Sport

Antonio Conte’s approach is at odds with what Tottenham need and want

Antonio Conte and Daniel Levy have always seemed like a very strange match. From the moment they began working together, there was a feeling that tension was inevitable. The Tottenham Hotspur chairman has been desperate to establish the club as one of English football’s powerhouses, but within strict financial boundaries and a long-term vision to make everything sustainable.

Conte, meanwhile, is quite the opposite. He is all about winning and winning now. To hire him means opening your club up to particular methods that sometimes jar with an existing culture. The Italian is someone who thrives off chaos; there is an intensity to him and his style that can help a club to glory, but cause problems when things don’t go well. For anyone to look at Conte, they should really be ready to win now, or at least able to put the exact parameters in place for success. Spurs are neither ready nor able to match what Conte needs, and so there has long been a sense of unease at the club, which tends to rear its head on a poor run of form.

So here we are now. With Spurs having lost three out of their last six Premier League games, and three of their last four at home, putting their push for the Champions League in jeopardy. At the time of writing, Conte’s men are two points off the top four pace, but given that he has won league titles with Juventus, Inter and Chelsea, perhaps the fact they are lagging 11 points behind Arsenal at the league’s summit is more pertinent. Tottenham have only fleetingly looked like title contenders in Levy’s reign, and not realistically for six years. This is why his relationship with Conte doesn’t fit like some of those in the last have.

Even when Spurs looked like a genuine challengers under Mauricio Pochettino, their foundations were stronger. They managed to circumvent the lack of investment in comparison to their rivals – Conte’s main gripe – by finding, developing and incorporating talented players into a high pressing system.

It was a club with a long-term identity; although the project always had a shelf life, they went close domestically and in Europe, deliberately targeting the biggest prizes. Pochettino wasn’t perfect, he also wanted more investment in the team and it did unravel before his departure in 2019, but his spell in charge remains the most exciting time Spurs have had in decades. To say he failed because he didn’t win a trophy is an extremely simplistic view.

Whereas with Conte, winning trumps long-term vision. He’s here for a good time, not a long time. Even if he gets everything he needs, he is not built to last because the way he works is so demanding and specific to a certain goal.

In attempting to hire him last summer before settling for Nuno Espírito-Santo’s disastrous mini-era and finally making the appointment in the Autumn, Levy agreed to an unspoken contract; accept what he needed to do to aid Conte and win, and abandon the idea of a project that is both effective and easy on the eye. At least that is what he must have done for the Italian to agree to join Spurs; it is hard to imagine conversations around funding and shared expectation weren’t had.

And yet at times it feels like they weren’t. Levy had already appeared to abandon principles in order to win something when he replaced Pochettino with Jose Mourinho.

Mourinho’s reputation was similar to Conte’s in that his methods guaranteed success according to his history. Since turning Porto into a European force, the Portuguese had won a trophy at every club he’d coached. Although his powers had waned, it was Spurs’ hope that he would end their wait since 2008 for a trophy; but he didn’t, and like Conte, he laid a lot of the blame on a lack of support in the transfer market.

Both Conte and Mourinho need backing with funds that simply aren’t within Tottenham’s remit to offer. The club itself works better with the sort of vision they showed when Pochettino in charge. Conte’s antics aren’t conducive to what makes them tick. But now their current boss is in charge, they have to back him in the way he wants or everything will end just as many have always anticipated.