Sometimes when a club play on a Friday it can give them a weekend off. Not for Tottenham. By lunchtime on Monday, Daniel Levy had joined a breakaway Super League and sacked Jose Mourinho. The two decisions may not have been related but they reflected a broader desire to establish Spurs among the European elite.
SACKED Jose Mourinho leaves Tottenham Hotspur
NEWS Tottenham want Julian Nagelsmann to replace Jose Mourinho as manager
Lying seventh in the Premier League, knocked out of continental competition by Dinamo Zagreb, Tottenham turned to illicit means to ringfence their place alongside the superpowers. That only lasted 48 hours, but this has been a year when their plans have unravelled at some speed.
Arguably Tottenham’s very presence in football’s dirty dozen was a triumph of Levy; he has contrived to increase their prominence to such an extent even though Ipswich and Derby have been champions of England more recently, Mechelen have European silverware since Spurs last gained any and Wigan and Swansea have more domestic trophies in the last decade, Tottenham found themselves alongside the renegade superpowers.
Maybe it meant that, off the pitch anyway, Mourinho served a purpose. Hiring the world’s most famous manager and then using the planet’s most quotable as the star of the Amazon All or Nothing documentary enhanced Spurs’ profile. Bringing back Gareth Bale was another indication of the Hollywoodisation of Tottenham, another superstar designed for a Super League.
None of which should deflect attention from how disastrous Mourinho’s appointment was. It was not merely the poor results of the last four months or the slide down the table. It was how predictable his failures were. The dull, fearful football, the scapegoating of players, the ever more unhappy dressing room, the determination to pin blame on everyone else and escape responsibility himself: this had all happened elsewhere. He didn’t understand Tottenham’s traditions or their players. Mourinho was as poor a fit as George Graham. But none of that was any shock. As so many others saw it coming, how didn’t Levy?
It feels as though he had not done his due diligence, hiring on reputation not recent record, thinking that he was still getting the 2009 Mourinho when he plumped for him in 2019. Even his description of the Portuguese, in the Amazon documentary, as one of the world’s two best managers, was out of date. Now Spurs have decided a 29-year-old who has never been in charge of a senior game, in Ryan Mason, gives them a greater chance of winning a cup final.
The Super League may deflect from what a chastening mistake Mourinho was. Levy had seemed the man with the sure touch in recent years, financing a deluxe stadium, plucking a manager from Southampton and seeing him lead Tottenham to a Champions League final with a famously low net spend. In an industry where most think they are cleverer than they are, Levy seemed one of the few who had found a genuinely brilliant formula.
Fourteen months ago, Spurs’ former director of football Damien Comolli claimed baseball’s legendary moneyballer Billy Beane had said Levy is one of the best executives in all sport. Comolli himself thought there should be at statue to Levy at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium; perhaps the lack of one will prevent vandalization now.
But how much of that reputation has been trashed by the 17 months of Mourinho? Much of Mauricio Pochettino’s legacy has been attacked, some of his players alienated, many of them talked down and seemingly deteriorating, deflating their market value. Even Harry Kane, a Mourinho loyalist who excelled, may want to join a club with a greater chance of securing silverware.
It is stating the obvious to say Levy needs to get the next appointment right. An interest in Julian Nagelsmann would seem a return to the principles Pochettino espoused, but the forthcoming vacancy at Bayern Munich may mean Tottenham’s timing is wrong.
But Levy does not just need to pick a manager. He needs to rediscover an ethos. Tottenham have lost their compass, moral and footballing, of late. Levy may have made them a fortune or lost some of his standing. Football’s history is littered with chairmen and chief executives – Huw Jenkins, Phil Gartside, Peter Ridsdale – who were acclaimed as gurus and role models until, after a few poor decisions, suddenly they weren’t. For Tottenham and Levy alike, Mourinho has to prove an aberration, an isolated lapse of judgment.
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