How do you know when you’re over someone you once loved?
Maybe it’s when you stop thinking about them everyday. Or when they stop haunting your dreams. Or perhaps it’s when you find a straight-talking Australian with a penchant for inverted full-backs to take their place.
For Tottenham Hotspur, four years on from his departure, there is finally a sense that the club are not still collectively pining for Mauricio Pochettino. Instead, there is a new object of their affections: the head coach appointed this summer, Ange Postecoglou.
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On Monday night, the two men will meet as opposing managers at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, bringing the dynamic into sharp focus. Pochettino, now managing Spurs’ loathed rivals Chelsea, up against the first of his four successors the Tottenham fans have taken to their hearts.
It will be the first time Pochettino has returned to the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium since his final game as Spurs manager against Sheffield United almost exactly four years ago — a painful 1-1 draw on a grizzly, wet afternoon in north London when Spurs were lucky to escape with a point.
It’s hard to imagine the emotions Pochettino will be feeling. He was sacked 10 days after that Sheffield United game and didn’t get the chance to say goodbye to the players — leaving a message on a training ground whiteboard instead.
Now, he’ll be returning to a ground that was an almost constant preoccupation during his time at the club. Spurs didn’t end up moving into the new stadium until April 2019, but everything up until then was geared towards making sure the team qualified for the Champions League by the time it was completed.
It felt like a symbol of the team’s progress and transformation into a bona fide ‘Big Six’ member. But the delay to the move, which meant two years playing at Wembley Stadium just as his Spurs side were coming to their peak, was another example of Pochettino having to do the job with effectively one hand tied behind his back.
In any case, once Spurs had belatedly moved, Pochettino was seen as the man who would lead the club into the new stadium and the new era it represented. He and his assistant, Jesus Perez, even had input into how the home areas, like the dressing room, were designed. When Pochettino enters the stadium on Monday, he will be intimately familiar with the place and its setup.
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And as for that aim of being a Champions League team by the time of the stadium’s opening, Pochettino had obliterated the target. When they finally moved, Spurs weren’t just competing in the Champions League, they were playing quarter-finals and semis at the new ground within a month of its opening.
Pochettino was acutely aware of the stadium’s significance and at one of the test games for the new ground between the Spurs and Southampton under-18s sides, he addressed the fans from pitchside at half-time and spoke about his excitement at Tottenham’s new home. “We need to cry because our dream came true,” Pochettino said.
But ultimately the delayed finish to the stadium and Pochettino’s premature exit meant he only managed the team in the new stadium for seven months, totalling a meagre 15 games. He managed far more at Tottenham’s hugely unpopular temporary Wembley home.
But whatever happened in the past, Pochettino’s return is long overdue — even if it’s not in the circumstances he and many others might have imagined.
Especially as the team he is currently managing, Chelsea, have endured a tricky start to the season. Should Spurs win on Monday, they would move 17 points clear of their London rivals and finish the game top of the league, potentially 15 places higher than Chelsea.
That in itself goes a long way towards explaining why Postecoglou has helped Spurs finally get over Pochettino. But there’s more to it — as well as the results, there’s also the thrilling football and sense of togetherness the Australian has engendered at Tottenham, evoking memories of the early Pochettino period when the team clicked and everything felt possible.
So, how did we get to the point where Pochettino is returning to north London in charge of the opposition rather than the Spurs manager? And after Tottenham’s decision not to go after Pochettino this summer, can we say things have turned out for the best for all parties?
So much has been written about Pochettino’s departure that there’s no need to relitigate it in too much detail here.
At the time, The Athletic reported on how tense things had become at Hotspur Way, with one source saying a month before Pochettino’s sacking that “the place is a regime and they’re sick of him”.
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At the time of his sacking, one dressing-room source told The Athletic that Pochettino had “sulked his way to the sack”.
That was one side of the story. The other was that Pochettino had not been backed properly when he desperately wanted and needed to refresh the squad and had surely earned the right to do so given the near-miracles he’d performed.
Most fans were devastated by his sacking and felt the club had failed him. How could they have not made a single summer signing in 2018? Why was the wage structure not more readily relaxed? Why did the stadium build have to drag on and leave Pochettino’s Spurs — so formidable at White Hart Lane — playing away from their home for almost two full seasons?
However you viewed it, Spurs had been in decline for some time at the moment of Pochettino’s sacking. They had not won away in the league for 10 months, were languishing in 14th after 12 games, and had picked up 25 points from their previous 24 games, which is relegation form.
The change in manager didn’t result in a long-term uptick in results, though, and the subsequent failure of his successor Jose Mourinho only served to deepen Spurs fans’ love for Pochettino. In the opposite way to how Postecoglou has helped Spurs get over Pochettino, Mourinho’s attitude and approach made them long for him even more.
So much of one’s legacy is defined by what comes after.
And in this case, even Daniel Levy, the Spurs chairman who had sacked Pochettino and might not have wanted to swallow his pride so quickly, attempted to bring the Argentine back in the summer of 2021. Mourinho had just been sacked and it was barely 18 months on from Pochettino’s departure.
He was by now at Paris Saint-Germain, which never felt like a natural fit. Even though Pochettino had only been in the job for half a season, as a natural romantic, he was open to a Spurs reunion. In the end, it proved to be a non-starter as PSG weren’t willing to let him go.
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The seed had been sown, however, and for everyone connected with Tottenham, the possibility of a Pochettino return remained tantalisingly within reach.
As Antonio Conte’s ultimately miserable time as Spurs head coach withered to a conclusion in the early part of 2023, the clamour for Pochettino’s return intensified. Conte — like Mourinho, then Nuno Espirito Santo — only served to emphasise what had been lost since Pochettino’s departure.
In March, as Spurs limped to a Champions League exit against Milan, the fans at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium began to sing Pochettino’s name. This became a regular occurrence at games for a month or so as Conte departed and the club began the hunt for his successor.
But Spurs had decided to go in a different direction. Pochettino, out of work since leaving PSG the previous summer, was not on the shortlist drawn up by the then managing director of football Fabio Paratici.
Paratici had worked hard to build up his power base at Tottenham and wasn’t going to willingly dismantle it to bring in a manager who would instantly be more powerful and popular than he could ever be. So it was no surprise when Pochettino was not on Paratici’s original list. The noises coming out of Spurs were that they wanted someone younger with fresh ideas.
But with Paratici banned from football at the end of March for alleged financial malpractice and Spurs lurching from one crisis to the next, perhaps the door would be open for Pochettino. It certainly would have been a politically expedient move for Levy, who had fans demanding his exit at every game alongside the chants to bring in Pochettino.
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But the call to Pochettino still never went in. The view of the Spurs hierarchy was that it wouldn’t have been sensible to go down this road given how toxic things had become by the time Pochettino had left in 2019. Many subscribed to the footballing truism that you should never go back.
Pochettino knew he couldn’t wait forever so joined Chelsea instead. When Spurs played Manchester United in late April soon after it became clear Pochettino was heading to west London, there was no chanting of his name. It felt like it had finally dawned on the club that the reunion many had pined for wasn’t going to happen.
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But for full closure to be achieved, Spurs needed to find someone else to rally around, especially as seeing Pochettino succeed with Chelsea while they continued to stagger around in mid-table was too painful to even think about.
Enter Postecoglou.
Given how much pressure Levy was under from the fans, he must have been tempted to make the politically popular decision and re-hire Pochettino.
Instead, the managerial search centred on finding someone with similar qualities to the former manager. “Culture” was the buzzword of the search for Conte’s replacement, with an acknowledgement that Spurs had become a pretty miserable place to work in the previous few years after three failed managerial appointments.
And while there’s a school of thought that says Levy got lucky with Postecoglou after missing out on other targets — the Australian himself joked that he was the “last man standing” for the job — he was on the club’s original longlist.
In essence, Spurs wanted someone like Pochettino in 2014 and, although he’s much older, there are a lot of similarities between the young Poch and Postecoglou. The positivity, the attacking football, the feeling of a manager on the up. However, one difference has been how quickly Spurs have started under Postecoglou compared to Pochettino’s transitional first season.
At this point, the decision not to bring back Pochettino looks like the best move for all concerned. One of the big issues with bringing Pochettino back would be that despite so much success in his five years at the club, there was also a lot of scar tissue. He and Levy are on good terms now — the chairman sent Pochettino a message of congratulations when he got the Chelsea job — but it’s not hard to imagine things quickly fraying. Pochettino has worked longer for Levy than any other manager has and probably ever will and both experienced a lot of frustration by the time things fell apart four years ago.
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With the fans, things might have become fractious fairly quickly, too. It’s worth pointing out that for all the adulation Pochettino enjoys from many supporters, some weren’t in favour of him coming back. By the time he left, a few had gripes over things like his team selection for cup games and the associated failure to capitalise on the team he’d built by winning a trophy. His comment in January 2019 that winning trophies only “builds egos” fed this discourse.
Inevitably, everything that happened in his second spell would have been viewed through the prism of his first. Let’s say in this parallel universe Spurs had just suffered an early Carabao Cup exit, it’s not hard to imagine the Poch-sceptics pointing to previous cup exits with weakened teams as evidence of his perceived failings. Pochettino’s advocates would respond in kind and we might be having the same arguments we’ve been having for the past few years.
Or maybe Pochettino would have been as successful as in the first spell and everyone would be happy.
We will never know. What we do know is that Postecoglou has so far done what seemed impossible — made the supporters largely forget about Pochettino. Some will boo the Argentine on Monday, some will want to offer their thanks, but what there won’t be is an aching for him and a wistfulness for the increasingly distant past.
For Pochettino, despite Chelsea’s poor results since his appointment, a different challenge also feels like it’s a healthier option than returning to the Spurs psychodrama.
Postecoglou meanwhile laughed at the constant ex-lover analogies at Thursday’s press conference and was nothing but complimentary about the man whose place he has taken in Tottenham hearts.
“Everyone I speak to around here, there are still people who worked with him, they can’t speak highly enough of him as a person and as a manager,” he said. “I doubt there will be anything but respect for Mauricio from anyone at this football club, supporters or people associated, but it doesn’t mean he will get a guard of honour on Monday night because we want to win. I don’t think he would expect that, but his tenure here and impact here are undeniable and will stand the test of time. Whenever people think of Mauricio and his time here as a Spurs manager, they will only look upon it with respect and fondness.”
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The way things have played out so far means Levy can be well satisfied with the decision he made in the summer. “We’ve got our Tottenham back,” he said at a fans’ forum event in September.
People will debate how much it was luck or judgment that saw Spurs end up with Postecoglou, but however they got there, it’s working out very well so far.
They are top of the Premier League, brimming with confidence and can add to Chelsea’s misery on Monday. They can also show that, four years on, Spurs are finally over Pochettino.
(Top photos: Getty Images; graphic: Sam Richardson)
