It will be a shame but you need to pack your things and you leave tonight
REVEALED: HOW RUTHLESS CHAIRMAN LEVY CALLED TIME ON POCHETTINO REIGN
A CONVERSATION among senior Tottenham players in the club’s plush canteen highlights the brutality of the sacking of manager Mauricio Pochettino.
Jan Vertonghen is telling Harry Kane and Son Heung-Min that the Argentinian must have known the end was coming.
“He didn’t know already, I spoke to him last night,” says Kane, before reporting Pochettino’s account of his conversation with Daniel Levy to his astonished team-mates.
“Mauricio told me, ‘The chairman called me and said, ‘Can I talk? It will be a shame but you will need to pack your things and you leave tonight.’”
Inviting Amazon Prime to bring their cameras behind the closed doors told a very different story to the one
Levy anticipated when the deal was struck last summer.
Instead of documenting more Champions League glory under Pochettino, the film-makers captured a club in turmoil.
Despite five-and-a-half years of remarkable improvement that took them all the way to the Champions League final, the team seemed to hit a wall at the start of the season and Pochettino was sacked after just three wins in the first 12 games left Spurs 14th in the Premier League.
“The perception of me is that I am hard-nosed, stubborn, don’t care and not ambitious,” says Levy. “A lot of that is unfair. They just don’t understand how hard it is to get to that place where you improve the team.
“The engine of the club is the team and I hate it when we lose. It is not something I can directly control – obviously I can have an influence by hopefully making the right decisions.
“But reaching this decision took a lot of heartache. My heart was telling me don’t do it and my brain was telling me I needed to do it. It was the most emotional decision I’ve had to make.”
The cameras capture details Jose Mourinho may have preferred had remained hidden. Did he want the world to know it takes a 45-page contract to secure his services? Or for us to see his ears prick up when he hears Sky Sports News on the TV in his office start to analyse his appointment? Mourinho’s interest soon turns to disgust. When a social media post is read out suggesting he is past it, he swears at the set and turns it off.
More important now is how the players react to their training ground secrets being laid bare.
Certainly Dele Alli’s soon-to-be very public dressing down is uncomfortably close to the knuckle.
Throughout, though, Mourinho makes sure he is the star. “The guy never smiles; the guy is ruthless – this is the perception,” he says of himself. “The truth is that there is some truth in that! Football is for me about trying to win. I’ve to show the players the person I am, the manager I am.”
Results this season will dictate whether All or Nothing is the motivational masterclass of a maverick or the psychological parlour tricks of a music hall magician no longer playing to his era. At present, though, there are definitely no plans for a sequel.
This was my most emotional decision