Mauricio Pochettino had plans for a Ferguson-style dynasty at Tottenham but Daniel Levy had other ideas

Mauricio Pochettino the man: He was passionate, persuasive and incredibly thorough.
AFP via Getty Images
Dan Kilpatrick @Dan_KP20 November 2019

Mauricio Pochettino largely kept the media at arm’s length but even at a distance you could feel the Argentine’s warmth.

When I literally bumped into Pochettino and his coaches in ­Moscow’s Red Square in September 2016, he took the time to chat and showed me a picture on his phone of his last visit, as a player with Espanyol. He had just sent it to his friend and former team-mate Ivan de la Pena.

The previous summer, in July 2016, Pochettino had given me and the two other reporters who travelled to ­Melbourne to cover Tottenham’s pre-season an unprecedented and impromptu tactical masterclass.

With his assistant Jesus Perez and coaches Toni Jimenez and Miguel D’Agostino each equipped with a ­MacBook, Pochettino explained his philosophy in detail, with the help of videos. I gained as much insight into Pochettino the man and the manager in those 40 minutes as in five-and-a-half years of press conferences.

Even back then, when his English was still patchy, it was easy to appreciate his absolute conviction in his approach and to understand why his players took so readily to his methods. He was passionate, persuasive and incredibly thorough.

Throughout the session, it was also impossible to ignore Pochettino’s raw outrage at the way other Premier League clubs had indulged Leicester’s fairytale title win in the previous ­season, ultimately at Spurs’s expense. He had said nothing of it openly, nor would he ever, I suspect largely out of respect for Claudio Ranieri. For all his cryptic public ­messages of late, he is a diplomatic at heart — certainly more so than his successor — with a strong sense of decorum.

In May, before the Champions League Final, he did an extensive interview with me and three other reporters, finishing with a bear hug for each of us and promising to hold a traditional Argentine asado (barbecue) for the media at the training ground if Spurs beat Liverpool. He had never seemed so motivated. The asado, of course, never happened.

These behind-the-scenes moments were rare, but Pochettino was ­typically cordial with the press, while maintaining consummate professionalism. He was particularly open when the cameras were off and he could express himself freely, often with the help of Perez as a translator.

Mauricio Pochettino's managerial career

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But Pochettino could also be prickly, occasionally unnecessarily so, and he regularly accused the media of “twisting” his words, an accusation which grew a little tiresome, particularly as it was usually a deflection from his own inconsistencies. He had a habit of attempting to rewrite history, often going back on something he had said a week or even a day earlier. Like all great managers, he has a powerful self-confidence which bordered on full-blown ego.

Pochettino’s mood swings were frequent and such was the force of his personality, it often felt like the very state of the club depended on his mindset. He could raise the room with inspiring public oratory or leave you feeling glum about Tottenham’s future.

Similarly, his messages could be contradictory, one minute hinting he could leave and the next insisting he wanted to build a dynasty to rival his hero Sir Alex Ferguson’s at Manchester United. I always felt more inclined to the latter. Now we know that Daniel Levy had other ideas.

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