Next Manager Watch

The Tottenham Hotspur head coach search of 2023 is moving steadily forward.

The due diligence stage is over and they are now lining up interviews with the leading candidates. This is a decisive moment in Spurs’ modern history, and not just because they are also running a simultaneous recruitment process to find their next managing director of football.

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Whoever comes in will be the club’s fourth permanent manager or head coach (not including Cristian Stellini or either of Ryan Mason’s two interim spells) since Mauricio Pochettino was sacked in November 2019.

Many Spurs fans wanted to see Pochettino back in his old job for next season but that is looking increasingly remote now, with the Argentinian the clear favourite to take over at Chelseainstead. It is time for the supporters (and, frankly, the media too) to move on from the possibility of his glorious restoration for a second spell in the blue and white half of north London. Tottenham want to go in a different direction this summer.

But while Pochettino is not coming back, there is an appeal in finding a candidate who represents something close to what he did when he was hired away from fellow Premier League side Southamptonnine years ago.

Because one of the big focuses at Tottenham between now and next season is improving the culture. It’s a word that means different things to different people but, broadly, culture means a positive workplace environment, with everyone pulling in the same direction, towards the same shared goals. That is what Spurs had for the peak years of the Pochettino era, before things went sour at the end. And it is something they have lost in recent years.

Nothing has been more corrosive towards the culture of the club than appointing big-name managers who have given the impression that Tottenham were lucky to have them.

Antonio Conte’s constant comments — both in public and in private — that their players, recruitment policy, medical staff and the rest were not up to his standards totally destroyed any sense that everyone at the club was pulling in the same direction.

So after almost four years of trying to go for big-name managers, the priority at Spurs now is to find the right cultural fit for the whole club again.

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Fans will remember Daniel Levy’s promise to get back to Tottenham ‘DNA’ made in the final week of the 2020-21 season, when he talked about “free-flowing, attacking and entertaining” football as well as promoting the club’s young, homegrown players. Clearly, that promise was not delivered at the time: he appointed Nuno Espirito Santo the following month, and then Conte before the calendar year was over. But this time it does feel as if a manager who is more in keeping with this ethos, especially when it comes to young players and building for the future, is in the club’s thoughts.

So the challenge for Tottenham, if they are not going for Pochettino, or for another big name, is to find someone who has some of those attributes he did when he arrived at Spurs.


Pochettino arrived at Spurs as a young coach with an upwards trajectory (Photo: Getty)
In that summer of 2014, Pochettino was 42 years old, having started his career with two good jobs: just under four years at Espanyol, the Barcelona club he played for with such distinction, keeping them safe and stable in La Liga, transforming the playing style and bringing through young players. From there, Pochettino did one and a half seasons at Southampton, getting to know English football, taking them up the table (from 15th to eighth), getting their squad to believe in his ideas and methods.

When Pochettino arrived at White Hart Lane, he was in a sweet spot for any ambitious manager: young enough to feel fresh, ambitious and eager to impress his view of the game on the players and the whole football club, but also experienced enough to know himself, and not to represent too much of a risk.

The question for Spurs is whether they can find someone in that same sweet spot this summer, someone who can instil the right culture and help bring the whole club together over the coming years…


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Julian Nagelsmann​

The youngest of all the candidates (although not said to be a leading candidate at this stage), Nagelsmann’s career will always be shaped by how precociously young he started out. He was only 28 years old when he took over at German Bundesliga club Hoffenheim in October 2015, having been forced to retire as a player with Augsburg by injury aged just 20.

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It feels as if he has been around forever because he has had three prominent jobs — Hoffenheim, RB Leipzig and then Bayern Munich — but he is still only 35 (he is seven months younger than Spurs’ captain Hugo Lloris). But Nagelsmann has already been around long enough for Tottenham to have long been interested in appointing him: they were admirers of his in 2019 but he was newly installed at Leipzig by the time they sacked Pochettino that November, and then in 2021 he had already signed with Bayern for the following season by the time Spurs sacked Jose Mourinho in the April.

So Nagelsmann would still come to north London with the freshness of youth — and a very strong commitment to his vision of possession football — as well as having serious experience behind him.

If there is one concern about his capacity to rebuild Spurs’ culture it would be Nagelsmann’s struggle to truly connect with the dressing room during his season and a half at Bayern, the sense that he was too demanding or overbearing with the players, rather than motivating them to play their best.


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Luis Enrique​

Luis Enrique stands out on this list as being older than the other leading candidates. He turns 53 on Monday — he is two years older than Pochettino — and is already 12 years into his senior management career, having done three years with Barcelona’s B team before that.

He was one of Fabio Paratici’s preferred choices for the job when he was still at the club, but now that Paratici has gone it remains to be seen whether he is still quite as attractive a candidate. Luis Enrique has a hugely impressive CV: he won the treble with Barcelona in 2014-15, as well as another La Liga title a year later. In 2021, he took Spain to the semi-finals of the European Championship (losing to eventual winners Italy on penalties) and the Nations League final.

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He has won more than anyone else on this list and if Tottenham were to stick with their head coach recruitment strategy of 2019-21 he would be the obvious choice. But some fans may wonder whether Luis Enrique is in fact now in the second half of his career and if his best achievements are all behind him. And if that is true, whether he can be the dynamic ambitious force that the club needs.

Roberto De Zerbi​

Arguably the candidate closest to Pochettino 2014, De Zerbi turns 44 in a month and now has just under one full season in Premier League football to go with his nine years of managerial experience in Italy and at Shakhtar Donetsk in Ukraine before then. He still feels like a man on the upswing of his career, with his biggest achievements ahead of him, while also having done a wide-ranging apprenticeship so far. And what De Zerbi would also bring is a style of possession football that is at the cutting edge of the modern game.

He has built on Graham Potter’s foundations and taken Brighton to the next level, not just to within a penalty shootout of an FA Cup final but most likely to a fifth- or sixth-place finish in the Premier League and Europa Leaguefootball next season (in that sense, his work there is like Pochettino building on Nigel Adkins’ foundations at Southampton, winning back-to-back promotions to reach the top flight in the summer of 2012).

De Zerbi would bring plenty of energy and emotion to the role, and is certainly admired at Spurs, although some may wonder whether his touchline antics when Brighton lost at Tottenham last month would count against him.


De Zerbi is admired at Spurs after an incredible first season at Brighton (Photo: Getty)

Ruben Amorim​

Another candidate who would appear to be in that sweet spot of youth and experience, Amorim is only 38 but has already achieved a lot in his native Portugal. His work at Sporting Lisbon has already marked him out as one of the best young managers in Europe, having ended their 19-year title drought in 2020-21 (as well as winning two league cups).

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It has not been an easy job there, with Sporting having to sell their best players every year — not least Pedro Porro to Tottenham in January — but he has re-energised the whole club after years of turmoil. Speak to anyone who knows Amorim and they will say his success there (and previously with domestic rivals Braga, winning the 2019-20 League Cup during his half-season in charge) is based on his ability to connect with and inspire his players.

Maybe it helps he had a long playing career in Portugal which did not end that long ago (he retired in 2017). But if Spurs are looking for someone who can command buy-in from the players, and get everyone pulling in the same direction, Amorim has shown that he can do that. (His preferred 3-4-3 style would also make use of their battery of wing-backs.)

He would not be easy to get out of Sporting, given his €20million release clause for non-Portuguese clubs, but if he is the preferred candidate, he would be worth paying for.


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Arne Slot​

Slot is only in his second managerial job but he has already proven that he knows how to rally a whole club behind him and deliver success that has not been seen for years.

Feyenoord reached the Europa Conference League final under him last season, and this weekend can win their first Eredivisie title since 2016-17 and just their second this century. And Slot has done this with a proactive pressing style of play — just like he introduced at fellow Dutch side AZ Alkmaar previously — that would take Spurs back towards the football they played under Pochettino.

He is 44 but only four years into his career as a senior coach, putting him firmly in the category of managers who will still hope to have the major achievements of their careers ahead of them.

Xabi Alonso​

The least-experienced name on the list, Xabi Alonso has less than one full season in senior management, having only taken over at Bayer Leverkusen of the German Bundesliga in October. Before that, he had got his feet wet with three years in charge of Real Sociedad’s B team from 2019-22.

Some may argue that does not represent the same apprenticeship that, say, Amorim or De Zerbi have had, or Pochettino before he first took over at Spurs, but although the Spaniard is still young — 41 — if you hear him talk about football, about the need to convince players of your ideas before you can achieve anything else, he does sound like someone who could deliver the cultural change that Tottenham are looking for.

The only question is whether this summer would be slightly too soon to go for him.


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(Top photos: Getty Images)