At Tottenham Hotspur’s world-leading training ground, they still have the barbecue area. It’s one of Mauricio Pochettino’s many legacies at the club, a spacious zone for outdoor and indoor eating where the squad and staff come together for the simple but profound human bonding experience of food cooked and enjoyed as a group in the open.
Daniel Levy, not the most sentimental person in football, nevertheless valued bonding enough to invest a six-figure sum in building the area at Pochettino’s behest during the Argentinian’s reign at Spurs. For a new breed of owners and executives in the game, though, you wonder if the human element registers highly enough.
That was the overriding feeling in the wake of Pochettino’s incomprehensible sacking at Chelsea. Here was a club that burned through three managers the previous season while the hotshots who had recently bought the club kept hiring, firing, rejigging and buying, creating a churn of the workforce and a huge influx of new additions to the playing group.
There were 30 signings in the first 14 months of the stewardship of Todd Boehly-Behdad Eghbali, the club’s new primary owners. Perhaps what they saw, after their £600million spree, was an accumulation of capital. But each footballer was a person, usually a young person and very often a foreign one, and each needed to be understood, cared for and catered for in ways appropriate to them.
Data figures heavily in Boehly and Eghbali’s thinking, yet you can’t put a metric on the human connection within a group. To know it, you need to be among it, feel it, see it.
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Graham Potter found the stockpiling of players disorientating and a particular scene summed up his reign. It was at the Radisson Blu hotel in Dortmund, where Chelsea were preparing for a Champions League round-of-16 first leg versus Borussia Dortmund and Potter cut an embattled figure after a poor run of results.
He was with his players in a giant conference hall. In a doorway, he was introduced to Andrey Santos, a Brazil youth captain acquired for £18million who had been flown in on a private jet. Eghbali was in the lobby tapping at his phone, wearing a sports jacket with “STAFF” on the back while Boehly was taking on all-comers on a nearby table football game. Potter already had 32 players in his squad and here, perhaps as discombobulated as he was, was number 33.
This was the environment Pochettino inherited and to which — despite a further summer churn of signings — he brought a sense of unity, focus, common purpose and even fun. It was not an immediate process. Building genuine relationships does not happen overnight. And even late in the year there were bumps in the road, like when Nicolas Jackson and Noni Madueke tried to take a penalty kick off Cole Palmer in a 6-0 win against Everton in April.
The vehemence with which Pochettino criticised that show of individualism showed how important group ethic is to him — and the Chelsea who finished the season with five consecutive wins, to claim a European spot, were conspicuously a collective of complementary players, with defined roles and tactics, with a common purpose. In other words, a team.
A senior member of the squad, whom Pochettino did not always select, nevertheless feels the Argentinian is the best man-manager he has worked with at club level. A Chelsea players’ WhatsApp group is said to have buzzed with incredulous messages after Tuesday’s announcement that Pochettino was departing the club by mutual consent. Jackson’s face-palm emoji on Instagram may have been the most accurate shot the striker took all year.
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Affection from a squad towards Pochettino is nothing new. At his 50th birthday party, on a big screen video messages were played from players with best wishes for their boss or ex-boss. At the World Cup in Qatar, Kylian Mbappé (whom he managed at Paris Saint Germain) and Hugo Lloris (his goalkeeper at Tottenham) eagerly sought him out. He remains close to Marco Verratti, another former PSG charge, and politely declined an invitation to (also ex-PSG player) Neymar’s birthday bash.
Paul Winstanley and Laurence Stewart, Chelsea’s co-sporting directors, are smart, down-to-earth people who know their way around football clubs. They valued Pochettino’s teambuilding skills and loved it when, in his first few weeks at Chelsea, he dipped into his own pocket to pay for a barbecue for staff, players and their families.
They enthused too about a Christmas party Pochettino put on, where the car park at the Cobham training ground was turned into a German-style Christmas market with sausages on the grill, little huts, a pizza stand and the mascots for the men’s and women’s teams there to entertain kids. Everyone at Cobham — and their families — were invited, as were Chelsea’s under-nine side, allowing ordinary staff, their children, and young players to mingle with first-team superstars.
Of course all of this would be just lightweight, good vibes froth if results were poor. But they were not. It is said the Chelsea hierarchy believes their squad may have underperformed in 2023-24 but fans don’t think that and nor do a great number within the game. In the end, Chelsea were one more win away from the same points total as Spurs, who were congratulated on their season. This despite long-term injuries to important players: Reece James, Ben Chilwell, Christopher Nkunku and Romeo Lavia.
Winstanley and Stewart’s appreciation of the special personality Pochettino brings to management did not save the Argentinian from an end-of-season review and two days of discussions at Cobham, with the co-sporting directors and the forceful Eghbali present (and Boehly dialling in from the US). The complaints leading Chelsea’s powerbrokers to believe it best that Pochettino departed included, apparently, substitutions, chance conversion rates, inadequate commitment to a possession style and resistance to appointing a set-piece coach.
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• The conflicting egos who made Pochettino’s job such an impossible task
The latter does not reflect particularly well on Pochettino — specialist coaching is where the game is going — but the other points seem debatable. And the overwhelming achievement of his reign — turning a cast of thousands into a team, a growing and a winning team — appears to have been ignored.
That typifies a modern strain of thinking, adhered to by those who want to boil football down to stats and transactions, and popular within the corporate class of owners, who want everything to be neatly measurable. That older part of management, where it is about creating and motivating groups, is not valued by them.
Yet it is what the greats like Sir Alex Ferguson excelled in, what Jürgen Klopp has shown us during his extraordinary career, and what managers such as Pep Guardiola, Mikel Arteta and Xabi Alonso also do as much as they do philosophies and tactics.
Suddenly today’s hottest managerial ticket in England is Kieran McKenna, and McKenna’s metrics and style of play with which Ipswich are playing. But delve deeper and you hear, coming out of Portman Road, testimony about how good McKenna is at creating a harmonious squad and a sense of hunger, unity and mission.
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And one of the biggest stars he worked with at Old Trafford, when José Mourinho brought him from the academy to the first team set-up, told of how he just seemed to have “it” — the right way of communicating and relating to senior players. Those human elements, as much as the numbers, are why Manchester United are interested in McKenna again, and why Chelsea and Brighton want him too. But those same elements also speak in Pochettino’s favour and make you wonder what the corporates at Stamford Bridge are thinking.
