Erik ten Hag’s decision to sign a contract extension at Ajax has landed a fresh blow in Tottenham Hotspur’s hunt for a new manager. The Dutchman had been the favourite with the bookmakers to take over at Spurs, but, after first losing out on Julian Nagelsmann, the north London club have now seemingly missed the boat on another prime candidate.
However, if the Naglesmann and Ten Hag links were as true as they were reported to be, it does at least indicate that Daniel Levy and the Tottenham board are looking in the right sort of direction.
For, after the misfire of the Jose Mourinho tenure, Spurs need a project manager to keep the club relevant, a coach with a style and strategy that is capable of making a squad greater than the sum of its parts.
Both Nagelsmann and Ten Hag would have fitted that description – and so too does Brendan Rodgers, the man now with the shortest odds to fill the Spurs hotseat.
It’s not hard to see why Rodgers would appeal. He has Leicester City riding high in the Premier League, playing a modern and attacking style of football. The Foxes under Rodgers have both spent cleverly and promoted youth wisely to supplement an already talented group of players, and the result is a team that only looks destined to get better.
That improvement under Rodgers follows a similar pattern to the one he oversaw at Liverpool, and his impact at Celtic was similar again.
“He improved the players that were already at the club, gave Scott Brown a new lease of life and improved Stuart Armstrong and Keiran Tierney, got them their big moves,” Hoops fan Desmond Kane told i. “He signed some good players on the cheap too, but really it was about mentality – Rodgers had the total respect of his players and they all had belief in what he was doing.”
Switch out the names and that could easily be a description of what Mauricio Pochettino achieved at Tottenham. And Levy is looking for another Pochettino this summer, a coach who can breathe new life into the squad.
With Leicester on the verge of Champions League qualification and into the final of the FA Cup then now is perhaps not the time for Rodgers to be casting admiring glances at a club like Spurs. And Rodgers himself has played down the links in any case.
“Tottenham is a great club, one of the biggest in Britain, but for me I’m just in a really, really happy place in my life,” he said last week when rumours first started circulating. “I’m very, very happy here. I have a huge respect here for the players and the board, and I really feel that I want to continue my work here.”
An alternative would be Brighton & Hove Albion’s Graham Potter, a coach with a similar style for whom a switch to Spurs would more clearly represent a step up. Both Rodgers and Potter prefer to play football the same way, working possession through what is usually a three-man midfield, with full-backs offering some attacking threat and the wide forwards playing a key role in an aggressive pressing game.
In the case of Potter’s Brighton, that approach has yielded good football but not necessarily remarkable results, primarily due to a lack of quality in the final third. But Spurs have no such issue with a lack of attacking quality. In fact, the current make-up of the Tottenham squad would seemingly lend itself very well to such an approach.
Over the past two years Spurs have added some ball-playing quality to their midfield, with Tanguy Ndombele and Giovani Lo Celso never looking suited to Mourinho but possessing plenty of ability on the ball.
Dele Alli excelled in a pressing game under Pochettino at Spurs and will surely be champing at the bit after a year spent largely twiddling his thumbs on the bench. And the same is true of Steven Bergwijn, a talented wide player who shone at PSV and impressed early on under Mourinho before his spark was slowly extinguished.
Throw in the potential return of Oliver Skipp from his highly successful loan spell with Norwich, where he has helped steer the Canaries to promotion, and there is plenty of quality to work with in the Spurs midfield, before you even look at possible transfer targets.
Investment and freshening up is still required at Spurs regardless, particularly in a defence that looks a shadow of the back-line that went a season unbeaten at home back in 2016/17. But the building blocks of a good team are there. The club now just needs a manager with the tools required to construct a side capable of ascending back to those heady Pochettino heights.
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