Was it one specific thing? Or was it a perfect storm of injuries, lack of investment, lack of foresight/strategy?
For me it's a few things:
- Not finding a suitable replacement for Dembele
- Shocking purchases in the 19/20 season
- Not backing Poch and bringing Mourinho in
The injuries we have are obviously contributing to our relegation fight, but I strongly believe with players fit we'd be mid-table. Certainly not the heady heights of where we were 5 or 6 years ago.
Love this thread idea. For me, I think there was a key moment where it all started to decline. But then there has been moments we could have recovered and built positive momentum again, and we have made the wrong decisions consistently since instead.
The start of the decline is not backing Poch. And by backing I mean trusting in how he wanted to build the team. It means understanding what made his team good in the first place. So it meant selling players before they became less effective under him. Replacing them with players a level up, in line with the position he had taken us to. Realising that Poch was the reason we performed so much above our station. His system, his cultural foundations.
Sacking him was insanely stupid to me at the time. I actually couldn’t believe it. But the decline wasn’t the sacking, it was the lack of trust in Poch when he’d more than earned it.
Then the other times we could have pushed forward but didn’t. Hiring Jose on the expectation that he would succeed with Poch’s now older squad, as opposed to hiring him to back him. Same with Conte. Feel like we probably could have had a title challenging campaign under him if we truly backed him. But it was never on the cards, so not fair to say decline so much as missed opportunity.
With all of that said, if you think about where we were on the day of the parade, all the ups and downs, I feel like we’d arrived at the point where we could begin to build forward again. We were winners. We were in the Champions League. We had a manager the squad was behind. And that all happened after they forged deep bonds after coming through the toughest season of their lives, all sticking together and never breaking apart.
And so I think the sacking of Ange and the appointment of Frank is almost equal to the lack of trust in Poch. I think it was a complete misunderstanding of what happened last year, of what the players actually needed, and what problems we actually needed to solve. And I think that decision utterly destroyed the culture among the team. I think there was a clear realisation from the players that Tottenham had no intention of really going anywhere, and so they began going through the motions. They were unified, they were bought into an idea, and that was destroyed. An unfathomably bad decision.
I think a special mention to other strange decisions. Trusting so much in Paratici, who I can understand had so much experience as a football administrator that Levy could see himself really starting to allow himself to be more hands off. But actually unsuited to our footballing ideals as a club. Paratici also probably provided us an edge in the transfer market through sheer connectedness but he is obsessed with reactive 3 at the back coaches. As long as he was making decisions, there would be some level of misalignment that would inevitably make it harder to progress.
And then Lange, and trusting him so much with the Frank appointment, and decision to stick with Frank. He has never struck me as a true Sporting Director, but seems to have way too much responsibility.
TLDR:
1. Not trusting Poch in 2018
2. Sacking Ange after everything the players went through in 24/25.
