Trouble at Tottenham: It's not you or me. It's a plague on them all at this stage

When Antonio Conte said Spurs were just losers, it wasn't just a criticism of a board that had long since lost the fans, it was a direct assault on an institution that had existed since 1882. And for many, it crossed a line.

ARRIVEDERCI: Antonio Conte

IT’s not me, it’s you. The pointed reversal of the classic old breakup line could almost have been written for the continuing soap opera that is Tottenham Hotspur, a club where no one is ever responsible for anything going wrong.

The latest episode was sparked by Antonio Conte’s extraordinary outburst after the 3-3 draw at Southampton, when he didn’t so much throw the club and everyone in it under a bus as bulldoze the entire N17 postcode and build a transport hub on top. Even those who had confidently predicted the relationship between Conte and Spurs was always going to end in tears were taken aback.

There is more than an element of truth in what Conte said. But he vented without acknowledging his own role. The players, he said, too often folded under pressure. When asked why he said: “Because they are used to it here. They don’t play for something important… Tottenham’s story is this – 20 years there is the owner and they never won something?” 

The direct reference to the owner struck a chord. There has been simmering discontent with the lack of focus on the football side of things for some time. But telling home truths is a tactic usually deployed to improve things. Conte’s rant intimated the problems were everyone’s fault but his own, and fuelled a damaging trope about the club.

‘Lads, it’s Tottenham’ was the phrase infamously used by Sir Alex Ferguson. The implication was that the club was institutionally incapable of winning when it mattered. Arsenal fans deploy a blunter version on the frequent occasions when Spurs fail to turn up for a North London Derby at The Emirates – “Tottenham Hotspur, you’ll always be sh*t”. 

And now here was the now ex-manager saying the same thing.

Don’t be fooled by “20 years there is the owner”. When pressed Conte was quick to clarify it wasn’t the people who paid his wages who he was criticising. Perish the thought. It was the players he was paid to coach. (Previously it was the fans for being too impatient and creating too much pressure.) Conte was pumping up one of the most damaging characterisations of the club, and he was doing so out of self-preservation.

For some time, his demeanour that he was doing the club a favour had grated. As had his refusal to commit to a contract beyond July – a fact surely noted by the players. Now, he’d come out and said Spurs were just losers. This wasn’t a criticism of a board that had long since lost the fans, it was a direct assault on an institution that had existed since 1882. And for many, it crossed a line.

As broadcaster and long-time Spurs fan Danny Kelly said, “I don’t take kindly to people torching the things I love. Even the crap ones.” Not wanting your club to be publicly trashed, not wanting your handsomely rewarded manager to give opponents material to hammer you with for years to come, that’s not avoiding home truths or sucking up to the board. That’s being a fan.

In his narcissistic fervour, Conte pedalled falsehoods and demonstrated his ignorance of the club’s history. Won nothing for 20 years? There’s the small, but still significant, matter of the League Cup in 2008. The ‘empty trophy cabinet’ banter he tapped into also disregards the fact that the club was the first to win the modern Double, the first British team to win a European trophy, the team that once held the record for the most FA Cup wins, the team that won at least one trophy in every decade from 1950 to 2010.

All ancient history? Too long ago maybe, but Manchester United don’t discount the Busby Babes or the Munich air crash because it’s ancient history, Arsenal don’t discount the achievements of Herbert Chapman because they happened nearly 100 years ago. Successful clubs tap into their past in order to shape their future. (Unless they can just buy it, which Spurs can’t and won’t do). Tradition and identity matter in football, which is a lucrative business because it is more than just a corner shop a new manager can rearrange the shelves in.

When under pressure, Conte had defaulted to blaming a group of players he once said were the best he’d worked with. He has been backed more than any manager has been backed by the current ownership, but he still apparently could not work with these tools. There are enough of his players there for the squad to be considered his. Good players regressed on his watch, and the tactics not only failed to play to the squad’s strengths, they have actively exacerbated its weaknesses.

The tactics are negative, the football dull, the approach predictable. The manager that questions whether a winning mentality exists waits until 150 minutes into a 180-minute Champions League knockout tie against AC Milan before going on the offensive, then swaps a forward for a defender when a goal is needed. The manager who questions the players’ commitment drops key personnel for a winnable tie against Sheffield United in a competition, the FA Cup, that offered a clearer route to success than it had for many years but which he considers unimportant. That’s serial winning for you.

It's surely an elite manager’s job to get the best out of the players, not to articulate excuses about why he can’t. And you don’t get the best out of people by constantly telling them they are no good.

You’d need a heart of stone not to acknowledge Conte has had a difficult few months. The loss of three close friends and a gall bladder removal have come on top of the challenges of running a club as complex and political as Spurs. But in the end, an elite manager on £15m a year who keeps reminding everyone he is a serial winner has to be responsible for something.

But we can’t talk about responsibility without talking about the club’s board. If Conte, rightly, needed to be held to account for his decisions, so do they. Since Mauricio Pochettino did what good coaches do and made the whole greater than the sum of the parts he was given, the club’s board have got every major football decision wrong. They didn’t back Poch to the point where he was broken and everyone knew the relationship would end, they made the disastrous decision to appoint the toxic narcissist Jose Mourinho who undid all the good work of the previous five years, they dithered for 72 days before appointing Nuno Espirito Santo, sacked him after four months, then appointed Conte when it was obvious his ‘buy me the best of everything’ approach was not a fit. If moneybags Chelsea couldn’t spend enough to keep him happy, how would Spurs? Us fans allowed ourselves to believe it would be different – because we had to.

The board’s footballing choices indicate nothing more than an ability to be mesmerised by a name. The pathway from the much-vaunted academy is overgrown with weeds and there’s no clear footballing philosophy. There are £218m-worth of players out on loan. Another trope is that money hasn’t been spent – it has, but it’s been wasted because the board don’t understand football. 

In a rare instance of communication with fans following the Mourinho debacle, Daniel Levy seemed to make an even rarer admission of error when he said the board may have taken its eye off the ball, and pledged to appoint a manager in tune with the club’s DNA. It’s clear he either didn’t understand what that meant or just said it to keep the pesky fans quiet.

The future does not look bright. The club has apparently given Fabio Paratici the job of finding the next new manager. Yet Paratici’s brand of football is about as far from Spurs DNA as you can get. And he might not even be able to ply his trade when his appointee arrives. Some of the names being bandied about – Luis Enrique and Thomas Tuchel foremost among them – indicate the board has learned nothing. What’s needed is a project that is backed and a manager that can implement it, not another name brought in to deliver a quick fix.

Conte touched on the truth but for the wrong reasons. That truth needs airing. For the Spurs board, winning doesn’t matter. But settling for just being there leads to stagnation. The Spurs board look utterly bemused when asked to articulate a footballing strategy. Until they realise why one is important, nothing will change. And until they get over their hubris, the offers of help from former legends such as Jurgen Klinsmann will continue to be ignored.

Conte was a £15m-a-year elite manager who wasn’t responsible for anything. Levy is the league’s highest-paid chairman – who’s just awarded himself a £500,000 a year pay rise – who has got every major footballing decision for four years wrong. 

Who needs success when the rewards for failure are so high?