Antonio Conte and Tottenham Hotspur always looked diametrically opposed from the very start of their relationship.
Everywhere you look the pair juxtapose. On the one hand is a manager with a track record for success and on the other is a club with one League Cup trophy in the last 21 years. Whereas Conte has a preference for working with experienced pros, Spurs have a youth-orientated approach to their recruitment. And while Conte is happy to play politics in public, Daniel Levy does his best to avoid the glare of the spotlight.
Despite their entrenched status as the Premier League‘s oddest couple, perhaps these two were made for each other. No club does boom-and-bust with such routine consistency as Tottenham Hotspur: any Spurs fan caught cold by a dismal defeat to a relegation-threatened side a few days after a thrilling victory against arguably Europe’s best team would be advised to find a new team to follow. This isn’t the club for you.
And no manager rides the emotional rollercoaster quite like Conte. If the Italian’s reaction to Saturday’s win over Manchester City was the theme park equivalent of someone beaming through their go on Space Mountain and posing for the camera on the way down, his response to the midweek loss at Turf Moor was that of a child throwing up after being spun one time too many on the local Ferris wheel.
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Having had a couple of days to digest that loss – a fourth in Tottenham’s previous five Premier League games – Conte was more reflective as he previewed Saturday’s match against Leeds, a club whose own crisis makes Spurs’ look minuscule in comparison. For now at least, the threat of an impending separation between Conte and Spurs has been eased. The cord is still intact.
“When you lose a game, I’m not the person to have dinner with,” he said of his post-match comments on Wednesday. “I am sorry if I show my disappointment because maybe it would be good to keep this inside and not show my emotion. I am an honest person, it is difficult for me to lie or hide the truth.”
Daniel Levy and more so Fabio Paratici, the Tottenham director who hired Conte while in charge of Juventus in 2011, would have been well aware of his penchant for drama. Conte twice threatened to walk out on Juventus before eventually doing so and appeared to be on the brink of leaving Inter in 2020 before leading them to their Serie A win last May.
This time feels a little more precarious, though, given the chasm that exists between Spurs and the top Premier League sides is wider than that at any of Conte’s previous employers. It will certainly take more than one transfer window to equip Conte with the tools he needs to succeed and his comments about the club’s January business indicated that he was unsatisfied with stage one of operation rebuild.
Although Conte reaffirmed his happiness and commitment to Spurs on Friday, his comments on the club’s project were ambiguous. “Here is a great experience because you have to build from the foundations and on one hand it could be very good to be totally involved in this to build a new structure,” he said. “On another hand for sure there is the will also to have a situation already made, already ready to fight to win.”
Conte played the role of project manager at Juventus, restoring a club that had been relegated and ridiculed after the Calciopoli match-fixing scandal to the pinnacle of Italian football. That was his longest managerial stint and even then it only lasted three years. Conte’s modus operandi is to stick around for a good time, not a long time. He’s the guy you call to fix a leak in the roof, not build a new one from scratch.
Whether he has the appetite to remain at Tottenham long enough to see them become winners will become apparent in the next few months. Until then, supporters and Levy face an anxious wait.
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