but that did not fundamentally change the dynamic. If Spurs moved for him at the right time, they would be able to get him, and the Dutch giants would not stand in his way. But as many boxes as Ten Hag ticked, he was never the leading candidate in this process, only ever an attractive alternative.
The lead candidate from the first stage of the process, back in early May, was Hansi Flick.
On April 17, two days before Mourinho was sacked, Flick had announced he was to leave Bayern Munich. He had only been in the post for 18 months but in that time had won the German double, Champions League, UEFA Super Cup and Club World Cup at his first attempt, and was on the way to retaining the Bundesliga too. And he had done so playing a brand of hyper-aggressive front-foot football that was more in keeping with Hitchen’s ideas and Levy’s promises than any other available candidate.
Flick had been heavily linked with replacing Joachim Low as the German national team manager after this summer’s Euros, having worked with Low as his assistant from 2006 to 2014. But Tottenham spoke to him repeatedly about becoming their next head coach. They liked his vision of the game, his coaching pedigree and his human qualities. They liked his young assistant Danny Rohl, who was the genius behind Hasenhuttl’s Southampton before he moved to Bayern in the summer of 2019. They liked Flick’s CV, having been sporting director of both the German FA and Bundesliga club Hoffenheim, sensing that this gave him a broader view of the job.
Flick, by this stage, was receiving interest from all around Europe for next season, including from Barcelona. But he did not want to work in a language other than English and German, and so Spain was never a likely destination. Of all the clubs interested in him, Spurs was the best fitting option, but they never did quite enough to convince him to join.
In the middle of May, Flick told Tottenham he would be taking over the Germany national team job after all. He was officially announced as Low’s post-Euros successor on May 25.
After these early attempts to find a new version of Pochettino, why not go for the man himself?
Even 18 months after his sacking by Levy, Pochettino still enjoys a good relationship with plenty of people at the club, speaking to them frequently. The fact he was appointed as the new head coach of Paris Saint-Germain at Christmas has not changed that.
During a difficult first half-season in charge of PSG, Pochettino would vent his frustrations about his new life to his old friends and colleagues in London. He was confronted with the same political issues predecessor Thomas Tuchel had faced in the job, the fact that the head coach was never going to be as powerful as sporting director Leonardo at that club. He had to try to build a shared ethos between players inhabiting very different worlds, from Neymar on €36 million per year net, down to the rest. And he had to do it all without fully settling down, living in a Paris hotel while his family were still in London.
People at Tottenham started to wonder whether they could tempt Pochettino back to the club. Nobody could fulfil Levy’s promises about Tottenham “DNA” better than the man who created Spurs’ modern identity in the first place.
Throughout May, Hitchen was speaking to Pochettino about a possible return, and when he returned to his home in north London after PSG’s season finished on May 23, those talks intensified. The Argentinian was torn on the matter: one large, emotional part of him was desperate to return to Tottenham, where he was so loved by the fans, where he had real power within the club, and where everything seemed to make sense. At the same time, another part of him was reluctant to walk out on PSG, and players as gifted as Kylian Mbappe, after such a short spell there.
Tottenham knew Pochettino might have to force his way out of PSG to rejoin them. And they knew that even then, PSG still had it in their power to say no. Sure enough, the French side bristled at the suggestion they were going to lose their new head coach against their will. There was some frustration in Paris that Spurs, scrambling around for a solution to satisfy their fans, would try to turn the head of another club’s head coach like this. “Tottenham may be looking to start a fire in somebody else’s house to deflect from their own arson,” one source there said.
PSG had endured enough disruption already, sacking Tuchel and getting Pochettino in at mid-season. They insisted very clearly that no matter how tempted Pochettino might be by a romantic return to Tottenham, and a suspected doubling in his salary, he would be going nowhere. Pochettino had a contract, and he would be held to it.
From this point, it was clear there was little Pochettino or Tottenham could do. By the last weekend in May, PSG club president Nasser al Khelaifi had spoken to Pochettino and told him he was going nowhere. PSG pushed on with their plans for summer, with deals for Georginio Wijnaldum and Achraf Hakimi lined up, and Tottenham realised Pochettino was staying put.
Tottenham could have pressed on with their original list at this stage and appointed Ten Hag. While PSG are rich enough to reject any approaches for their head coach, Ajax aren’t. If Spurs had gone back in for Ten Hag in May, giving Ajax enough time to appoint a replacement, they would have got him. But Levy had other ideas.
The end of the season had been a difficult time for Levy as he dealt with the Super League fallout, strained relations with the fans, club finances, and other issues away from the pitch. But by the end of May, he was able to focus on a new plan for the running of the club.
The idea had been suggested to Levy that he should recruit a new senior football executive, a big figure to whom he could delegate football decisions. He had been told that Fabio Paratici, who had helped to orchestrate much of Juventus’ success over the last few years, was on his way out in Turin. If Pochettino had taken the job in late May then the old structure would have remained, but once that idea was dead, Levy seized on the opportunity to bring some new football expertise in.
He began to explore the Paratici move at the end of May, but with Pochettino now off the table, he still needed a coach. And Paratici knew just the man for the job.
Antonio Conte was not exactly in tune with Levy’s promises to appoint a coach for a rebuild focusing on young players. But he is certainly one of the top five coaches in the world. And on May 26, the day Paratici left Juventus, Conte also left newly-crowned Serie A champions Inter Milan. He was looking for a new job and made clear via intermediaries he was interested in the Tottenham one.
Suddenly a new plan was coming together. Paratici and Conte had a good relationship from their time working together at Juventus. Conte often falls out with the clubs he works for, but he didn’t with Paratici. And if Paratici could help to deliver a coach as good as Conte, he could get Spurs challenging for trophies again in his first season in charge.
In the first week of June, Levy pressed on with this new plan. When Conte discussed the role with Tottenham, he was hugely impressive, and spoke like a man who wanted the job. He talked in detail about his ambitions and his plans, how he would get the players fitter — something the club is especially keen on right now — and organise them defensively again. Conte has a reputation for being demanding but there were no issues raised over his salary or terms.
But in that interview, Conte also warned the club that if they had any doubts about signing him, they should not do it. He believed that as long as he was allowed to drive this project as he wanted, then it would work, and hinted that if he ever felt that the club lied to him, he would walk out, just as he’d just done at Inter.
After this call, there was confidence at Tottenham a deal could be done, and that they had found a manager far better and more successful than many they had looked at over the course of the process. Even if Conte was not exactly a natural fit for their initial criteria. But as that week went on, and the two parties should have been moving towards a final agreement, it was clear that Conte was having second thoughts. By June 4, the move was off.
Why exactly Conte pulled out remains unclear.
One theory is that he did not think Spurs would be able to raise enough money in a depressed marketplace to fund the signings he thought they needed. Another is that Conte doubted their capacity to truly compete for trophies in the next few years. Levy, it should be said, knew how badly the club’s finances had been hit by the pandemic and did not want to over-commit to spending this summer if that meant putting Tottenham’s sustainable model at risk.
The collapse of the Conte talks effectively put Spurs back at square one.
They were starting again, and this time it was Paratici who was in charge. Given the size of the role he was coming into, with oversight on all football decisions, it was only natural that he would have control of the head coach appointment process. Talks continued over the next week with club officials flying out to Turin for more discussions on June 8.
Paratici turned his attentions to Paulo Fonseca. The Portuguese coach, who Spurs had considered at the start of their search, was available having left Roma at the end of last season. He may not have the cachet of Pochettino or Conte but he ticked some of Levy’s boxes. His Shakhtar Donetsk and Roma teams played some attractive football, in keeping with Levy’s initial promises. His three consecutive Ukrainian doubles proved he built teams to win, too.
So Paratici stayed in Italy to hold talks with Fonseca in Milan over the role, and on June 11 — the day the Euros kicked off down in Rome — a deal was agreed for the 48-year-old to sign a two-year contract with the option of a third. Next day, Paratici was announced as Spurs’ new “Managing Director, Football”, with Levy confirming he would be “heading up the football side of the club”. The contracts were sent over to Fonseca, and the hope at that point was he would be unveiled early the following week.
Only the final details were left to be discussed. Paratici arranged one more summit with Fonseca on June 14 and 15 in the Italian resort of Como. They would talk pre-season plans, about ideas for the squad and for the transfer window. The issue of backroom staff was still unresolved. Tottenham wanted Fonseca to bring two coaches of his own, to work alongside two who would be provided by the club.
But over the course of those two days, Paratici changed his mind. There were disagreements about transfer policy. There was no clear plan for the backroom staff. Fonseca felt Levy’s vision of attacking football was at odds with Paratici’s insistence that they fix the defence. Fonseca then flew off from Milan to Kyiv for a family holiday, unimpressed with Tottenham’s prevarication, and sensing something had changed in the negotiations. Indeed, by this point, Paratici had decided to look elsewhere.
The next day, Jorge Mendes called Paratici. The two are close after Paratici masterminded Juventus buying Mendes’ leading client Cristiano Ronaldo from Real Madrid in 2018. Mendes said Gennaro Gattuso was going to walk out on his deal to coach Fiorentina, which he’d only signed a couple of weeks earlier. Gattuso and Fiorentina had fallen out over the club’s reluctance to push for Mendes clients Sergio Oliveira, Jesus Corona and Goncalo Guedes in the transfer market.
Paratici was a big admirer of Gattuso’s work as a coach, in his recent spells at AC Milan and Napoli. If Paratici had stayed at Juventus this summer, he would have brought Gattuso in to replace Andrea Pirlo. But Paratici left and the club brought back Max Allegri instead. So Paratici moved fast.
Paratici met Gattuso and was impressed. Gattuso is a charismatic, persuasive man, and while he does not have the coaching CV of Conte, in his last few jobs he has been popular with his players, and has a good backroom staff behind him. The hope was that he would have the personality and drive to push Tottenham forward for the next few seasons. The next morning, June 17, Gattuso’s departure from Fiorentina was confirmed. By that afternoon, everything was in place for him to take over at Spurs.
But when news broke of Gattuso’s imminent appointment, Tottenham fans were furious. And not just because he had not achieved enough in his brief spells at Pisa, Milan and Napoli to justify getting the job.
Pointing to sexist and homophobic statements Gattuso had made in the past, as well as his downplaying of racist abuse, a #NoToGattuso movement gathered pace on Twitter. Very quickly, the club were bombarded by impassioned fans saying that appointing Gattuso would be utterly incompatible with the values of the club.
The Athletic is aware of one fan who emailed Levy to say he was “disheartened to see you thinking about hiring Gattuso as manager”, “not because of his style of play or anything, but like I’m sure you’ve seen, his statements previously surrounding women in football and his stance on same-sex marriage”. The supporter went on to request that, if Gattuso did get hired, the Italian should address his previous comments in a video for supporters.
Before that Thursday was over, Levy pulled the plug on the move.
It was a bruising week for Tottenham, even more so than the failures to land either Pochettino or Conte.
Spurs had been close to two candidates — neither of them as prominent or attractive as Pochettino or Conte — and pulled out on both of them. By the end of the week, Paratici and Levy were back at square one yet again.
When Levy and Paratici started working on the final phase of the process, Levy was clear on one thing. He did not want to conduct this part of the search in public.
Tottenham were stung by how much of this process had become public knowledge, and were determined that the successful completion of their head coach search would not be leaked out anywhere.
Levy led another meeting on Monday, June 21 to assess where Spurs could turn next. They discussed remaining candidates from the original shortlist. They wanted to be thorough and explore all their options. But it was too late to get Ten Hag out of Ajax. Parker was leaving Fulham for Bournemouth. Martinez and Roberto Mancini were impressing at the Euros, but the timing did not align. No national federation would release their manager to negotiate in the middle of a tournament, and the start of pre-season was two weeks away.
The strongest of those initial candidates now was Potter. Tottenham liked him and his style of play, but they also knew the timing might not be quite right for either party. And given Potter’s release clause, getting him out of Brighton would not be cheap.
Paratici had another idea: going back to Nuno. (Nuno, like Gattuso, is a Mendes client.) Paratici had been a long-term admirer of his coaching career, and his work in Portugal and Spain before his successful spell at Wolves. Paratici argued that Nuno’s teams played better football than some thought, and pointed to how he had coached improvements from many of his Wolves side. Levy was not initially sold, but Paratici made a strong case. By the end of last week, Nuno had edged past Potter and was the new favourite for the job.
Negotiations were not too complex and an initial two-year deal was agreed. One final meeting this Tuesday, June 29, confirmed that Nuno was the club’s choice. He might not have been the man Levy wanted at the start of the process, but it was now almost July and all other credible options had been exhausted. That night, Paratici finally flew into London, to officially start the job he been effectively doing for the past month.
The next day, Wednesday, Nuno arrived to sign the deal pose for photos in Spurs gear.
“I’ve spoken already about the need to revert back to our core DNA of playing attacking, entertaining football,” said Levy, who must have felt like he’d lived through the longest 72 days of his career. “And Fabio and I believe Nuno is the man who can take our talented group of players, embrace our young players coming through and build something special.”
Tottenham’s fans did not appear universally convinced, but at least, after over two months, their club finally have a manager again.
Is there a short version ?Reading that through, it seems like we had many of the right options on our agenda, and I understand why some didn't pan out, but Levy's still ended up making two really flawed appointments from a club (Spurs) compatibility standpoint, when much better fitting options were very possible.
The longest 72 days of Daniel Levy's career: Inside Tottenham's epic manager hunt
From Jose to Nuno, via Flick, Ten Hag, Pochettino, Conte, Fonseca, Gattuso and more - it has been a bizarre summer at Tottenham Hotspur
Even in a season in which Tottenham went top of the league, collapsed, joined the Super League, sacked Mourinho, replaced him with 29-year-old Ryan Mason and lost a cup final, this 72-day search for a manager will be the phase that stands out.
It has been fascinating and at times dramatic, but it has also damaged the standing of a club for so long seen as a byword for intelligent decision-making. And it has brought back the old questions: what is Tottenham’s identity, and what are they trying to be?
It all started on the morning of Monday, April 19.
The eyes of the world were on the launch of the Super League, announced late the previous night. But even as Daniel Levy was involved in this attempt to rip up the fabric of football, he still had a season to save. Spurs had just drawn 2-2 away to Everton and Levy was desperate to push the team back towards the Champions League places over the 2020-21 campaign’s last six games.
With Mourinho preferring to prioritise the Carabao Cup final the following Sunday over the midweek league game with Southampton that preceded it, Levy finally decided to cut his losses on an expensive failed experiment. Tottenham had appointed a “proven winner” to help them take the final step, but the club had only gone backwards instead. So Mourinho was gone, Mason was in, and the hard work began on finding the new permanent successor.
The model, at this point, was the man Mourinho had replaced 18 months earlier. The feeling was that Tottenham needed to get back to the Pochettino era, and find a new man who could replicate his strengths: a modern, aggressive style of play, a commitment to fitness, a positive coaching environment that improved every player, and above all a sense of unity between the squad, the fans and the club. If Tottenham could not get Pochettino back from his new gig as Paris Saint-Germain coach — and there was little talk of this in April — they wanted someone as similar to him as possible.
But late April and early May was a difficult time for Levy, given how much time he had to spend clearing up the mess from the failed Super League and attending to club finances amid the long-running pandemic. So responsibility largely fell to Steve Hitchen, Spurs’ technical performance director, to draw up a list of available candidates who fitted the bill.
Some attractive candidates were not attainable.
Tottenham have admired Julian Nagelsmann for years and the 33-year-old RB Leipzig coach would have been perfect for the job. But by the time they had a vacancy, he was already too close to signing for Bayern Munich for the next five seasons. He was announced at Bayern on April 27, eight days after Mourinho was sacked.
Brendan Rodgers would have been very attractive too, having come very close to getting the Spurs job in 2012 before he decided to leave Swansea City for Liverpool instead. But Tottenham never got the sense this time that he was interested in leaving Leicester City for them.
Other candidates were considered but then discarded. Southampton’s collapse in the second half of last season counted against Ralph Hasenhuttl, as did the fact Spurs wanted a coach who created a positive atmosphere with the players.
There was some early interest in appointing a young English coach who could rebuild Tottenham over the next four or five years, bringing through a new generation of young players. They considered Fulham’s Scott Parker but thought this was too soon for a man with just over two years of first-team management behind him. More consideration was given to Graham Potter, who has transformed the style of play at Brighton & Hove Albion, but only has two seasons of Premier League coaching experience himself.
Looking abroad, they spoke to Ralf Rangnick, who has pioneered the growth of pressing football in Germany over the last decade, but who was maybe more of a fit for a director of football role rather than as their next head coach. They looked at Roberto Martinez, busy preparing for the European Championship with the world’s No 1-ranked team Belgium, but they knew things had gone sour for him at Everton, and wondered if he was a big enough name for the club.
Near the head of Hitchen’s initial shortlist of candidates was Erik ten Hag.
Here was a candidate who was almost a perfect match for the criteria Levy had laid out. In his three and a half years in charge of Ajax, he had got them playing precisely the sort of attractive front-foot football Spurs wanted, football that showed how much Ten Hag had learned working under Pep Guardiola at Bayern Munich from 2013 to 2015.
His Ajax side had high attacking full-backs, pressing midfielders and forwards who were trusted to create. That style propelled Ajax on their famous run to the semi-finals of the Champions League in spring 2019, eliminating Real Madrid and Juventus before they were knocked out, somehow, by Pochettino’s Spurs. Ten Hag won the Dutch double that season and did it again in 2020-21. He is rated by those who know him as an intelligent, impressive individual who had done well to win over the early doubters in Amsterdam to build something special.
Tottenham sounded out Ten Hag and knew that he was interested.
Ajax extended his contract on April 30, but that did not fundamentally change the dynamic. If Spurs moved for him at the right time, they would be able to get him, and the Dutch giants would not stand in his way. But as many boxes as Ten Hag ticked, he was never the leading candidate in this process, only ever an attractive alternative.
The lead candidate from the first stage of the process, back in early May, was Hansi Flick.
On April 17, two days before Mourinho was sacked, Flick had announced he was to leave Bayern Munich. He had only been in the post for 18 months but in that time had won the German double, Champions League, UEFA Super Cup and Club World Cup at his first attempt, and was on the way to retaining the Bundesliga too. And he had done so playing a brand of hyper-aggressive front-foot football that was more in keeping with Hitchen’s ideas and Levy’s promises than any other available candidate.
Flick had been heavily linked with replacing Joachim Low as the German national team manager after this summer’s Euros, having worked with Low as his assistant from 2006 to 2014. But Tottenham spoke to him repeatedly about becoming their next head coach. They liked his vision of the game, his coaching pedigree and his human qualities. They liked his young assistant Danny Rohl, who was the genius behind Hasenhuttl’s Southampton before he moved to Bayern in the summer of 2019. They liked Flick’s CV, having been sporting director of both the German FA and Bundesliga club Hoffenheim, sensing that this gave him a broader view of the job.
Flick, by this stage, was receiving interest from all around Europe for next season, including from Barcelona. But he did not want to work in a language other than English and German, and so Spain was never a likely destination. Of all the clubs interested in him, Spurs was the best fitting option, but they never did quite enough to convince him to join.
In the middle of May, Flick told Tottenham he would be taking over the Germany national team job after all. He was officially announced as Low’s post-Euros successor on May 25.
After these early attempts to find a new version of Pochettino, why not go for the man himself?
Even 18 months after his sacking by Levy, Pochettino still enjoys a good relationship with plenty of people at the club, speaking to them frequently. The fact he was appointed as the new head coach of Paris Saint-Germain at Christmas has not changed that.
During a difficult first half-season in charge of PSG, Pochettino would vent his frustrations about his new life to his old friends and colleagues in London. He was confronted with the same political issues predecessor Thomas Tuchel had faced in the job, the fact that the head coach was never going to be as powerful as sporting director Leonardo at that club. He had to try to build a shared ethos between players inhabiting very different worlds, from Neymar on €36 million per year net, down to the rest. And he had to do it all without fully settling down, living in a Paris hotel while his family were still in London.
People at Tottenham started to wonder whether they could tempt Pochettino back to the club. Nobody could fulfil Levy’s promises about Tottenham “DNA” better than the man who created Spurs’ modern identity in the first place.
Throughout May, Hitchen was speaking to Pochettino about a possible return, and when he returned to his home in north London after PSG’s season finished on May 23, those talks intensified. The Argentinian was torn on the matter: one large, emotional part of him was desperate to return to Tottenham, where he was so loved by the fans, where he had real power within the club, and where everything seemed to make sense. At the same time, another part of him was reluctant to walk out on PSG, and players as gifted as Kylian Mbappe, after such a short spell there.
Tottenham knew Pochettino might have to force his way out of PSG to rejoin them. And they knew that even then, PSG still had it in their power to say no. Sure enough, the French side bristled at the suggestion they were going to lose their new head coach against their will. There was some frustration in Paris that Spurs, scrambling around for a solution to satisfy their fans, would try to turn the head of another club’s head coach like this. “Tottenham may be looking to start a fire in somebody else’s house to deflect from their own arson,” one source there said.
PSG had endured enough disruption already, sacking Tuchel and getting Pochettino in at mid-season. They insisted very clearly that no matter how tempted Pochettino might be by a romantic return to Tottenham, and a suspected doubling in his salary, he would be going nowhere. Pochettino had a contract, and he would be held to it.
From this point, it was clear there was little Pochettino or Tottenham could do. By the last weekend in May, PSG club president Nasser al Khelaifi had spoken to Pochettino and told him he was going nowhere. PSG pushed on with their plans for summer, with deals for Georginio Wijnaldum and Achraf Hakimi lined up, and Tottenham realised Pochettino was staying put.
Tottenham could have pressed on with their original list at this stage and appointed Ten Hag. While PSG are rich enough to reject any approaches for their head coach, Ajax aren’t. If Spurs had gone back in for Ten Hag in May, giving Ajax enough time to appoint a replacement, they would have got him. But Levy had other ideas.
The end of the season had been a difficult time for Levy as he dealt with the Super League fallout, strained relations with the fans, club finances, and other issues away from the pitch. But by the end of May, he was able to focus on a new plan for the running of the club.
The idea had been suggested to Levy that he should recruit a new senior football executive, a big figure to whom he could delegate football decisions. He had been told that Fabio Paratici, who had helped to orchestrate much of Juventus’ success over the last few years, was on his way out in Turin. If Pochettino had taken the job in late May then the old structure would have remained, but once that idea was dead, Levy seized on the opportunity to bring some new football expertise in.
He began to explore the Paratici move at the end of May, but with Pochettino now off the table, he still needed a coach. And Paratici knew just the man for the job.
Antonio Conte was not exactly in tune with Levy’s promises to appoint a coach for a rebuild focusing on young players. But he is certainly one of the top five coaches in the world. And on May 26, the day Paratici left Juventus, Conte also left newly-crowned Serie A champions Inter Milan. He was looking for a new job and made clear via intermediaries he was interested in the Tottenham one.
Suddenly a new plan was coming together. Paratici and Conte had a good relationship from their time working together at Juventus. Conte often falls out with the clubs he works for, but he didn’t with Paratici. And if Paratici could help to deliver a coach as good as Conte, he could get Spurs challenging for trophies again in his first season in charge.
In the first week of June, Levy pressed on with this new plan. When Conte discussed the role with Tottenham, he was hugely impressive, and spoke like a man who wanted the job. He talked in detail about his ambitions and his plans, how he would get the players fitter — something the club is especially keen on right now — and organise them defensively again. Conte has a reputation for being demanding but there were no issues raised over his salary or terms.
But in that interview, Conte also warned the club that if they had any doubts about signing him, they should not do it. He believed that as long as he was allowed to drive this project as he wanted, then it would work, and hinted that if he ever felt that the club lied to him, he would walk out, just as he’d just done at Inter.
After this call, there was confidence at Tottenham a deal could be done, and that they had found a manager far better and more successful than many they had looked at over the course of the process. Even if Conte was not exactly a natural fit for their initial criteria. But as that week went on, and the two parties should have been moving towards a final agreement, it was clear that Conte was having second thoughts. By June 4, the move was off.
Why exactly Conte pulled out remains unclear.
One theory is that he did not think Spurs would be able to raise enough money in a depressed marketplace to fund the signings he thought they needed. Another is that Conte doubted their capacity to truly compete for trophies in the next few years. Levy, it should be said, knew how badly the club’s finances had been hit by the pandemic and did not want to over-commit to spending this summer if that meant putting Tottenham’s sustainable model at risk.
The collapse of the Conte talks effectively put Spurs back at square one.
They were starting again, and this time it was Paratici who was in charge. Given the size of the role he was coming into, with oversight on all football decisions, it was only natural that he would have control of the head coach appointment process. Talks continued over the next week with club officials flying out to Turin for more discussions on June 8.
Paratici turned his attentions to Paulo Fonseca. The Portuguese coach, who Spurs had considered at the start of their search, was available having left Roma at the end of last season. He may not have the cachet of Pochettino or Conte but he ticked some of Levy’s boxes. His Shakhtar Donetsk and Roma teams played some attractive football, in keeping with Levy’s initial promises. His three consecutive Ukrainian doubles proved he built teams to win, too.
So Paratici stayed in Italy to hold talks with Fonseca in Milan over the role, and on June 11 — the day the Euros kicked off down in Rome — a deal was agreed for the 48-year-old to sign a two-year contract with the option of a third. Next day, Paratici was announced as Spurs’ new “Managing Director, Football”, with Levy confirming he would be “heading up the football side of the club”. The contracts were sent over to Fonseca, and the hope at that point was he would be unveiled early the following week.
Only the final details were left to be discussed. Paratici arranged one more summit with Fonseca on June 14 and 15 in the Italian resort of Como. They would talk pre-season plans, about ideas for the squad and for the transfer window. The issue of backroom staff was still unresolved. Tottenham wanted Fonseca to bring two coaches of his own, to work alongside two who would be provided by the club.
But over the course of those two days, Paratici changed his mind. There were disagreements about transfer policy. There was no clear plan for the backroom staff. Fonseca felt Levy’s vision of attacking football was at odds with Paratici’s insistence that they fix the defence. Fonseca then flew off from Milan to Kyiv for a family holiday, unimpressed with Tottenham’s prevarication, and sensing something had changed in the negotiations. Indeed, by this point, Paratici had decided to look elsewhere.
The next day, Jorge Mendes called Paratici. The two are close after Paratici masterminded Juventus buying Mendes’ leading client Cristiano Ronaldo from Real Madrid in 2018. Mendes said Gennaro Gattuso was going to walk out on his deal to coach Fiorentina, which he’d only signed a couple of weeks earlier. Gattuso and Fiorentina had fallen out over the club’s reluctance to push for Mendes clients Sergio Oliveira, Jesus Corona and Goncalo Guedes in the transfer market.
Paratici was a big admirer of Gattuso’s work as a coach, in his recent spells at AC Milan and Napoli. If Paratici had stayed at Juventus this summer, he would have brought Gattuso in to replace Andrea Pirlo. But Paratici left and the club brought back Max Allegri instead. So Paratici moved fast.
Paratici met Gattuso and was impressed. Gattuso is a charismatic, persuasive man, and while he does not have the coaching CV of Conte, in his last few jobs he has been popular with his players, and has a good backroom staff behind him. The hope was that he would have the personality and drive to push Tottenham forward for the next few seasons. The next morning, June 17, Gattuso’s departure from Fiorentina was confirmed. By that afternoon, everything was in place for him to take over at Spurs.
But when news broke of Gattuso’s imminent appointment, Tottenham fans were furious. And not just because he had not achieved enough in his brief spells at Pisa, Milan and Napoli to justify getting the job.
Pointing to sexist and homophobic statements Gattuso had made in the past, as well as his downplaying of racist abuse, a #NoToGattuso movement gathered pace on Twitter. Very quickly, the club were bombarded by impassioned fans saying that appointing Gattuso would be utterly incompatible with the values of the club.
The Athletic is aware of one fan who emailed Levy to say he was “disheartened to see you thinking about hiring Gattuso as manager”, “not because of his style of play or anything, but like I’m sure you’ve seen, his statements previously surrounding women in football and his stance on same-sex marriage”. The supporter went on to request that, if Gattuso did get hired, the Italian should address his previous comments in a video for supporters.
Before that Thursday was over, Levy pulled the plug on the move.
It was a bruising week for Tottenham, even more so than the failures to land either Pochettino or Conte.
Spurs had been close to two candidates — neither of them as prominent or attractive as Pochettino or Conte — and pulled out on both of them. By the end of the week, Paratici and Levy were back at square one yet again.
When Levy and Paratici started working on the final phase of the process, Levy was clear on one thing. He did not want to conduct this part of the search in public.
Tottenham were stung by how much of this process had become public knowledge, and were determined that the successful completion of their head coach search would not be leaked out anywhere.
Levy led another meeting on Monday, June 21 to assess where Spurs could turn next. They discussed remaining candidates from the original shortlist. They wanted to be thorough and explore all their options. But it was too late to get Ten Hag out of Ajax. Parker was leaving Fulham for Bournemouth. Martinez and Roberto Mancini were impressing at the Euros, but the timing did not align. No national federation would release their manager to negotiate in the middle of a tournament, and the start of pre-season was two weeks away.
The strongest of those initial candidates now was Potter. Tottenham liked him and his style of play, but they also knew the timing might not be quite right for either party. And given Potter’s release clause, getting him out of Brighton would not be cheap.
Paratici had another idea: going back to Nuno. (Nuno, like Gattuso, is a Mendes client.) Paratici had been a long-term admirer of his coaching career, and his work in Portugal and Spain before his successful spell at Wolves. Paratici argued that Nuno’s teams played better football than some thought, and pointed to how he had coached improvements from many of his Wolves side. Levy was not initially sold, but Paratici made a strong case. By the end of last week, Nuno had edged past Potter and was the new favourite for the job.
Negotiations were not too complex and an initial two-year deal was agreed. One final meeting this Tuesday, June 29, confirmed that Nuno was the club’s choice. He might not have been the man Levy wanted at the start of the process, but it was now almost July and all other credible options had been exhausted. That night, Paratici finally flew into London, to officially start the job he been effectively doing for the past month.
The next day, Wednesday, Nuno arrived to sign the deal pose for photos in Spurs gear.
“I’ve spoken already about the need to revert back to our core DNA of playing attacking, entertaining football,” said Levy, who must have felt like he’d lived through the longest 72 days of his career. “And Fabio and I believe Nuno is the man who can take our talented group of players, embrace our young players coming through and build something special.”
Tottenham’s fans did not appear universally convinced, but at least, after over two months, their club finally have a manager again.
Yeah, but Ajax gave Ten Hag a new contract as soon as they found out about our interest and Potter has a five year contract so that was pretty much a non-starter...
They took out the 1 year option, the article states Ten Hag wanted to come so it was a buy out essentially, Potter was the same but maybe a bit more expensive (There was a rumour of 8-10m going around at one point).
Point is Levy made his DNA comment to the fans. You can’t say that and then hire Nuno a defensive manager, I have nothing against Nuno personally he seems a good guy and I wish him the very best at fixing us but the manager is the most important signing a club can make. Look at the difference between AVB and Poch with essentially the same squad. Levy had a real opportunity after all the mess (ESL, Joseball etc) to put a line in the sand and he blew it.
Maybe he was saying that thinking he was getting Hansi Flick...which didn't really pan out...he's probably regretting that DNA bullshit now. He sort of painted himself into a corner with it.
That DNA comment got my hopes up that Levy understood the clubs fans from the 60’s/80’s/Poch era that we like to play attacking front foot football and whatever our success we would try and play the right way. He has now put Nuno is a position where if he doesn’t play attacking football the fans will want him out quickly and Nuno is not known for attacking football. I do feel a bit sorry for Nuno.
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