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Amo

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Aug 22, 2013
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But Liverpool beat Spurs and Pochettino did not quit on a high but sulked off to his home in Barcelona instead. This went down badly with senior club staff, but Levy did not act, a decision that the Spurs chairman is now thought to regret.

Damn.

Fantastic article but this passage is especially painful given what transpired over the summer and the attempted rapprochement early this season.
 

ClintEastwould

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Jul 3, 2012
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By Jack Pitt-Brooke, David Ornstein and Adam Crafton 2h ago
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“Don’t look at the boss.”
Tottenham players had become used to saying those words to each other in recent weeks. Don’t catch his eye, don’t give him an excuse to get you in to trouble, just get on with training and surely this will all be over soon.
Mauricio Pochettino had never been overly friendly around the training ground, that just wasn’t his style. He was the boss after all, not the players’ friend. And after becoming Tottenham’s most successful manager in 50 years, who cared how chatty he was anyway? The team had become regulars in the Champions League, they were beating the biggest teams in Europe and had challenged for the Premier League title at their peak. They were scintillating at their best, hunting down the opposition in packs and entertaining their fans with a team full of improving young players.
But then they weren’t. Then the victories dried up, the tough training sessions caught up with the players’ minds and legs and the manager became surly and distant.
As one dressing room source told The Athletic: “It was the only decision that made sense.” With the team currently 14th in the Premier League, without a win in five, and with no away victory in the league since January, the players really had lost faith. From their last 24 league games, a run dating back to late February, they have taken just 25 points.
On Tuesday evening the club sacked Pochettino and 12 hours later replaced him with Jose Mourinho. This is why.
Some members of the first-team squad did not know about Pochettino’s sacking until the club’s online statement on Tuesday just after 7.30pm. Some senior staff were unaware of his impending departure as late as Tuesday morning, and some club scouts speaking to agents on Tuesday appeared to have no idea either as they continued to talk about Pochettino as Spurs’ head coach in the future tense.
Tottenham chairman Daniel Levy took decisive action to address a disastrous start to the season, ending Pochettino’s five-and-a-half-year tenure at the club. The decision paved the way for Levy to appoint a new manager in time for Saturday’s lunchtime trip to West Ham, and he acted swiftly. A statement on Wednesday morning announced Mourinho’s arrival on a contract until the end of the 2022-23 season.
Training has been pushed back to Wednesday afternoon, which will allow Mourinho, who had been out of work since being sacked by Manchester United last Christmas, to take the session. Spurs’ interest in RB Leipzig coach Julian Nagelsmann came “one year too late”.
The former Real Madrid, Chelsea and Inter Milan manager Mourinho, 56, has always enjoyed associations with the biggest, richest clubs, but one source close to him told The Athletic that he is “always evolving as a man and a manager”. Another source with close links to Spurs added: “If Mourinho is in the dugout against West Ham, as opposed to Pochettino, who’s got a better chance of winning? If you’re looking long-term, Mourinho doesn’t work. If you’re looking for two years, he does.”
After a week of talks over Pochettino’s future, in which he had resolutely refused to resign, Levy was eventually left with no choice on Tuesday but to dismiss the 47-year-old and his backroom staff, triggering what is understood to be a £12 million pay-out to the Argentine coach. Pochettino’s assistant Jesus Perez, and coaches Miguel d’Agostino and Antoni Jimenez have also left the club.
Talks started last Wednesday as Levy hoped to use the international break to find a solution to Spurs’ bad start.
There was a growing sense of unease throughout the week as speculation about Pochettino’s future grew. Some first-team players — but by no means all — got wind on Monday night that their manager was on his way out. But with some players still on international duty, and no public statement until Tuesday evening, there was still a sense of confusion throughout the club.
Toby Alderweireld found out after playing in Belgium’s 6-1 win against Cyprus in Euro 2020 qualifying, adding: “It’s part of football. It’s never nice to see a manager leave but that’s all I can say, I think. It’s a surprise for me. The club made the decision and we have to accept this and try to change the situation as quick as we can… We have to be very thankful for what he achieved and I think he brought the club to the next level.”
Two contrasting emotions dominated the immediate reaction to the dismissal. The first was shock, a sentiment echoed by Ben Davies when he was told after helping Wales to reach next year’s European Championships with a 2-0 win against Hungary. It had “been amazing to work with him (Pochettino) for the last five years”, the full-back added.
Pochettino was the fifth-longest serving manager in English football until Tuesday evening, having joined Spurs in May 2014. He was Tottenham’s longest-serving manager since Keith Burkinshaw and their best since Bill Nicholson. “The players thought he would get a few more games to turn it around,” said one dressing-room source. “They are in a bit of shock and it’s like a dad has left the family home. There wasn’t the impression he had managed his last game before the international break.”
Relationships between Pochettino and Levy, and Pochettino and his players had been deteriorating all year. It was no secret the Argentine wanted to quit if he won the Champions League final in Madrid in June. And that would have been a very appropriate moment to go — not just because it would have been a historic honour for the club, but because it would have marked one whole five-year cycle in charge for its manager. Pochettino built a team and then saw it develop to the climax of what it could achieve.

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Pochettino knew how difficult it would be to give the club the new cycle it needed, which is why June 2019 would have been such a perfect time to leave. “Some managers mentally can’t keep going week-in week-out, they hit a brick wall,” said one source close to the club. “It looked before the Champions League final that he wanted to get out. As if his heart wasn’t in it any more.”
But Liverpool beat Spurs and Pochettino did not quit on a high but sulked off to his home in Barcelona instead. This went down badly with senior club staff, but Levy did not act, a decision that the Spurs chairman is now thought to regret.
This made for a tense summer between the owner and his manager. For years Pochettino had wanted a serious clear-out of players, to make sure that he could compete with a team of young, hungry, ambitious footballers — just like he did in his first few seasons. But Levy could never deliver it, leaving Spurs with the infamous no-signings summer of 2018, which contributed to some of the issues of staleness that have plagued their Premier League form in 2019.
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Pochettino sits behind Levy during the NFL game between Carolina Panthers and Tampa Bay Buccaneers at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium on October 13. (Photo: Naomi Baker/Getty Images)
Pochettino demanded signings and Levy broke Spurs’ transfer record to sign Tanguy Ndombele from Lyon for £55 million, although several sources say that did not happen without its own fair share of drama, with the manager demanding the deal was done before he came back from his summer break, fully expecting Levy not to deliver. He was surprised when he did. Spurs then added Ryan Sessegnon, Giovani Lo Celso on a season-long loan from Real Betis and almost pulled off a shock move for Paulo Dybala from Juventus. But Pochettino was still unhappy, feeling his squad needed far greater surgery. “Pochettino sulked and sulked his way to the sack,” said a source.
There is little doubt the squad Pochettino was working with was far inferior to the one who he almost took to the Premier League title in 2015-16 and 2016-17. Alderweireld, Jan Vertonghen and Christian Eriksen had become jaded by their contract stand-offs with Levy, Kyle Walker had never truly been replaced, Danny Rose, Eric Dier and Dele Alli’s form had faded and Mousa Dembele — viewed by the manager and players as the heartbeat of the team — had departed.
What eventually did for Pochettino was losing the support of the dressing room over the course of this season. The players sensed that he did not have the same relish for the job as in his early years at Spurs. They had once been willing participants in his demanding hard-running style, but their physical and mental energy did not last forever. The players have got older, and recently they have found themselves with less to give. The Pochettino regime of double sessions, very few days off and hard running started to drag. “The old effect of the double sessions had gone, and it was mentally important to regenerate,” said one dressing-room source. “So the moment of the sacking is a bit surprising, but the fuel tank got empty much earlier. At a certain moment, it is just over.”
The players were tired of the physical demands of Pochettino’s playing style, and that was clear in how the team stopped pressing over the course of this year. But they also found him increasingly distant as a manager, especially given his reaction to losing the Champions League final. The players grew tired of the coaching staff’s careful monitoring of their off-field activities, such as video games, and their public pronouncements.
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(Photo: Mark Leech/Offside/Offside via Getty Images)
Last month one source told The Athletic that “the place is a regime and the players are sick of him”. Recently at a sponsor’s event four players were asked to pass a jokey comment on Pochettino’s hair in a picture of his playing days, but they went quiet, reluctant to say anything that might get them in trouble. “Pochettino, who is never particularly warm with his players at the training ground, had become even more stand-offish in recent weeks,” said a source. “It had become a ‘don’t look at the boss’ situation.”
Before one game this season, the players were taken aback when they felt they were not given much tactical instruction from Pochettino and were largely left to their own devices. It led to another defeat.
When Pochettino rotated his team for the League Cup game at Colchester United at the end of September, which ended in a 0-0 draw and a defeat on penalties, some players were aghast at Pochettino’s post-match press conference. He spoke about “different agendas” in the team, which was taken as a criticism of some of the players who were trying to leave the club. They thought Pochettino should have taken more responsibility for losing to the League Two side.
That was two months ago and ultimately Pochettino has been made responsible for Tottenham’s bad start to the season. There are plenty of causes for Spurs’ bad start, many of them not Pochettino’s fault. The club’s restrictive wage structure, the failure to refresh the squad and allowing the core of the team to get into the last year of their contract at the same time have all played a part. But in football the manager is always the easiest man to replace, and as Pochettino’s Spurs finally came back to earth this year, that was the most obvious solution for Levy.
As this season started poorly and showed no sign of improving, it felt increasingly likely that this would be Pochettino’s last at the club. The only question was when he would leave. But once Levy had decided to get a new manager in, it made sense to make the change sooner rather than later. And with Pochettino determined not to resign, no matter how much he looked as if he was not enjoying his work, Levy was only left with one lever to pull. One source describes Pochettino as “sad but philosophical” on Tuesday night, but says he feels as if he was at the “end of the path”.

For years Pochettino had wanted a serious clear-out of players, to make sure that he could compete with a team of young, hungry, ambitious footballers — just like he did in his first few seasons. But Levy could never deliver it, leaving Spurs with the infamous no-signings summer of 2018, which contributed to some of the issues of staleness that have plagued their Premier League form in 2019.


!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
 

dontcallme

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Mar 18, 2005
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Whatever else Daniel Levy achieves at Tottenham Hotspur he will always be remembered as the man who sacked the best manager he has ever worked with, six months after the bloke led them to the Champions League final. It represented one of the most ruthless and spectacular Premier League sackings since 2015, when Roman Abramovich ditched Jose Mourinho — just the man Levy has now turned to.

It resulted in the most remarkable 24 hours in the modern history of Spurs — incomparable to any of the mid-season managerial changes Levy has made before, whether that was to replace Glenn Hoddle with David Pleat, Martin Jol with Juande Ramos, Ramos with Harry Redknapp or Andre Villas-Boas with Tim Sherwood. It is the biggest decision Levy has made in his career.

Levy is saying goodbye to more good memories, accumulated credit and fan capital than he has ever done in the past. Mauricio Pochettino transformed the club, giving Levy everything he ever wanted: consistent Champions League football on a Europa League budget, second- and third-place finishes in the Premier League, and appearances in two major finals. He made the team stronger and more competitive than they had been in 30 years, in a league that is now defined almost entirely by how much money you can spend. He gave Levy the space to focus his attention on the £1 billion stadium project, securing the financial future of the club.

But then, Levy did not do this at all lightly. He sensed there were problems at the end of last season when Pochettino was hinting he would quit if Tottenham won the Champions League. But he did not want to sack Pochettino — he wanted to try to make things work. That is why he went big in the transfer market this summer, signing Tanguy Ndombele, Giovanni Lo Celso and Ryan Sessegnon, and doing everything he could to get Paulo Dybala from Juventus, only for the image rights to prove too complex. Signing Dybala would have meant breaking Tottenham’s wage structure, and he would have done it, just as he pushed the boat out on new contracts for Harry Kane and Dele Alli in recent years.

Until very recently, Levy was invested in Pochettino’s continued success.

As soon as Levy started speaking to potential replacements, Pochettino’s time at the club was up.

Tottenham liked the look of Julian Nagelsmann, they sounded out Max Allegri and considered Carlo Ancelotti. After the Pochettino era, it would have made sense to appoint another progressive, high-pressing youth-oriented manager such as Nagelsmann or Brendan Rodgers. And it might have made sense to go for a relaxed player-oriented man, an Ancelotti or Allegri, who would release the pressure on the players and get them enjoying their football again. Just like when Chelsea’s Abramovich replaced Mourinho with Avram Grant in 2007 or Guus Hiddink in 2015.

Instead, Levy has done neither of those things. He has appointed a man who, in almost every possible way you look at it, is a surprising replacement for Pochettino.

His football does not represent continuity; Mourinho famously preferring a defensive, rigid, low-possession game rather than Pochettino’s intense, risky pressing game. That is one reason for concern among some Spurs fans about the new man.

Away from the pitch, Mourinho is a controlling disciplinarian who demands respect, and when Pochettino referred to Mourinho in the past as a “reference”, it was more to do with his management than his philosophy of play. But it means that if the players, worn down by Pochettino’s tight ship and endless training, are hoping for a more relaxed vibe, well, they are not going to get it.

But it does make you wonder why Levy has replaced Pochettino with a manager who is neither a continuation of his work, nor a solution to his problems.

Much of this season at Tottenham has resembled what Antonio Conte famously dubbed the “Mourinho Season”, Chelsea’s spectacular collapse at the start of the 2015-16 season, after winning the Premier League title. The Chelsea players grew tired of Mourinho’s methods and moods, the sense that he made the club a regime, and they stopped playing for him. Mourinho was sacked just before Christmas, with Chelsea worryingly close to the relegation zone. Abramovich’s response was to bring in the gentler Hiddink, just as he did in 2009, to save their season.

The parallel is not perfect, but as Tottenham emerge from something comparable and try to turn their club around, it is impossible not to question how the solution to them having a ‘Mourinho Season’ can be Jose Mourinho himself.

We all know that Mourinho is a manager who has done some great work in the past with teams full of experienced players, whether at Porto, Chelsea or Inter Milan. And it might have been that back in 2016 or 2017, when this squad was at its physical peak, he would have been the right man to give them that extra edge. But look at the squad now — three senior players in their contracts’ final year, Danny Rose and Eric Dier on the fringes, questions about whether Kane and Dele are as good as they were — and it does not look like a Mourinho-level team any more.

This is a squad in need of a rebuild, which is what Pochettino had been telling Levy and why this season and, most likely, next season will be so difficult. If Toby Alderweireld, Christian Eriksen, Jan Vertonghen and Rose all go, then the team will need replacements. Levy will not want to buy established names. And that is why a ‘rebuild manager’ would have made the most sense.

Mourinho’s best work, as we all know, has been in short, sharp bursts. And most of it came in the early years of the 21st century, working with a more resilient and obedient generation of footballer, playing a more rigid, physical style. That is why he was so good at Porto, Chelsea and Inter. But players changed and the game changed. Mourinho’s football looked stodgy and predictable, and players did not take to him any more.

All of his best work was with players born in roughly 1985 or before. He struggles to get through to Millennials, to say nothing of Gen Z. Mourinho was brilliant in the 2000s but faded badly in the 2010s. Which way do you think the 2020s are likely to go?

Levy must know all this. The most prudent, intelligent, meticulous chairman in the league would not give out a £15 million per year managerial contract without thinking it through. He will know all about Mourinho’s reputation, his flaws and his recent failures. It might be that Levy was convinced by Mourinho’s pitch for the job, and the 56-year-old is said to be determined to be “calmer, less controversial and much more level-headed” in this job, according to reporting in Portugal.

And yet it is impossible not to look at this appointment and think that it has strayed from Levy’s usual principles of prudent long-term planning. That it is the move of a man desperate to keep his club in the public eye for the next year or so. To make sure that they do not drift into mid-table anonymity, especially with their growing foreign fan-base.

It feels like the perfect decision for a club that stages NFL games, and has allowed Amazon’s cameras in to make a documentary, because there are few better ways to grow your global brand than those.

And all of those decisions, to do everything to keep Tottenham Hotspur as one of the most exciting football brands in the world, make most sense when you consider the future of the club.

Levy has achieved so much, establishing the team in the Champions League, building the new stadium, refinancing the debt, and he and Joe Lewis do not intend to hold on to Tottenham for ever.

The club is worth somewhere between £1.8 billion and £2 billion and it is no secret in football that US investors and sovereign wealth funds would be interested in buying a stake. However, ENIC have no interest in selling at this moment in time.

And until such a time, at least everyone will still be talking about Spurs.
 

dontcallme

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Mar 18, 2005
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The first thing to acknowledge is that people can change. The Jose Mourinho settling in at Tottenham Hotspur is not the same man who swaggered into Chelsea back in 2004, or even the slightly greyer figure who returned nine years later with a second European Cup on his curriculum vitae but scarred by his time at Real Madrid. “I’m the same personality, the same nature, but seeing things from a different perspective,” he had offered on his second coming. His outlook had shifted, if perhaps only marginally. It will have done so again in the years since.

His experiences at Stamford Bridge, where it all unravelled so spectacularly, and, most recently, Old Trafford will surely now colour how he tackles his latest role back in English football. He has a new-look backroom staff, led by his trilingual assistant Joao Sacramento who has been prised from Lille, at Spurs’ Enfield training base. They will bring new ideas.

There will be no Rui Faria, so often the private provocateur behind some of Mourinho’s more infamous public outbursts, but also someone upon whom the manager leaned as his right-hand man. At Tottenham, he will not seek to emulate every tactic or ploy instigated at Chelsea or Inter Milan, Real or Manchester United, in order to kick-start a recovery.

Then there is the timing of his appointment. Mourinho has not taken over a team whose domestic campaign is already under way since swapping Uniao de Leiria for Porto as a 38-year-old in early 2002, back when his coaching career was in its infancy. There will be no meticulously planned, month-long pre-season in which to raise fitness levels through double, or even triple daily sessions. No opportunity to experiment in friendlies in an attempt to work out a favoured line-up or tactical game-plan. No chance for players and staff to live in each others’ pockets on tour and learn how everyone ticks. Mourinho took the job on Wednesday morning and must send out a Spurs team at West Ham on Saturday lunchtime.

All of which will dictate how he sets about the task of replacing Mauricio Pochettino. And yet those traits that he claimed were constant back in 2013 — “the same personality, the same nature” — will still underpin how he deals with a squad who were good enough to reach the Champions League final in May only to find themselves treading water in mid-table in November. Some things will never change. To a certain extent, Tottenham’s players should know what to expect.

There will be the considerable positives that have tended to flare early in his tenure at clubs. Mourinho will pinpoint those in the ranks who are to be pivotal in what he hopes to achieve, and make them feel loved. Cherished, even. At Chelsea he always revelled in a core of locals, English players for an English league just as he claimed to turn to Italians in Serie A and Spaniards in La Liga, “to keep the culture of the country and not lose some characteristics of the local football”.

Spurs have been regular contributors to Gareth Southgate’s England side in recent times, so that fit might work. And when Mourinho determines a player is key, he indulges him whether that be making a naked Frank Lampard feel “10 ft tall” by insisting he was the best player in the world as he traipsed to the showers on pre-season in the United States back in 2004, to banishing the uncharacteristic self-doubt that had crept into John Terry’s game in 2013.

The centre-half, diminished by injury, had fallen out of favour over Rafael Benitez’s interim stint in charge at the end of the previous season. “Rafa had come out publicly and said my legs were gone, that I was finished,” Terry told the radio station Dubai Eye last week. “He’d pretty much told the club that as well. I was in Portugal having dinner with my wife and kids when I got a call from Mourinho telling me that he was back in charge.

“He told me: ‘You’re my captain, I love you, I need you to be on it.’ I was having a glass of wine, was about to have a dessert and I was instantly like: ‘No wine, no dessert.’ I was up the following morning, having two or three (individual) fitness sessions a day. He made me go from feeling lost under Rafa to knowing I had the trust of the manager.”

Plenty from that nucleus who excelled under Mourinho’s stewardship at Stamford Bridge share similarly glowing testimonies. Eidur Gudjohnsen, already a Chelsea player of four years when the Portuguese first arrived in England, had been braced for life to be “like the army” under the new regime. Those fears were shared by others, including Terry. “All the players had watched his first (“Special One”) press conference and were texting each other saying: ‘We could be in for it here’,” said the former Chelsea and England captain. “But when I met him for the first time it was the complete opposite.

“He just wanted to get all the players onside. He called me and Frank Lampard in to talk individually, then got the whole group together. He then put on a full, detailed slideshow of how he wanted things, how he wanted us to be around the place, what he expected from us individually and collectively. He had the first month’s schedule already written up for everybody ‘so you can tell your wife, tell your kids and plan’. But if you broke it down, he knew what we were doing over the next three months from a footballing point of view.”

Mourinho addressed a similar meeting at Enfield on Wednesday in which the Tottenham players he had inherited that morning were urged to pull together to revive their season. Then there were one-to-ones with senior personnel to make clear his vision, with player-specific training plans outlined in the hope they can provoke an immediate, positive reaction. Both the level of preparation and the way it was all put into practice hark back, again, to those early exchanges at Chelsea’s former training ground, under the Heathrow flight path in Harlington, back in 2004.

A squad used to working under Claudio Ranieri had been presented from the off with clarity. A structure. Players were even given handbooks detailing all the team’s defensive plans. The sense prevailed that nothing was being done on the hoof. It was the right approach for the right group at the right time. The tempo and intensity of training were duly lifted from the outset, with the onus forever on players to impress. “That was Jose’s genius,” said Joe Cole. “We were always on our toes. He would give you a kick up the backside at times, but it was fun playing for him too. He always seemed to know the right balance.”

“You’d be sitting there watching television and you’d get a text from him saying: ‘Are you watching this?’,” added Terry. “It’d be a comedy sketch show or something, and you’d end up having a two-way chat about it, and then it would just stop. And you’d be, like: ‘He’s not replied – what have I done?’ You’d go in the following morning and he wouldn’t speak to you and you’d be thinking: ‘Did I upset him?’ and check your messages again.

“Then you come in the next day and he’s putting his arm around you, asking how you were the previous night, how the wife and kids are. He would come sit with you at breakfast. Then a few days later he wouldn’t even acknowledge you again. He knew how to press buttons. As an individual it made you think you had to impress him every single day. He knew that if he did that with me, Lampard, Didier Drogba, Ashley Cole, Michael Ballack, Cech and Michael Essien — the big characters — and we were at it every single day, the other players who weren’t playing as much had just one way to go, and that was to match our standards on a daily basis.

“He created a culture. If Mourinho called a meeting at 10.30am, I’d be there at 10.15am because I never wanted to be late under Mourinho. Never. But all of a sudden everyone was there at 10.15am. So, if you arrived at 10.20am, you felt like you were late even though you were actually 10 minutes early.” It was all about raising collective standards on the assumption that, if the senior players set the tone, others would follow. It worked with that group to spectacular effect.

His one-to-ones would inspire and pep conviction. In his second spell at the club he would privately urge Diego Costa, such an asset when focused, to be at his most inflammatory out on the pitch, knowing the Brazil-born Spain striker added a thuggish dimension to the team’s play that knocked opponents back on their heels. At United he would send the players text messages before games to rev them up. Those who excelled were treated to days off in blocks if he deemed that a means of reinvigorating them for the fixtures ahead.

“When he praises you, he makes you feel like the most special person in football,” a senior player coached under Mourinho at Old Trafford told The Athletic. “There was a time he spoke about me in a press conference and I felt on top of the world. In the good times, he knew what to say. He is a champion. He’s won everywhere he’s gone. You have to admire him for this, and it should motivate you to work even harder.

“When he arrived, I was expecting exactly what he is and what he became: a winner. We won two titles together (the League Cup and Europa League in 2017). He knows what he wants and I have to say I liked our time together. As part of a leadership group, we had a good relationship: talking, asking me how I saw the group, how the players felt. He wanted that feedback.” Interaction has always been encouraged in his team meetings.

Ander Herrera, now of Paris Saint-Germain, had celebrated Mourinho’s “dynamic” training sessions, which would flit between tactical, technical and competitive drills to ensure there were few “long exercises where you might lose concentration”. “He is much more relaxed than he appears,” added Herrera’s former team-mate. “When we work, we work bloody hard. When we lost, he was bloody hard. And when we won, he wanted us to win the next game too. This mattered to him.

“He was good with days off but he wanted us to be sensible, to cleanse the mind on a day off and return completely fresh for the next training session. He sent me a text message when he left, and I replied thanking him for our time together. Despite how it ended, he remains an incredible manager.”

Those who worked under him at Chelsea will recognise those qualities. Cesc Fabregas suggested the kind of talks Mourinho staged with Harry Kane and Dele Alli on his first day at Spurs “brought back energy and fire in me”. The manager told Eden Hazard to be more ambitious in his play in their first tete-a-tete, with no mention of onerous tracking back or defensive responsibilities. Those demands would come later.

“Jose is the kind of manager who needs to get into players’ heads,” Branislav Ivanovic told The Athletic, recalling his time under a manager who would claim the Premier League for a third time in 2015. “When he does that, those players believe in themselves. He changed our mentality after only a couple of weeks of training at Chelsea (at the start of his second stint in charge). In that period we were so happy and impressed with his way of football, his way of talking to us every day. We knew definitely that we were going to win. There were no doubts because we were like one player. Everybody was focused and we dominated.”

Gary Cahill talks of “his aura, a presence and confidence that rubs off on his players”, while Thibaut Courtois initially spied a father figure in the Portuguese. “He knows when to be ‘one of us’, to be in with his players making jokes or relaxing us,” said the Belgium back in 2014 as he first made his mark at Stamford Bridge. “He might try and keep things upbeat and jokey ahead of a difficult away game, but other times he will be strong and distant. Above the team. Even severe sometimes. He mixes it up to keep everyone sharp.”

That mischievous sense of humour, more obvious in his dealings with the media through that first spell at Chelsea, has still re-surfaced in more recent years. This is a manager who once cued his coach, Silvino Louro, to drench an unsuspecting audience of players and training ground staff, ostensibly there to listen to the manager’s rabble-rousing speech, with a bucket of cold water.

Water bombs are a recurring theme, with the manager’s entourage pelted by Mourinho and Faria from a balcony as they enjoyed a drink on the hotel terrace in Velden, Austria back in the summer of 2014. They launched a similar aquatic attack later in that pre-season trip, and had bicycles stored close by so as to plead innocence as they subsequently rode past their soggy victims, pretending they were returning from a leisurely trip from the nearby village.

Then there were the acorns he would collect from the leafier side of the training pitches at Cobham and ping surreptitiously at his players in a bid to raise spirits while their title defence was collapsing in late 2015. He attempted everything in that trickiest of periods, whether carrot or stick, to summon a response. At United, when reports of his sour mood were dominating the back pages and the club started to feel on the slide, he made a point of strolling into the canteen whistling, singing, laughing and making jokes with the chef. His comedy bordered on defiance.

Maybe those perceived mood swings served to disconcert after a while. Particularly when results had taken a downturn, or if off-field political intrigue had started to infiltrate the dressing-room, and the customary calls for intensity started falling on weary minds and bodies. Then the unpredictability of Mourinho’s approach took on a rather wild air, at odds with the meticulous planner who had plotted teams’ routes to success. The confrontational side to his management style, which had once served to keep people eager to please, suddenly cut too close to the bone, too provocative. It merely served to rile.

Again, it boiled down to timing. This is a manager who, early in his second stint at Chelsea, once announced to his team at half-time that they had been “playing with 10 men” before turning to Hazard and pointing out he had been “rubbish”. The Belgian had been more used to being mollycoddled up to then. That was an early shot across the bows, designed to coax more from the playmaker. There were times in the weeks that followed when Mourinho would litter preparatory sessions on opponents’ star men with compliments to bolster his own playmaker’s confidence: “He is good, but he is no Hazard.” The Belgium international eventually came to terms with the tactic and the pair remain relatively close.

But, during that troubled autumn four years ago when Chelsea’s champions collapsed and were transformed overnight into relegation fodder, such an abrasive approach risked shattering brittle confidence. Back then, the manager picked fights with all and sundry, upsetting players and staff upon whom he might later need to rely. The core in whom he most trusted were overworked and overplayed, and wilted when they could offer no more. The rest had long since been alienated.

There has always been a volatility to his style. At half-time he would lurch from the hairdryer one week, to placid calm the next, even if his team were losing at the break. Not that that necessarily represented a problem. Emmanuel Adebayor, who had grown used to Arsene Wenger’s more measured in-game dressing-room lectures, recalls retiring at the break 3-0 up at Real. “And yet Jose came into the dressing-room and went mental,” he said. “He kicked the fridge, threw water, killed everyone. He once killed Cristiano Ronaldo after he scored a hat-trick.”

Mourinho freely admits he expects more from his creative talents, which should serve as a warning of sorts to those free spirits in Spurs’ ranks. “I am not the kind of guy that makes life easy for the great players,” he said in pre-season back in 2013 when asked of his initial impressions of Hazard. “This kind of player is the last I praise. If you have more ability than the others, you have to do more than the others. You have to praise the guys who play at their limits, who give everything. They are not superstars. They are just good players trying to support their teams.

“I made life quite difficult for Joe Cole because I was going in another direction and he accepted that, so we transformed together. Someone people used to call a No 10 who would make one or two fantastic actions in a game, we turned into a kind of inside-winger, right and left, and strong defensively. He was fantastic. I’ve worked with Cole, Arjen Robben and Damien Duff; Cristiano, Angel di Maria and Mesut Ozil. If you are ‘different’, you are different, so go and show it.”

The criticism of Ronaldo post hat-trick probably spurred the Portuguese on, but others are not quite as thick skinned. There are tales of Mourinho issuing a dressing down to one of the younger players in front of a crammed canteen on a pre-season tour, to ensure it was noted by all. Or of the manager deliberately telling a youngster the wrong time for a team meeting to ensure he could admonish him for being late in front of the rest of the squad. His intention, it seems, was to see if the player was angered and stood his ground. Instead, the youth-team graduate withdrew into himself and apologised, and Mourinho apparently considered that a strike against his character.

There is the tendency towards paranoia, whether that relates to strangers spying on training sessions or conspiracy theories over the commitment of his players. He has sought out scapegoats at times, rather than maybe scrutinising what he is doing wrong himself. There would be scepticism over injury niggles to key players — and not just Hazard’s hip complaint in 2015 — and wild accusations of dressing-room leaks which he deemed to undermine his authority.

The deterioration of his mood at United, amid frustrations in the club’s transfer dealings and the team’s stodgy form out on the pitch, served to suck all the happiness from Carrington. He cut a spiky, embittered figure over those final few months. He was uncommunicative, morose and, following Faria’s departure in search of a No 1 role, increasingly isolated. His assistant had often been the one to dissuade disgruntled players from seeking out the manager to voice their grievances. To Mourinho, he was a layer of protection. Stripped of that, he felt more exposed. It wore him down. He lost his edge.

There have been suggestions in the period of reflection since his sacking almost a year ago that he has reached out to former colleagues at the club and asked them to paint an honest picture of his behaviour. The kind of move made by someone who realises he might have gone too far. An acceptance of ill-judgement.

Spurs will certainly hope lessons have been learnt. Back on that first day at Chelsea 15 years ago, Mourinho had convinced a group of players that they could go on to secure a first league title since 1955. “The first slideshow in the team meeting he put on had a picture of the trophy and he said: ‘That image stays with you for the whole season, that’s what we are going to do this year,” added Terry. “No manager had ever done that before. He then explained what we needed to do to achieve that.”

Tottenham’s immediate objectives are more mundane, beginning with a game of catch-up to the top four, but Mourinho retains the ability to inspire good players towards silverware. At a club that has claimed a solitary League Cup in the last 28 years, for all the eye-catching progress of the Pochettino era, any trophy would feel like mission accomplished.
 

Gb160

Well done boys. Good process
Jun 20, 2012
23,646
93,315
His football does not represent continuity; Mourinho famously preferring a defensive, rigid, low-possession game rather than Pochettino’s intense, risky pressing game.
Intense, risky pressing games had practically disappeared in the last year under Poch.
 

King of Otters

Well-Known Member
Jun 11, 2012
10,751
36,093
Intense, risky pressing games had practically disappeared in the last year under Poch.

I also think Poch's promotion of youth has been vastly overrated. Who has he successfully integrated into the first team other than Winks?

Poch obviously did a lot of great things for us, but you'd think we'd just sacked Fergie the way some journos are carrying on.
 

Gb160

Well done boys. Good process
Jun 20, 2012
23,646
93,315
I also think Poch's promotion of youth has been vastly overrated. Who has he successfully integrated into the first team other than Winks?

Poch obviously did a lot of great things for us, but you'd think we'd just sacked Fergie the way some journos are carrying on.
It makes you question how much attention the media actually pay to us...they just keep trotting out the same old tired, inaccurate waffle.
 

King of Otters

Well-Known Member
Jun 11, 2012
10,751
36,093
It makes you question how much attention the media actually pay to us...they just keep trotting out the same old tired, inaccurate waffle.

I can only assume that a lot of them were amazed by the transformation he brought to the club in the first 3-4 years, but haven't been paying much attention for the past 12 months. You'd expect a bit better tbh.
 

Gb160

Well done boys. Good process
Jun 20, 2012
23,646
93,315
I can only assume that a lot of them were amazed by the transformation he brought to the club in the first 3-4 years, but haven't been paying much attention for the past 12 months. You'd expect a bit better tbh.
If I was paying £30 per year I bloody would lol.
 

carmeldevil

Well-Known Member
May 15, 2018
7,588
45,112
Good write up on the new No. 2:


Meet Mourinho’s new No 2: a tactical genius born in Portugal, made in Wales and who has never played football


Treforest, a small town in the Welsh valleys, strikes as an unusual place for Jose Mourinho’s new No 2 to have begun his coaching education. Aside from being the birthplace to Sir Tom Jones, there is little much else to write home about.

But for Joao Sacramento, it represented the start to a pursuit of a career at the highest level. And he was unafraid to leave his comfort zone to take it.

As an 18-year-old, Sacramento moved from Portugal to Treforest to study at the University of Glamorgan — as it was named then — because its football course was one of only a few offering such bespoke tutoring in Europe.

He wasn’t there for the cosmopolitan lifestyle. One contemporary student tells The Athletic: “It’s literally the start of a valley. When I first moved there my mum said, ‘Where are we?’”

Sacramento’s progression from undergrad in south Wales to jobs at Monaco and Lille — where he was briefly caretaker manager aged 29 — and now Tottenham is a triumph for academia. He did not play the game to any level but instead committed fervently to understanding coaching methods and in that sense Mourinho, who has a history of making such appointments when you consider Andre Villas-Boas and Rui Faria, might see a reflection of himself.

Sacramento’s mother and father could not envisage their son’s trajectory at the start, however. “His parents wanted him to study something mainstream, like engineering,” says Dave Adams, who led the course at Glamorgan, now called the University of South Wales. “He was interested in coaching from a very young age. He found the course online and knew it offered qualifications and a degree in football that was very specialist. In Portugal there was no such programme available. His parents didn’t seem very keen. They wondered where he would go career-wise, which is fair enough, it was niche. But he and I managed to convince them.”

Even though he could speak French and Spanish, Sacramento’s English was actually very rudimentary when he first relocated. But he came armed with an excellent appreciation of the training methods Mourinho had brought to England to such success in his first stint at Chelsea.

‘Tactical periodisation’ is a concept pioneered by Vitor Frade at the University of Porto which essential interweaves all the elements of football. “Everything is integrated, all the disciplines of the game come together,” says Adams. “So when you are doing technical, tactical training you are also training the physical at the same time.”

John Terry has given an account of what this looked like for players. “We were of a generation that on day one of pre-season, you’d put your trainers on and run around the pitch. But from day one, (Mourinho) ordered us to put our boots on (to play with the ball),” Terry recently told Dubai Eye 103.8. “His fitness coach had the mindset of, ‘You never see a pianist running around a piano.’ From day one we were working with the ball.”

Adams, who is now technical director of the Welsh FA, adds: “During Joao’s Masters we did quite a bit of research, looking into how that methodology had been implemented into various clubs at the time. Brendan Rodgers was in at Swansea, for example, and he had worked with Mourinho at Chelsea.”

It was clear from the beginning Sacramento, now 30, meant business. “He was quite quiet but extremely studious,” says Adams. “Every single assignment he got 80 per cent plus. He was incredibly switched-on.”

A university friend remembers: “He is cut from a similar cloth to Mourinho to be honest, confident but a little bit brash. He’s a good dude, can be cheeky. His English improved loads second and third years.

“For Joao there was no other way. Even back then he said there were certain managers he couldn’t work with because of his training methods.”

Adams set up vocational modules for his students, with Sacramento one of a number who gained experience at Cardiff City academy, coaching various age groups.

“He was also very much into analysing the opposition,” adds Adams. “He was very keen to learn more about going to games and he was producing very high-end, detailed reports.”

Some of these even found their way to Gary Speed, who was managing Wales at the time. “He did a lot of work behind the scenes on the intermediate teams,” says Adams. “It was an internship, so when he was doing a masters degree full-time, he would do 20 hours a week work on top.”

Mourinho scouted opponents for Louis van Gaal at Barcelona, just as Villas-Boas then did for him at Chelsea. There is a pattern.

In June 2018, Sacramento gave a presentation at the inaugural Soccer Science Conference hosted at Bristol City, in which he provided insight into his approach. “He talked about the benefits of analysing a snapshot of the opposition’s shape or tactical disposition and then building your training sessions literally as a by-product,” says Adams, who also spoke at the conference. “You think it might be straight-forward but not many are doing it to that level of detail.”

The university friend describes Sacramento’s work in that regard as “mind-bending”. “There was only really one place Joao could have gone and that’s Champions League.”

Sacramento reached that level in April 2014 when he was named head of opposition analysis at Monaco by sporting director Luis Campos, working as an assistant to video manager Miguel Moita. It is believed Campos comes from Barcelos, the same town in Portugal as Sacramento, but there was nothing nepotistic about the appointment. Instead Sacramento gained a meeting with Campos and impressed him with a demonstration of his work on his laptop. Sacramento analysed Monaco’s opponents first for Claudio Ranieri then for Leonardo Jardim.

In January 2017 Lille OSC were bought by Gerard Lopez and one of his first acts was to appoint Campos as a sporting director. And one of Campos’ first acts was to bring Sacramento in from Monaco. He joined as first team assistant coach, with a special focus on video analysis. But when Marcelo Bielsa was appointed in May 2017, Sacramento was a victim of the power struggle between Campos and the new manager. In early September Bielsa sidelined Sacramento, relegating him away from first-team duties.

Bielsa only lasted 13 games, and in November 2017 he was suspended by the club. And Sacramento, still just 29 years old, led the four-man team that temporarily took over coaching duties. The players quickly warmed to Sacramento, finding him more amenable than Bielsa, with a less ideological style of play, and were impressed by his ability to take training in French, Spanish and Portuguese. “With Bielsa, training was very positional, it was very repetitive,” said defender Adama Soumaoro. “With Joao, there is more play, we touch the ball more.”

After losing his first game in charge, Sacramento then masterminded a 2-1 win away at Lyon, abandoning Bielsa’s style for a deeper defence and counter-attack game. “He gives us confidence, he talks to us a lot, he is always behind us,” said defender Kevin Malcuit. And when Christophe Galtier was appointed as the new permanent manager in December 2017, Sacramento was promoted to being his assistant. Clearly he made an impression in that role, as Galtier sarcastically congratulated Mourinho on his “classy” behaviour in his Thursday press conference, for taking his assistant without calling him.

Zinedine Zidane was impressed by Sacramento’s work and tried to get him as part of his staff at Real Madrid.

Evidently Mourinho, who counts Campos as a friend, was paying attention too. During his 11-month spell out of management Mourinho was frequently seen at Lille’s matches. Now they will be on the bench together at Tottenham, alongside another former Lille coach, Nuno Santos, and two of Mourinho’s team from United, the fitness coach Carlos Lalin and tactical analyst Giovanni Cerra.

Sacramento’s last job in Britain was working under Adams as technical demonstrator. And his former boss is pleased to see him thriving.

“He’s extremely ambitious and believes in himself 100 per cent,” says Adams. “He is not influenced by fads. He has always had this idea and stuck to that way of working. He is a very honest person, a good guy to have at the elite end of the game. I wish him the best of luck.”
 

MightyModric

Well-Known Member
May 29, 2011
1,147
3,201
"Ornstein on Monday: Raiola complicates United pursuit of Haaland, Adidas gives Mourinho special treatment, rogue firms exploit Premier League clubs "

Think it also mentions Sessegnon as well, could someone post?
 

SargeantMeatCurtains

Your least favourite poster
Jan 5, 2013
11,764
61,758
"Ornstein on Monday: Raiola complicates United pursuit of Haaland, Adidas gives Mourinho special treatment, rogue firms exploit Premier League clubs "

Think it also mentions Sessegnon as well, could someone post?
It’s short, but:

Another reason for Mourinho to be cheerful is that he finally has the chance to coach Ryan Sessegnon, having repeatedly tried to sign the teenager from Fulham while in charge at United.
 
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