Tottenham Hotspur‘s protracted search for a new director of football is finally over after the club confirmed the appointment of Johan Lange from Aston Villa on Monday.
The 43-year-old Dane, whose official title is technical director, will start his new role on 1 November and according to the club’s statement, “will have responsibility for recruitment, analytics and talent identification across our senior and academy teams”.
In effect, Lange will replace Fabio Paratici at the top of Tottenham’s recruitment tree. This comes six months after the Italian stepped aside after an appeal against a global ban for alleged false accounting while at Juventus was rejected. Paratici maintains his innocence.
With a new-look, youthful team making a flying start to the Premier League season under Ange Postecoglou, Lange’s remit will be to continue Paratici’s good work in the transfer market, minus the baggage that ultimately proved to be his predecessor’s undoing.
Of the 15 players to start a league game for Spurs this season, only two – Son Heung-min, who signed from Bayer Leverkusen in 2015 and academy graduate Oliver Skipp – were at the club before Paratici’s appointment in 2021.
Tottenham’s recent transfer business has been canny with the likes of Guglielmo Vicario, Destiny Udogie, Micky van de Ven and Pape Matar Sarr plucked from mid-table clubs elsewhere around Europe. And for the first time in years, there is a discernible strategy in place geared towards signing players suitable for Postecoglou’s free-flowing football.
Lange’s reputation as a shrewd operator, particularly from his time with Copenhagen, appears to align with the club’s plan to prioritise the recruitment of up-and-coming talent over ready-made stars, with the signing of the Premier League proven James Maddison the obvious outlier from this summer’s business.
During Lange’s fruitful six-year spell in Copenhagen, the club routinely found value in the transfer market, buying players for low fees before selling them on for a significant profit within a couple of years.
Robin Olsen, the Swedish goalkeeper now at Aston Villa, is a high-profile example, joining for £630,000 from PAOK Salonika before moving on to Roma for £8m just two-and-a-half years later. Robert Skov, the Danish winger, was another success story, leaving for Hoffenheim in a £9m deal 18 months after joining for less than £1m.
Galatasaray centre-back Victor Nelsson was one of Lange’s final signings at Copenhagen from FC Nordsjaelland and has been linked with Premier League clubs including Spurs in recent months.
The “work smarter not harder” mantra certainly applied to Copenhagen, with Lange stating “our process is very data driven” in an interview with Sky Sports in 2020. Only players who fit the club’s ethos and playing style under long-serving manager Stale Solbakken were bought.
The club sought out high-potential prospects in untapped markets, with players routinely brought in from other teams in Scandinavia, and further afield in eastern Europe and South America, and more often than not, they flourished.
In the same interview, Lange outlined the four principles that underpinned Copenhagen’s success: “We have a strong culture, a proactive strategy, stability among key personnel and a very clear style of play.”
After years of aimless drift, Tottenham are attempting to put the same building blocks in place.
Lange’s Aston Villa hits and misses
Hits:
- Matty Cash: Signed from Nottingham Forest for £16m. Established as a Poland international and one of the Premier League’s best right-backs since joining Villa.
- Emi Martinez: Signed for £15m from Arsenal. Named Villa’s Player of the Season in 2020-21 and played a key role in Argentina’s World Cup triumph last December.
- Ollie Watkins: Signed for £25m from Brentford. Has scored 50 goals for the club and is on track to be Harry Kane’s understudy at the Euros next summer after a fine start to the season.
Misses
- Philippe Coutinho: Signed for £17m from Barcelona. Scored one goal and registered no assists in 20 Premier League games last season. Now on loan to Al-Duhail in Qatar.
- Danny Ings: Signed from Southampton for £25m. Scored a respectable 14 goals in 52 games but struggled to link up with Watkins and sold to West Ham in January.
- Morgan Sanson: Signed from Marseille for £15.5m. Made only six Premier League starts for Villa before being loaned out to Strasbourg and now Nice.
The fact that Copenhagen remained competitive in Europe despite routinely losing their biggest stars reflected well on Lange who was headhunted by Aston Villa in 2020 after their first season back in the top-flight.
It is harder to gauge Lange’s success at Villa compared to Copenhagen considering he worked with significantly higher transfer and wage budgets in the Midlands. The financial disparity between the Premier League and the rest of Europe is such that its clubs can afford to cherry-pick talent from most clubs on the continent.
There is still an art to recruitment at the top level, though, and over the past few years, Villa have shopped with more savvy than most of their divisional rivals.
Ollie Watkins, Matty Cash and Emi Martinez are the headline success stories since 2020 and each carried an element of risk: Watkins and Cash were acquired directly from the Championship (from Brentford and Nottingham Forest respectively) and Martinez signed after only 15 top-flight appearances for Arsenal.
All three are now among the best players in their position in the Premier League. More recently, Boubacar Kamara, Alex Moreno and Moussa Diaby have made an eye-catching impact.
Villa were also praised for their measured response to Jack Grealish’s £100m move to Manchester City in 2021, using the funds to buy three players in Emi Buendia, Leon Bailey and Danny Ings, although the latter has since departed.
There have been expensive mistakes, though, most notably Philippe Coutinho who contributed only six goals and three assists in 41 league appearances before joining Al-Duhail on loan in August, and Leander Dendoncker who has made only seven league starts since a £13m move from Wolves.
The Steven Gerrard gamble also backfired spectacularly, with the former Liverpool captain winning just 13 of his 40 matches in charge. Conversely, the appointment of Unai Emery as his successor has proven to be a masterstroke.
Reaction to Lange’s departure among the Villa fanbase has been unremarkable. The Dane rarely communicated in public and has been tipped to move on ever since Monchi, arguably the most renowned sporting director in world football, arrived in the summer.
But Villa certainly made strides during his time at the club, consolidating themselves as a Premier League club before securing a long-awaited return to European competition last season. As one of the more senior figures involved in recruitment, Lange must take some credit for that, even if some major decisions did not work out.
At Tottenham, meanwhile, the blueprint has been laid out: play attractive football, develop young talent and show patience in the Postecoglou project. Having subscribed to similar principles at previous clubs, Lange might just prove to be another smart pickup for a club that is starting to get major decisions right.
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