By this point in Mauricio Pochettino’s first season at Tottenham Hotspur, things were already looking up.
Spurs had 57 points with five games left of the 2014-15 season, and had moved up to sixth in the league. Harry Kane had just scored his 30th goal of his breakthrough season. They finished the season without a trophy and without Champions League football, but that was beside the point. Pochettino had already succeeded in the tasks that underpinned everything else: changing the mentality, changing the habits and creating bonds between the players — and between the players and the supporters.
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That sense of unity, excitement and optimism fuelled Spurs’ rise over the second half of the last decade. There is nothing quite like that feeling of being at the start of a journey, knowing that you are on the right track but not knowing exactly where you will end up. That is what Tottenham have been trying to get back to this season under the management of Ange Postecoglou.
Pochettino, meanwhile, has been trying to build that same unity, optimism and sense of direction at Chelsea, a club still looking for their post-Roman Abramovich identity. In Pochettino, they had a manager who could create it.
But with five games to go in his first season, no one could honestly say that Chelsea are in as good a place as Spurs were in May 2015. Their league record is worse, with 48 points from 33 games, even if they have had two good runs in the cups. There has been some recent improvement, with one league defeat in 10, but that was a painful 5-0 thumping at Arsenal. They will likely finish seventh or eighth, better than last year, but not exactly the resurgence fans were hoping for.
What is missing from Pochettino’s Chelsea this season is that sense of shared purpose throughout the club that marked out his first season at Spurs. Even with the growing grumblings among some Spurs fans about Ange Postecoglou and his methods, there is still a far more tangible sense of unity and stability at Tottenham than there is at Chelsea. There is no speculation about whether Postecoglou will be in charge at the start of next season.
For those of us who predicted that Pochettino would be a big success at Stamford Bridge, this forces us to ask why it has been so difficult to create an identity and a shared ethos at Chelsea. If there was a question over whether this job would be more like Spurs or Paris Saint-Germain for Pochettino, the expectation was that it would ultimately be closer to the former. That has not proven to be the case.
So what explains the discrepancy? Why is it that, when Pochettino sowed his seed at Tottenham, it bore fruit but when he tried the same at Chelsea it has not yet taken root? What is it about Stamford Bridge that has made it such rocky ground?
One thing that Tottenham never had a lot of during Pochettino’s era was money and there has been no shortage of that at Chelsea during the Todd Boehly-Clearlake era. The most money Spurs spent on a player under Pochettino was £55million on Tanguy Ndombele, and he only started seven league games for Pochettino before his dismissal. Chelsea, meanwhile, have plenty of players — Enzo Fernandez, Moises Caicedo, Mykhailo Mudryk — signed for far bigger fees. And yet this squad is less than the sum of its parts.
Maybe part of the issue comes down to power. Looking back at the Pochettino era at Tottenham, what was so striking was how streamlined the operation was. Franco Baldini was still there in Pochettino’s first season but when he left, there were remarkably few decision-makers on football matters at the club. Just Pochettino, Levy, and initially Paul Mitchell, later replaced by Steve Hitchen. It was a tight circle and it meant that it was easy to get things done.
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Chelsea used to be like that in the back end of the Abramovich era, when Thomas Tuchel could work closely alongside Petr Cech and Marina Granovskaia to make decisions on players. But the new owners have seen the growth of a different structure, with not only multiple owners but two sporting directors and an overwhelming sense of too many voices and too much politics. The simple decision-making processes at Spurs must look very far away now.
The evidence of this is clear in the playing squad itself. For all the money spent on Chelsea, it remains a strikingly unbalanced squad, one that does not look much closer, two transfer windows in, to playing a recognisable form of Pochettino football. Partly this is down to quality: ask yourself how many of the Chelsea squad would be sought after by the rest of the ‘Big Six’ based on of their performances this season. Cole Palmer, obviously. Conor Gallagher probably. Malo Gusto maybe. But beyond that?
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This is also to do with the type of players that Chelsea have signed. Everyone knows the style of football that Pochettino wants to play: pressing high, winning the ball back quickly, positional attack, width from the full-backs. And yet the squad at his disposal has never looked consistently able to do that.
Full-back has been an issue all season, with Reece James barely available, and Ben Chilwell only playing a bit more. Gusto has looked good but Chelsea have often been lacking on the other side, especially when Pochettino had to play Levi Colwill there to provide extra defensive cover. In his first season at Spurs, Pochettino already had a young Ben Davies, Kyle Walker and Danny Rose in the full-back positions.
At centre-back, Chelsea have needed to keep relying on Thiago Silva, now 39 years old and set to leave Stamford Bridge at the end of the season. None of the other centre-backs have convinced — Wesley Fofana’s absence through injury has not helped — and Chelsea have only kept six clean sheets in the league all season. They have been involved in some thrilling games — 4-4 against Manchester City, 4-3 against Manchester United, 2-2 with Aston Villa last week — but you wonder whether that is where they want to be almost one year in.
Perhaps the biggest issue comes in midfield. Pochettino’s Spurs used to physically dominate opponents in the middle of the pitch, with Eric Dier, Mousa Dembele and eventually Victor Wanyama playing there — but for all the money Chelsea have spent, they struggle to dominate games, get counter-attacked easily and never look like overpowering opponents.
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Given the amount of money they have spent on midfielders, it beggars belief how little control they have in that area. It should be remembered that Romeo Lavia, the only natural No 6 they have bought, has barely played due to injury.
But there is another issue beyond the individual profiles of the players, the lack of power, the lack of size, the lack of a left-back or a centre-back or a No 6 or a No 9. And that is the dynamic of the dressing room. We assumed at the start of the season that Pochettino would create the same atmosphere at Chelsea that he had at Spurs, where every player looked willing to run through brick walls for him. While Pochettino is certainly popular with the players — who have spoken about the fact they want him to stay — he does not look as much of a dominant figure here as he did after one year at Spurs, someone who sets the tone for the whole club every single day.
Perhaps that Tottenham connection has been a barrier to his relationship with the Chelsea fans, which has made everything else harder.
One theory is that this comes down to leadership from the dressing room, or the willingness of the players to push on behalf of the manager’s ideas. While Pochettino oversaw a generational shift at Spurs, he was also blessed with plenty of young players who were the willing building blocks for his era. Hugo Lloris had already been France captain for two years when Pochettino arrived at Spurs. Jan Vertonghen and Dembele, like Lloris, had arrived in 2012 and were fully settled into the environment. Dier and Davies signed in 2014 but were unusually mature young players who commanded respect quickly. Walker had already won PFA Young Player of the Year, Kane and Ryan Mason had been around the club for years.
So when Pochettino arrived at Spurs, there were at least some foundations to build on, a new generation of responsible young players who had been at the club just long enough to understand how it all worked. But at Chelsea, the turnover of players has been so frantic that they barely have that structure. Lloris was an integral figure to Pochettino’s Spurs, the go-between from the coaches to the players, speaking to every player in whichever language they wanted and always gauging the mood of the camp. Chelsea’s official captain is James and, while he has been unfortunate with injuries this season, he is not a Lloris-type figure even when fit. The vice-captain is Ben Chilwell and ultimately Gallagher has worn the armband for much of this season even given the ongoing uncertainty about his own future.
There has been so much change at Chelsea that instilling any clear ethos looks an almost insurmountable challenge, like trying to hold together a political party being pulled in too many directions at once. It almost makes you wonder whether in hindsight the best time for Pochettino to take the job would have been when Thomas Tuchel was sacked in September 2022, back when they still had the core of the 2021 Champions League-winning side, players with a bit more experience who could have ensured more stability on the pitch.
No manager can control his own timing in football, but Pochettino taking over in 2023 rather than 2022 has given him an even more daunting rebuilding job, as he tries to magic order out of chaos. Taking over Tottenham from Tim Sherwood 10 years ago has probably never looked as easy.
(Top photo: Richard Heathcote/Getty Images)
