novar
Well-Known Member
Assuming he continues aiming lower at the EPL table I guess his next potential choices are Palace, Southampton, Wolves or Arsenal
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José Mourinho: See Mou Later
- Thread starter Jury
- Start date
- Replies 5,386
- Views 652,282
Country: Wales
You won’t see any. Mainly because that’ll raise rightfully raise questions about how terrible Daniel Levy is at his job.
I admit I rate Mourinho as a manager more than most but honestly I just think that squad is very mediocre.
If you look at that team from last night I don’t think any would start for us apart from NDombele and Son.
I think them being so high in the table early in the year fooled people because the squad and transfer business isn’t good enough.
Since the CL final they’ve signed:
54M - Ndombele - One of the Mourinho success stories
27M - Steven Bergwijn - Invisible so far. Following in Vincent Janssen’s footsteps.
42M - Lo Celso - Perma crock who doesn’t really do much either.
25M - Sessegnon - Mental signing of a young LB or winger in a position they were stacked in.
9M - Jack Clarke - Youngster but the signs aren’t great.
27M - Reguilon - Pretty decent LB
15M - Doherty - No business at a top club
15M - Hojbjerg - Pundits favourite but very limited
10M - Rodon - Injury prone CB who’s the same age as Gabriel. I was shocked was going to a big side.
Loan - Gareth Bale - Lol
That’s absolutely shocking business. When you break it down with all their players who ran down their contracts it’s mad how Levy is avoiding criticism.
He’s had a career of wasting money, going back years but the guy is untouchable.
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Country: England
This one got me
He's not a midfielder Arsenal fans would be happy to see but the way he gets begged on sky sports and MOTD is something else - you're completely right.
Fwiw I thought their summer business was decent, but I am a bit surprised Doherty hasn't convincingly displaced Aurier.
Country: Norway
Sp**s can't afford Rodgers.Next Tottenham manager odds
- Brendan Rodgers 2/1
- Julian Nagelsmann 4/1
- Rafa Benitez 7/1
- Max Allegri 9/1
- Eddie Howe 10/1
- Scott Parker 12/1
- Mauricio Pochettino 16/1
- Steven Gerrard 25/1
- Frank Lampard 50/1
Atlas
Lost a sausage bet on Xhaka 😭
Levy terrible at his job? That’s a first surely he’s done a fantastic job getting value for their players and keeping their stars on long contracts so they don’t walk away for free. Compared to whoever runs out club he’s got to be a few levels above. Sp**s management of the wage bill is nothing short of a miracle. Himself and my boy Poch had Sp**s in the top 4 for a few consecutive years on close to 0 net spend with clever signings and good value sales. He’s one of the best at what he does Levy. Having said that he did **** up by hiring a past it Mourinho that should end in disaster soon.
CaseUteinberger
Established Member
Country: Sweden
I really despise Sp**s but the points on what Levy has managed to achieve are fair ones. Think hiring Mourinho will go down as the start of when Sp**s start slipping down the table again. Kane is getting older and squad is not improved much.
Country: Wales
How much credit are you giving to Levy and how much goes to Pochettino? Levy’s been there since 2001.
Considering they’ve only qualified for the CL one other year in their history apart from the Poch era I wouldn’t be so quick to praise Levy especially as he’s the highest paid executive in the league.
Going back years he’s signed flop after flop, most DoFs would be sacked after the 2013/14 window but no one said anything and he went on to waste huge amounts of money in future years before not buying a single player in 2018.
Add to that a lot of their key players running down the contracts so they couldn’t get fair value. They’ve succeeded in spite of him not because of him.
Atlas
Lost a sausage bet on Xhaka 😭
Can see why he’s paid so highly. Pre covid Sp**s were one of the few profitable clubs in the world. In 18/19 they made world record profits and their revenue exceeded ours either that year or last which is a great achievement for them. Nobody is going to sack an exec who delivers those kind of results while spending next to nothing and having an exceptionally well managed wage bill.
I would give all the credit to Potch if I could I wanted him here as manager after Emery. I just think Levy has played a massive role in all that stuff I mentioned especially the player wages I’ve always wondered how they managed to keep player wages so low when they were in the top 4.
Country: Nigeria
Player:Saliba
But AM told me he was the best manager we could get
Country: Canada
If he didn't require such a payoff, he'd surely be off by now?
Country: Scotland
Player:Gabriel
Think that's only thing stopping it. Levy is ruthless.
Hleb's Sirush
Established Member
Even if he believes in that you don't say that out loud. What good can come from telling your tight fisted boss that the striker he got you for a 3m loan deal and the option to buy for 45m can't even score 8 goals a season.
Or the player himself? Your manager just told the world you are practically useless to him.
Country: Norway
Public criticism like that is rarely a good idea, I'll grant you that. It is in line with what Mourinho normally does though. It is no surprise.
Tree Points
Another annoying Manc
Sp**s have some very good players. Son and Kane walk into every team in the Premier League.
Then you've got Ndombele, Lo Celso, Højbjerg and Reguilón who should be at least challenging the likes of United, Leicester and West Ham for Top 4. But Jose is far too defensive and thinks about not losing before going for it and winning the match.
Weirdly enough, this is how Arteta sets up as well - he's just less obvious with it and thinks that loads of possession will win the games (which it doesn't if you don't have killer instinct and a poor defence).
Mourinho is finished, will probably end up at Wolves next - if he's lucky.
Then you've got Ndombele, Lo Celso, Højbjerg and Reguilón who should be at least challenging the likes of United, Leicester and West Ham for Top 4. But Jose is far too defensive and thinks about not losing before going for it and winning the match.
Weirdly enough, this is how Arteta sets up as well - he's just less obvious with it and thinks that loads of possession will win the games (which it doesn't if you don't have killer instinct and a poor defence).
Mourinho is finished, will probably end up at Wolves next - if he's lucky.
Country: England
He's definitely better than Arteta tbf. There are some aspects of his management I like but yeah, he was never for us. Arteta till this day marginally was the better choice.
Country: England
https://theathletic.co.uk/2401399/2...cond-to-none-but-some-Sp**s-players-disagree/
Reckon some of you guys will love this one lol.
Mourinho says his methods are ‘second to none’, but some Sp**s players disagree
Jack Pitt-Brooke
After Tottenham lost their fifth Premier League game out of six, Jose Mourinho insisted that the methods that he and his coach staff use are “second to nobody in the world”. But the reality inside the Sp**s dressing room is that some players are unhappy with training sessions they think are too defensive, too focused on the opposition, and not as intense as they were used to under Mauricio Pochettino.
The Athletic has learned from multiple dressing room sources that although Mourinho has not lost the whole dressing room yet, some of the team are increasingly unhappy with his approach. This disquiet is starting to tell in terms of results. Having started the season brilliantly and been top of the Premier League in December, Sp**s have taken just 12 points from their last 12 league games. They have sunk to ninth in the table, raising questions about the direction under Mourinho.
It is 15 months since Mourinho replaced Mauricio Pochettino. And while the Argentinian’s relationship with the players had broken down by his sixth season at the club, some senior players now look back fondly at that era. A section of players who used to complain about Pochettino’s double sessions and rare days off now wish they were working harder, although the impact this COVID-19-affected season is having on training loads cannot be ignored.
Some of the attacking players, who feel that Mourinho’s training is too focused on defence and on not making mistakes, are unhappy with how little focus there is on coaching complex offensive patterns. Some attacking players have even remarked privately that they are still reliant on moves and finishes in the final third that they learned and honed under Pochettino because there has been so little detailed attacking work under Mourinho.
Fundamentally, this comes down to a difference in approach between Pochettino and Mourinho. Pochettino’s whole philosophy came down to a positive, dominant style of play, the positional game, and his training was built around helping his players to understand it, to play it and to perfect it.
Mourinho’s whole approach is different. Rather than mastering one particular style of play, he is focused on developing and executing a different plan for every opponent. This means that training is largely focused not on Sp**s’ own game, but on how to exploit the weaknesses in whomever they are playing next. Training will be tailored towards the specific scenarios Mourinho expects to face, and the mistakes he does not want his players to make or does want to trigger in the opposition. Players have remarked that as they get closer to every game, the atmosphere is increasingly based on fears of what might go wrong, and Mourinho’s insistence that the players must be careful at all times, only playing out or taking risks under certain circumstances.
At times, this pragmatic work has proven useful, as the players have developed gameplans that have proved successful. Mourinho has recorded impressive counter-attacking plans that have brought wins against Manchester City, Manchester United and Arsenal, masterclasses in reactive football that took Sp**s to the top of the table. But at times, some players have grown bored and frustrated with how much time Mourinho will focus on one particular aspect of the game — hours spent working on how to defend throw-ins when they are preparing to face Liverpool, for example, or on perfecting attacking crosses from deep positions before playing West Ham United. One source said the players are at risk of a “tactical overload”.
So much attention on nullifying the strengths of the opponent means that Tottenham do not focus as much time on developing and improving their own attacking game. The priority is defence and counter-attack. Numerous sources say this is why Sp**s’ attacking football has looked limited at times this season because there is no plan for how to build out from the back, play through the thirds and create chances in the opposition box.
In that sense, it is the polar opposite of how Pochettino works. Now in charge of Paris Saint-Germain, he always had a clearly structured method for moving the ball forward from one end of the pitch to the other, how the goalkeeper plays the ball, where the centre-back splits and drops to, where the full-back moves to, and so on. With Mourinho, there is no such coordinated plan. “Everything has changed, even the training is so defensively minded now,” one dressing-room source says. “There is no plan to move the ball forward. The plan is to defend, boot the ball up to Harry Kane and Son Heung-min, and that’s it.”
This is an issue that has followed Mourinho around his last few jobs. He has been routinely accused of not coaching attacking patterns in the way that his modern rivals do. Jurgen Klopp, Antonio Conte, Pep Guardiola and Pochettino all work in this way, instilling patterns that help their teams unpick opponents in the final third. Mourinho’s own approach of “guided discovery”, hoping his players would be good enough to find the right combinations, has worked when Kane and Son have been at their best, as proven by some incisive counter-attacking performances earlier this season. But it also has its limitations, as shown by Sp**s’ struggles to create good chances against deep-lying defences.
(Photo: Tottenham Hotspur FC via Getty Images)
The other major change between Pochettino and Mourinho concerns workload and intensity. Pochettino worked the players famously hard, with hardly any days off and double sessions pencilled in every time the players had a free week. It was necessary to get the players fit enough to play Pochettino’s style of play, but there is no point pretending that the players enjoyed it at the time. They did not, and often complained about the workload, especially during the end of Pochettino’s tenure.
Mourinho’s approach is different. Players have noticed that there are fewer double sessions than before, and more days off, with days off sometimes used as a reward after victory. Multiple sources have questioned whether the intensity of Mourinho’s sessions can ever replicate match situations. When Sp**s finally had a free week in the build-up to the FA Cup game against Wycombe Wanderers on 25 January, some of the players were relieved to have finally been worked hard.
Of course, Mourinho is operating in the unique circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic. There were only five weeks between the end of the last Premier League season and the September 2020 international break. They have already played 40 games in all competitions so far this season, with the possibility of another 23 to come if they go the distance in the Europa League. They have played more matches than any side in Europe’s top five leagues this season, so Mourinho has been forced to manage the physical loads of his entire squad to keep them fit through an exhausting calendar. No team in the world is training or playing as intensely now as they did before the pandemic.
Another view is that this was a team that was in decline before Mourinho arrived, whose declining performances in the Premier League in 2018-19 were masked by their unlikely run to the Champions League final. And that Mourinho’s job of transforming the mentality of these players, most of whom were here under Pochettino, still needs more time to deliver consistent results. Sp**s are in the Carabao Cup final, almost in the Europa League last 16, and not out of European contention in the league. This season can still end well. Mourinho’s first season at Manchester United was not much fun at points but it still ended with the League Cup and Europa League trophies, and a place in the following year’s Champions League.
But ultimately, right now, Mourinho’s mixture of analysis, defensive work and tactical drills designed for each opponent is not prompting the right response in the Tottenham players.
When Mourinho was asked last Wednesday what he would be doing in training to iron out the defensive errors that have undermined Tottenham’s season, he replied that he would be sending the players more clips on their phones for them to mull over, before more individual analysis meetings and then a session to prepare them for Wolfsberger AC in the Europa League.
“Everything we can, everything we can,” Mourinho said. “Starting with players receiving on their own phones and iPads immediately analysis of all the situations. So they can read, they can analyse by themselves. Then the individual meeting analysing every situation and trying to improve every situation. Then on the pitch, we managed to have two good training sessions today and yesterday. Yesterday, they had individual work with (first-team assistant) Ledley King and the staff. And then today, we had a collective session in relation to the game tomorrow. Work: that’s the only thing that we can do to try to improve.”
But Tottenham’s decline in form recently suggests that Mourinho’s methods are not having the desired effect, despite what he said in his press conference after the West Ham game on Sunday.
When Mourinho arrived in English football in 2004, he was a revolutionary. His approach of tactical periodisation, with everything geared towards the game itself, had been very successful in Portugal and worked just as well in England too. Players loved the fact that everything Mourinho did had an application, and everything was with the ball. His methods were wildly successful: Chelsea won the 2004-05 Premier League, 95 points, 15 goals conceded, before retaining it the following era.
That was almost 17 years ago and other coaches now think that Mourinho’s rivals have caught up with him. The idea of all training being with the ball is no longer new, especially as other managers set new standards for technical football at the top of the league.
Mourinho’s other great strength when he first arrived, of meticulous attention to detail and rigorous analysis of his opponents, has itself been eroded now that every Premier League club has its own analysis department.
And then Mourinho’s powers of motivation, the psychological tricks and games he plays with players to provoke the right response — what he calls “confrontational leadership” — have consistently shown to be less effective with this generation of players than they were with his great Chelsea, Porto and Inter Milan teams. At Sp**s, Tanguy Ndombele has responded well to Mourinho’s methods, and Kane, Son and Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg have shone this season, but plenty of other players have plateaued or declined since Mourinho took over. This generation of players does not always respond to psychological triggers as the last generation did.
Mourinho now finds himself — 15 months, three transfer windows, and 75 matches — into his Tottenham reign, complaining that there are “problems in the team that I cannot resolve by myself as a coach”. And yet he must also know that the only route out of this situation is to win games. We will all know soon enough whether Mourinho’s coaching methods remain as good as he still thinks they are.
Jack Pitt-Brooke
After Tottenham lost their fifth Premier League game out of six, Jose Mourinho insisted that the methods that he and his coach staff use are “second to nobody in the world”. But the reality inside the Sp**s dressing room is that some players are unhappy with training sessions they think are too defensive, too focused on the opposition, and not as intense as they were used to under Mauricio Pochettino.
The Athletic has learned from multiple dressing room sources that although Mourinho has not lost the whole dressing room yet, some of the team are increasingly unhappy with his approach. This disquiet is starting to tell in terms of results. Having started the season brilliantly and been top of the Premier League in December, Sp**s have taken just 12 points from their last 12 league games. They have sunk to ninth in the table, raising questions about the direction under Mourinho.
It is 15 months since Mourinho replaced Mauricio Pochettino. And while the Argentinian’s relationship with the players had broken down by his sixth season at the club, some senior players now look back fondly at that era. A section of players who used to complain about Pochettino’s double sessions and rare days off now wish they were working harder, although the impact this COVID-19-affected season is having on training loads cannot be ignored.
Some of the attacking players, who feel that Mourinho’s training is too focused on defence and on not making mistakes, are unhappy with how little focus there is on coaching complex offensive patterns. Some attacking players have even remarked privately that they are still reliant on moves and finishes in the final third that they learned and honed under Pochettino because there has been so little detailed attacking work under Mourinho.
Fundamentally, this comes down to a difference in approach between Pochettino and Mourinho. Pochettino’s whole philosophy came down to a positive, dominant style of play, the positional game, and his training was built around helping his players to understand it, to play it and to perfect it.
Mourinho’s whole approach is different. Rather than mastering one particular style of play, he is focused on developing and executing a different plan for every opponent. This means that training is largely focused not on Sp**s’ own game, but on how to exploit the weaknesses in whomever they are playing next. Training will be tailored towards the specific scenarios Mourinho expects to face, and the mistakes he does not want his players to make or does want to trigger in the opposition. Players have remarked that as they get closer to every game, the atmosphere is increasingly based on fears of what might go wrong, and Mourinho’s insistence that the players must be careful at all times, only playing out or taking risks under certain circumstances.
At times, this pragmatic work has proven useful, as the players have developed gameplans that have proved successful. Mourinho has recorded impressive counter-attacking plans that have brought wins against Manchester City, Manchester United and Arsenal, masterclasses in reactive football that took Sp**s to the top of the table. But at times, some players have grown bored and frustrated with how much time Mourinho will focus on one particular aspect of the game — hours spent working on how to defend throw-ins when they are preparing to face Liverpool, for example, or on perfecting attacking crosses from deep positions before playing West Ham United. One source said the players are at risk of a “tactical overload”.
So much attention on nullifying the strengths of the opponent means that Tottenham do not focus as much time on developing and improving their own attacking game. The priority is defence and counter-attack. Numerous sources say this is why Sp**s’ attacking football has looked limited at times this season because there is no plan for how to build out from the back, play through the thirds and create chances in the opposition box.
In that sense, it is the polar opposite of how Pochettino works. Now in charge of Paris Saint-Germain, he always had a clearly structured method for moving the ball forward from one end of the pitch to the other, how the goalkeeper plays the ball, where the centre-back splits and drops to, where the full-back moves to, and so on. With Mourinho, there is no such coordinated plan. “Everything has changed, even the training is so defensively minded now,” one dressing-room source says. “There is no plan to move the ball forward. The plan is to defend, boot the ball up to Harry Kane and Son Heung-min, and that’s it.”
This is an issue that has followed Mourinho around his last few jobs. He has been routinely accused of not coaching attacking patterns in the way that his modern rivals do. Jurgen Klopp, Antonio Conte, Pep Guardiola and Pochettino all work in this way, instilling patterns that help their teams unpick opponents in the final third. Mourinho’s own approach of “guided discovery”, hoping his players would be good enough to find the right combinations, has worked when Kane and Son have been at their best, as proven by some incisive counter-attacking performances earlier this season. But it also has its limitations, as shown by Sp**s’ struggles to create good chances against deep-lying defences.
(Photo: Tottenham Hotspur FC via Getty Images)
The other major change between Pochettino and Mourinho concerns workload and intensity. Pochettino worked the players famously hard, with hardly any days off and double sessions pencilled in every time the players had a free week. It was necessary to get the players fit enough to play Pochettino’s style of play, but there is no point pretending that the players enjoyed it at the time. They did not, and often complained about the workload, especially during the end of Pochettino’s tenure.
Mourinho’s approach is different. Players have noticed that there are fewer double sessions than before, and more days off, with days off sometimes used as a reward after victory. Multiple sources have questioned whether the intensity of Mourinho’s sessions can ever replicate match situations. When Sp**s finally had a free week in the build-up to the FA Cup game against Wycombe Wanderers on 25 January, some of the players were relieved to have finally been worked hard.
Of course, Mourinho is operating in the unique circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic. There were only five weeks between the end of the last Premier League season and the September 2020 international break. They have already played 40 games in all competitions so far this season, with the possibility of another 23 to come if they go the distance in the Europa League. They have played more matches than any side in Europe’s top five leagues this season, so Mourinho has been forced to manage the physical loads of his entire squad to keep them fit through an exhausting calendar. No team in the world is training or playing as intensely now as they did before the pandemic.
Another view is that this was a team that was in decline before Mourinho arrived, whose declining performances in the Premier League in 2018-19 were masked by their unlikely run to the Champions League final. And that Mourinho’s job of transforming the mentality of these players, most of whom were here under Pochettino, still needs more time to deliver consistent results. Sp**s are in the Carabao Cup final, almost in the Europa League last 16, and not out of European contention in the league. This season can still end well. Mourinho’s first season at Manchester United was not much fun at points but it still ended with the League Cup and Europa League trophies, and a place in the following year’s Champions League.
But ultimately, right now, Mourinho’s mixture of analysis, defensive work and tactical drills designed for each opponent is not prompting the right response in the Tottenham players.
When Mourinho was asked last Wednesday what he would be doing in training to iron out the defensive errors that have undermined Tottenham’s season, he replied that he would be sending the players more clips on their phones for them to mull over, before more individual analysis meetings and then a session to prepare them for Wolfsberger AC in the Europa League.
“Everything we can, everything we can,” Mourinho said. “Starting with players receiving on their own phones and iPads immediately analysis of all the situations. So they can read, they can analyse by themselves. Then the individual meeting analysing every situation and trying to improve every situation. Then on the pitch, we managed to have two good training sessions today and yesterday. Yesterday, they had individual work with (first-team assistant) Ledley King and the staff. And then today, we had a collective session in relation to the game tomorrow. Work: that’s the only thing that we can do to try to improve.”
But Tottenham’s decline in form recently suggests that Mourinho’s methods are not having the desired effect, despite what he said in his press conference after the West Ham game on Sunday.
When Mourinho arrived in English football in 2004, he was a revolutionary. His approach of tactical periodisation, with everything geared towards the game itself, had been very successful in Portugal and worked just as well in England too. Players loved the fact that everything Mourinho did had an application, and everything was with the ball. His methods were wildly successful: Chelsea won the 2004-05 Premier League, 95 points, 15 goals conceded, before retaining it the following era.
That was almost 17 years ago and other coaches now think that Mourinho’s rivals have caught up with him. The idea of all training being with the ball is no longer new, especially as other managers set new standards for technical football at the top of the league.
Mourinho’s other great strength when he first arrived, of meticulous attention to detail and rigorous analysis of his opponents, has itself been eroded now that every Premier League club has its own analysis department.
And then Mourinho’s powers of motivation, the psychological tricks and games he plays with players to provoke the right response — what he calls “confrontational leadership” — have consistently shown to be less effective with this generation of players than they were with his great Chelsea, Porto and Inter Milan teams. At Sp**s, Tanguy Ndombele has responded well to Mourinho’s methods, and Kane, Son and Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg have shone this season, but plenty of other players have plateaued or declined since Mourinho took over. This generation of players does not always respond to psychological triggers as the last generation did.
Mourinho now finds himself — 15 months, three transfer windows, and 75 matches — into his Tottenham reign, complaining that there are “problems in the team that I cannot resolve by myself as a coach”. And yet he must also know that the only route out of this situation is to win games. We will all know soon enough whether Mourinho’s coaching methods remain as good as he still thinks they are.
Reckon some of you guys will love this one lol.
Last edited:
Country: Norway
With the debt that Sp**s have, it will surely sting if they lose out on Europe.
SingmeasongSong
Right Sometimes
Rather Rodgers than Nagelsmann.
Not exactly happy of the prospect of them getting either though.
Country: England
Player:Saliba
Poch took a club spending 6th and made them top 4, the club sacked him the first time he dropped down.
Arsène took a club spending 5th and made them top 4 for 20 years, the fans forced him out after he made 2nd.
Look at both clubs now, desperate to get back to somewhere near what they had. It could take them years of losing money, supporters and credibility. I'm amazed how few people understand this game and its fickle nature. Football is infused with idiots.
Arsène took a club spending 5th and made them top 4 for 20 years, the fans forced him out after he made 2nd.
Look at both clubs now, desperate to get back to somewhere near what they had. It could take them years of losing money, supporters and credibility. I'm amazed how few people understand this game and its fickle nature. Football is infused with idiots.
