There’s no question that the new Spurs coach is effective, decisive even, and may just be the thing that chairman Daniel Levy needs to shock his embittered, lethargic and indifferent players into performing. Nice guy as Nuno Espírito Santo is, he came across as too casual in his authority at Tottenham, running into the perfect storm of Harry Kane angling for a move to Manchester City, impacting his previously symbiotic relationship with the otherwise dependable Son Heung-min, while allowing the ego-on-legs that is Dele Alli to retreat even further into his own agenda, which seemed to be as much about having a good time as knuckling down with the job he gets paid handsomely for.
Should I care about any of this? Well, obviously not. Football’s laws of tribalism ensure that not only do I not care about any team other my own, but also that the ongoing existential drama of what it is to be seemingly permanently “Spursy” is only to be laughed at. Which I do. I also don’t care about the idea of Conte taking charge in N17. He won Chelsea the Premier League in his first season in charge, and then the FA Cup in a somewhat insipid final at Wembley, before parting company with the club (and then taking it to court). The same was the case when José Mourinho joined Tottenham (and, indeed, Manchester United) - we had the best out of him, won titles and enjoyed the psychodramas that come with his involvement in a club, but moved on with gratitude.
Conte is, by turns, likeable and charismatic, but also by reputation, difficult to handle. And, let’s face it, Chelsea get through managers with a higher frequency than I buy underwear, so it’s hard to get too attached to any of them, even a club legend like Frank Lampard. Thomas Tuchel will, I’m sure, at some point, fall out with the club hierarchy, and the revolving door will spin again. So we enjoy things while we can. Conte, on the other hand, has a different challenge at Spurs, namely to deliver success to a club that has spent longer than I care to remember believing it should be hoovering silverware, but consistently falling short. Unlike Liverpool or Manchester United, who have the Shankly and Ferguson legacies to draw on, Spurs have never had an imperious phase, even if their fans believe - from what and where, I have no idea - that they do.
The agreement to appoint Conte as new head coach, on an 18-month contract worth up to £15 million a year, will need to deliver. Unlike Nuno, Conte has a somewhat more substantial track record, having won five league titles as a club manager (and over seven campaigns). Even if his last appointment, at Inter Milan, ended with the sack, he still managed to take the nerazzurri to their first Serie A title in more than a decade. He therefore arrives in north London with his work cut out, and even though the opening overtures from the club hierarchy have been positive, it won’t be lost on many that Spurs’ original approach for Conte in the summer, to replace Mourinho, ended after Conte allegedly expressed concerns about the club’s strategy and funding for recruitment. Tottenham suggested that they didn’t see eye-to-eye with Conte on squad strengthening, and a perception that he wasn’t interested in working with youth players (a hangover from his Chelsea days). Clearly, then, these red lines have been removed.
Conte has since made a statement that the summer was “too soon” to take over at Spurs, but that doesn’t bely the fact that, wherever he goes, he has high expectations of clubs spending to match their ambitions. Daniel Levy is not known for his largesse (especially as he’s going to be paying for the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium for many years to come).
“The terms must have changed,” Chris Sutton said last night on BBC Radio 5 Live. “[Conte] isn't going to go to Spurs unless he feels he can win something or come close because he is not that type of manager. He is not coming to the end of his career. He wants to come in and transform the club.” In that, Sutton said, Conte will be doing Spurs a favour, rather than the other way around, helping out an unemployed top-tier coach. It won’t, though, be an easy ride.
From Day 1, Conte faces plenty of challenges. Principal of those will be getting Harry Kane scoring goals again, which also means restoring the 28-year-old’s love for the club badge. No mean feat, that, when his head was so publicly turned by the prospect of City. The second challenge will be to restore a sense of team unity. It was notable that no player gave any statement of sympathy for Nuno, not even a patronising “wishing the gaffer well”. Rumours spilled out from Tottenham that team spirit had been allowed to fray by a head coach who was not a great interpersonal communicator, whose vision wasn’t well translated to the 11 on the pitch, and for those players not considered to be in Nuno’s immediate thoughts, a sense of being frozen out or ignored.
Football management is about squad engagement as well as managing disappointment - just look at what happened to Frank Lampard when he started to work with a core of younger players at the expense of older heads. I hate the notion of player power: the manager should be respected otherwise discipline breaks down, but it’s worth noting that so far, Thomas Tuchel has been able to keep a large squad happy with tactical rotations to cope with the various competitions Chelsea are currently in without any obvious disquiet in the ranks.
There is, though, also a tactical challenge that Conte will face. Spurs fans have a tradition of expecting their team to play a certain way, and while this isn’t as bad as it sounds (i.e. coaching from the terraces), it does play into the club culture, one that has become ever so slightly entitled. If there’s one aspect of this I’d say, as objectively as I can as a supporter of a despised rival (and, therefore, what do I care?), is that Spurs need to get back into a more attacking frame of mind. That doesn’t just lean on Kane’s shoulders (though he could help), but on the entire formation. So far this season they’ve been far too tentative - and the results have shown. That might come through the physical intensity Conte will put the team through. At Chelsea he was notorious for the punishing training routines at Cobham, and during his single full pre-season put the squad through the kind of ‘beasting’ ordeal that SAS recruits might baulk at. Conte is also a disciplinarian (just look at his fractious relationship with Diego Costa), and that will come into sharp focus with Alli, who’d been all but abandoned by both Mourinho and Nuno, and even Mauricio Pochettino, suggesting that it wasn’t them, but Alli himself who has been the problem.
Another challenge Conte will encounter is longevity. No one is naive enough to think that any job in football is for life, and the fact that the Italian has only been signed until the summer of 2023 suggests that his appointment is more of a project than the start of a legacy. From a Spurs perspective, there is also Conte’s reputation for managing for the short term, not always through choice. “He left Inter [at the end of last season] because they couldn't invest money and they sold his best players,” points out football writer Gabriele Marcotti. “He left Chelsea because he couldn't get owner Roman Abramovich to spend more money on players he wanted.” Marcotti says Conte has form in this area, recalling a tale about him leaving Juventus saying that “they wanted me to eat out in a 100 euros restaurant with 10 euros in my pocket”. Marcotti believes that Spurs, with its notoriously profligate attitude to buying players, might leave Conte short-changed.
The managerial merry-go-round is a constantly baffling thing. The minute a manager is fired, a list of runners and riders tipped to replace him is quickly assembled, even if you can’t help feeling that they’re all red shirt-wearing crew members of the Starship Enterprise being summoned to the transporter room (you might need to look that reference up). Managers like to talk of “relishing the challenge” and “opportunities too good to miss” when they sign up for the most poisoned of football’s chalices. Conte is far from cannon fodder, but it’s hard to imagine that Spurs will be any happier an environment to work in than anywhere else he’s been and subsequently walked away from. You kind of wish him luck, but then that wouldn’t be a rival football club fan’s sentiment, now would it?
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