A year on from appointing Nuno, Spurs are a million miles away from their malaise of 2021 (2024)

It was one year ago today, on 29 June 2021, that Daniel Levy and Fabio Paratici reluctantly agreed that their only option was to appoint Nuno Espirito Santo as their new head coach. Tottenham had been looking for Jose Mourinho’s successor for 10 weeks and, with players due to return for pre-season training in a few days, they had run out of road. Their only hope was that Nuno could stabilise the club and that, with the Portuguese having only been handed a two-year deal, they could find an upgrade sooner rather than later.

The next day Nuno arrived at Tottenham to sign his contract, but even that was not the end of Spurs’ shambolic summer. Nuno was expected to arrive with four members of staff: assistant manager Rui Pedro Silva, fitness coach Antonio Dias, goalkeeping coach Rui Barbosa and rehab coach Joao Lapa. But Silva and Lapa simply did not show up, and Ian Cathro joined them instead. Tottenham staff were taken aback that such a big change could happen at short notice. (Silva has since taken over at FC Famalicao in Portugal, and taken Lapa with him.)

And from there it was pretty much all downhill. After a disastrous 3-1 defeat at Arsenal on September 26, Levy realised he might have to start looking for a replacement even sooner than he had expected. After a mutinous 3-0 defeat to Manchester United on October 30, Levy sacked Nuno and finally, at the second time of trying, appointed Antonio Conte.

That effectively marked the end of a long period of instability and drift at Tottenham Hotspur, one that started when Jose Mourinho was sacked in April (or, you may argue, when Mauricio Pochettino was sacked in November 2019).

The remarkable thing, with one year of hindsight, is how a club that has always prided themselves on being intelligently run and forward-thinking could have got themselves into such a disastrous mess.

There are not many examples of big clubs getting things this wrong in the modern era — either in the sense of spending so much time scrambling around for an appointment (clubs don’t tend to sack managers without knowing who is coming in next), or in the sense of appointing someone who was so obviously not cut out for the job, and having to get rid of him so soon. Luiz Felipe Scolari at Chelsea, David Moyes at Manchester United, Roy Hodgson at Liverpool: all of these were clearly not right for the job, but they all got more than half a season before getting sacked. Nuno is left, by the modern standards of the Big Six, not so much as an Edward VIII figure but as a Lady Jane Grey.

The difference in feel between that summer and this one is so pronounced that this bit hardly needs to be re-stated. Spurs spent the of summer 2021 scrambling around for a head coach, desperately trying to hold onto Harry Kane, preparing for life in the Europa Conference League, revamping the football structure of the club, bruised by protests from fans furious about their club’s dalliance with the Super League, trying to repair the club finances post-COVID-19 and, frankly, with no obvious plan or idea for the future of the club in the 2020s.

This summer? They have one of the best managers in the world in Antonio Conte. Kane looks committed to the club and is the subject of no speculation. Spurs are back in the Champions League and will find out on 25 August who they will face in the group stage. After one season of full stadium revenue — and with another £150-million cash injection coming in — Spurs can be active in the transfer market, and have three established players through the door already. More importantly than any of that: it feels like Tottenham are heading in the right direction again, that they have a clear plan and the means to get there.

So right now, the summer of 2021 feels like a bad dream, something better left in the far recesses of our collective memory, and never mentioned again. (Like the embarrassing memories of a drunken evening that you are too ashamed to try to access.) But it is worth asking just how things got so bad last year. How did Tottenham get so far adrift?

In the summer of 2021, Tottenham did not know what they wanted to be. They had tried the glamorous big-name option, by replacing Pochettino with Mourinho, and it had failed. With Spurs no closer to a return to the Champions League, and an air of toxic apathy enveloping the club, what could they do next?

Plan A was for Levy to entrust Steve Hitchen (who was then the club’s director of technical performance) to draw up a shortlist of coaches with a view to appointing someone as similar as possible to Pochettino. They wanted to bring a coaching ethos, young players and attacking football back to Tottenham. Some candidates were ruled out from the start — Julian Nagelsmann had gone to Bayern Munich, Brendan Rodgers was a non-starter — but Hitchen built up a shortlist in April and May. There was Roberto Martinez, Ralf Rangnick (whatever happened to him?) and Graham Potter.

But at the top of the shortlist were Erik ten Hag and Hansi Flick. They loved Ten Hag’s style of play with Ajax, but after his interview they were left slightly underwhelmed. He was not quite as authoritative as they had hoped (Ajax also triggered an extension to Ten Hag’s contract, but that would not have been a barrier to him taking over). Flick was hugely impressive, with a wide-ranging CV and a commitment to an aggressive style of play. But he stuck with his initial plan to take the Germany job instead.

So Spurs decided to go back to Pochettino himself, who still held the club in his heart, and who was torn on the romantic idea of returning to the club where he was so loved. But when Paris Saint-Germain made it clear there was no absolutely no way that they would lose their manager to Tottenham Hotspur, Levy and Hitchen needed a new plan.

It was the end of May, when the Pochettino plan was running aground, that Levy considered a new idea: bringing Fabio Paratici in from Juventus in a managing director of football role, and Conte, who had just won Serie A with Inter, as head coach. Appointing Conte was a great idea, but it was also a 180-degree turn from the youth-oriented rebuild (“Tottenham DNA” and all that) that Levy had promised just a few weeks before. Spurs were back to shopping at the top end of the market.

When Tottenham spoke with Conte he was very impressive: clear that he could revive the team, but that he would never change who he was, and that if he ever got a sense he was being lied to he would walk. “I am who I am” was his core message. There was no issue with agreeing the contract or salary. But then Conte decided to say no and spend at the least the first part of the next season on the beach instead.

This is when the drama really started. Tottenham had gone from planning a return to their own values, to aiming for the best manager on the market, and ended up with neither. So where did they turn next? A deal was lined up for Paulo Fonseca and Paratici, already working for the club behind the scenes, spoke to him in Milan. But when he arranged a two-day summit with Fonseca in Como, to finalise plans for backroom staff, transfers, and style of play, he came away with the feeling that Fonseca would not be the right man after all. Tottenham needed a more powerful, assertive figure.

What good fortune, then, that Gennaro Gattuso was already on his way out of Fiorentina, having signed a contract but not taken over yet. And even better luck that his agent Jorge Mendes should be so very close to Paratici. The morning after Spurs decided against Fonseca, Mendes called Paratici and pitched Gattuso. Paratici was intrigued and after a quick interview in Italy, the job was effectively his. He wasn’t Conte, but Tottenham felt that he had the strength of personality and instant charisma to rally the players and the fans again. He might not be as smart as Pochettino, the thinking went, but he did have some of his conviction.

But when fans started to voice their disapproval for comments Gattuso had made in the past, Levy had to pull the plug. (This in itself was unprecedented: no Premier League fanbase has blocked the appointment of a manager on moral grounds before.)

Levy was forced back to the drawing board yet again. Had they left it too late for Ten Hag? Could they get Potter out of Brighton? Was it too soon for Scott Parker? (Yes, no and yes.) Paratici was more intrigued by the idea of Nuno than the club had been at the start of the summer, and with no other better available options, Nuno got the job.

It really is, looking back, the most bizarre sequence of events. And what does it tell us? Well, on the one hand, that if a club loses sight of its “key priorities” (as Levy put it himself, at the start of this process), then they can become unmoored fast. That sackings should only be done with a succession plan in place, if not a successor lined up. Spurs seemed to sketch out and then dispose of a bin-full of succession plans between sacking Mourinho and appointing Conte.

But the alternative reading of this is that it has barely mattered at all. Spurs are now in a position that they could scarcely have dreamed of at the end of last season, at the end of the Ryan Mason interregnum, when it felt every part of this football club was pulling in a different direction.

Ultimately it was the underlying health of the club — the stadium, the training ground, the players, the location, the simple fact of being one of the biggest teams in the Premier League, at a moment of English financial dominance — that kept Spurs relevant. Through a combination of good fortune and good decisions, this is a club with a lot going for it. Even if it didn’t feelthat way when everything was falling apart last year.

In the modern stratified Premier League, status is more permanent than we might think.

(Photo: Tottenham Hotspur FC/Tottenham Hotspur FC via Getty Images)

Jack Pitt-Brooke is a football journalist for The Athletic based in London. He joined in 2019 after nine years at The Independent.