Spurs must show Pochettino Old Trafford is not a better new world
Tottenham chairman Daniel Levy has a fighting chance of keeping his manager out of the grasp of Man United, due to a bond on and off the field which is unusual in today’s game
hould we stay or should we go?” wrote Mauricio Pochettino, recalling the days towards the end of the 2013-2014 season at Southampton, when the club were changing rapidly behind the scenes and Daniel Levy was working hard to convince him to come to Tottenham Hotspur.
“Our departure from Southampton was a saga,” Pochettino would later recall in his autobiography Brave New World, that extraordinarily candid account of his life published last year. “A lot of tears were shed.”
But he had a reason then. His friend Nicola Cortese, the chairman, had been forced out by owner Katharina Liebherr, many of his best players were about to be sold and even given the impact of his eighth-place finish, he had been there only 18 months.
Levy will not need to leaf through Pochettino’s book to remind himself how hard it was to recruit a manager for whom the emotional pull is just as critical as the financial reward. It was tough enough for Southampton to appoint Pochettino in January 2013, even though he was out of work at the time. In the end he had to be persuaded by Karina, his wife, and Jesus Perez, his faithful assistant. On the private jet Cortese sent to bring him over, Pochettino told his assistants not to touch the champagne or food in case the club thought they were “here for a lark”.
The man whom Manchester United want as their new manager; the bright young coach at the centre of the season’s biggest stay-or-go saga, is a different kind of character. The logic is compelling, as Jamie Carragher has already made clear in these pages: United are a bigger club than Spurs, they are a bigger club arguably than any other in the world when you consider their revenue-generating capacity. But Levy also knows that if he can persuade Pochettino to stay put, he will have done more than ever to disrupt the natural hierarchy of the English game.
More than anything, Levy will know well that there is a part of Pochettino that, in the face of whatever promises have been made by United, retains a stoic sense of loyalty; a desire to do the right thing by those he works with, that might keep him at Spurs beyond this summer.
As ever in these power games, when the biggest clubs try to poach players, or sometimes managers, from one another there can be a sense of the inevitable. That behind the scenes the whole game has already played out, a deal cut and promises made, although with Pochettino, his history strongly suggests that he is persuadable. At Southampton they remember a conflicted, emotional manager who agonised over leaving behind players and colleagues.
If that was the case after 18 months at Saints, then what will it be like after 4½ years at Spurs?
He changes his mind. He takes the counsel of his three coaches, although it is Perez to whom he listens most. In the early days at Southampton, the other two,
Miki D’Agostino and Toni Jimenez, would leave their open-plan office so the pair could talk in private.
United would have to convince the whole Pochettino team as well to carry their manager along with them, and Levy will see plenty of ways that he can counter that to make his man stay where he is.
For the Spurs chairman, this is another critical period of his stewardship; a moment when his strategy for the next three years will hinge on how he deals with the Pochettino-United episode and possibly who he appoints in the Argentine’s place. The most obvious Premier League successor would be Eddie Howe – younger than Pochettino but also in no rush to leave, content with the world he has built for
It is hard to think of a chairman-manager bromance like the one between this pair