Where Will Mauricio Pochettino Go Next?

And why do teams keep hiring Jose Mourinho?

All right! The request comes from Kyle: “Potential topic/questions that still puzzle me as a Spurs fan: Why do clubs keep hiring Mou?? And less bitter, who is Poch waiting for to come ask for his hand in managerial matrimony? Or whatever makes an interesting newsletter around that!” Let’s answer both! 

Teams keep hiring Jose Mourinho because, well, he’s Jose Mourinho. I think we see this in every sport, and probably every other reputation-based industry, too. The guy has won the Champions League twice, with different teams. He’s won the treble in Italy, he has three Premier League titles, and he’s the coach who kept Pep Guardiola from going four-for-four in La Liga with Barcelona. He’s only 57 years old, and although he hasn’t won a major trophy since 2015, he’s still got one of the best managerial CVs of the 21st Century.

There’s so much success to look back on that it’s pretty easy for a club chairman to breeze past Mourinho’s recent struggles: the dressing-room blowups, the constant underachievement, the fact that a high-possession and high-pressing game has become the dominant mode of play, a growing Premier League upper-class that makes it hard for his teams to grind out draws against top sides and still garner enough points to win the league. Mourinho is incredibly meticulous and, when he wants to be, incredibly charismatic. Add that to a resume that maybe one or two other coaches can match, and it’s not hard to see a club chairman becoming smitten with the Special One despite the recent struggles. Yeah, he’ll fix our club.

However, it is hard to see this happening with Daniel Levy. The Spurs chairman has a history of squeezing every last bit of value out of every deal he makes. He’s overseen Tottenham’s rise into one of the ten richest clubs on the planet with a hands-on approach. Levy is the kind of dealmaker that Donald Trump thinks he is. And so, how do you square that with him hiring a super-expensive, control-freak manager who hasn’t been able to get a team to outperform its talent level in 10 years? Plus, as we talked about on this week’s podcast, Mourinho has been most successful in short-term environments, where his remit is to win now, no matter the cost. Meanwhile, Spurs were seemingly in the midst of a kind of half-rebuild, phasing out previously invaluable players like Mousa Dembele, Christian Eriksen, and Toby Aldeweireld while they also entered a new financial bracket..

The best explanation I can come up with is the one Jack Pitt-Brooke offered up at The Athletic back in November:

Levy must know all this. The most prudent, intelligent, meticulous chairman in the league would not give out a £15 million per year managerial contract without thinking it through. He will know all about Mourinho’s reputation, his flaws and his recent failures. It might be that Levy was convinced by Mourinho’s pitch for the job, and the 56-year-old is said to be determined to be “calmer, less controversial and much more level-headed” in this job, according to reporting in Portugal.

And yet it is impossible not to look at this appointment and think that it has strayed from Levy’s usual principles of prudent long-term planning. That it is the move of a man desperate to keep his club in the public eye for the next year or so. To make sure that they do not drift into mid-table anonymity, especially with their growing foreign fan-base.

It feels like the perfect decision for a club that stages NFL games, and has allowed Amazon’s cameras in to make a documentary, because there are few better ways to grow your global brand than those.

Is this a good idea? Perhaps, if as Pitt-Brooke suggests, Levy eventually intends to sell the shares he owns at the club. But even that logic starts to curdle once you think about it for just a couple seconds: Was the pre-pandemic value of press and a potentially popular Amazon documentary really worth more than continued qualification for the Champions League with a less popular but more effective coach? I’m not sure it was, and so for a club like Tottenham, one with designs on being one of the best teams in the world year in and year out, Mourinho is a more effective marketing hire than a managerial one. Levy hired a coach without a recent history of improving his teams but with a recent history of feuding with star players -- and that’s exactly what he got. From Stats Perform:

As for the guy he replaced? Pochettino is probably doing two things: 1) resting and 2) waiting for the right job. He is -- by far -- the best unemployed manager right now. I’d put him in my top five, employed or not, and I might have him even higher than that. But managing a top club is wildly stressful; the expectations make it hard enough, but especially so in a sport where your team’s performance only has a partial say in whether or not you get the win. Pochettino, reportedly, might’ve stepped down at Spurs had they won the Champions League final last year. The dude seemed burnt out.

But he’ll be back at some point, and where to? Let’s run through the five most likely outcomes, based on Betfair’s odds:

Real Madrid (+1000): Would Pochettino do well with maybe the biggest budget in world soccer? Absolutely, but Madrid might be the most literal managerial gig there is. “Real don’t generally appreciate intense, demanding, all-powerful managers like Mourinho, preferring more easygoing figures like Vicente Del Bosque beforehand, or Carlo Ancelloti and Zinedine Zidane afterwards,” Michael Cox writes in Zonal Marking. “Power at Real traditionally resides with the club’s president and the players; the manager is a disposable middleman.” Pochettino would be the most intense and demanding Madrid manager since the guy who replaced him at Tottenham, and while his unique pressing style -- powerful, bullying -- would fit Madrid’s squad perfectly, it wouldn’t fit the club’s traditional power structure.

Bayern Munich (+1000): Another stylistic fit. In Pochettino’s best season at Tottenham from an xG perspective, 2017-18, Spurs ranked in the 90th percentile or higher of Europe’s Big Five leagues in shots, shots allowed, possession, passes completed into the penalty area, field tilt (passes completed in the final third, compared to passes allowed in the final third), and the average starting height of each possession (how high you typically win the ball back). All of that applies to Bayern this season, too, but Hansi Flick just signed a full-time contract, and he already had Bayern playing like one of the three-best teams in the world (along with City and Liverpool). Don’t expect this job to open up any time soon.

Manchester City (+550): Poch is the betting-market favorite to become the next permanent Manchester City manager. Crucially, the odds don’t care about when that happens. It’s unclear how City’s Champions League ban is gonna shake out, and it’s unclear how long Pep Guardiola is gonna stick around. His contract expires at the end of next season. There’s a world in which this bet hits ... in two or three years, after Pochettino has already taken another job. However, if Pep somehow leaves this year -- Juventus are heavy favorites as his next destination (-175), whenever that may be -- then Pochettino replacing him seems like the most likely outcome.

Manchester United (+500): This isn’t a stylistic fit. United are a really good defensive team, and they do it by limiting the quality of their opponents’ chances. They’re essentially an average European team in terms of how often and how aggressively they press, and while they’re right around an 80th-percentile team in the various possession-dominance metrics mentioned in the Bayern section, they play a much faster game -- fewer passes per possession, moving the ball toward goal more quickly -- than Pochettino’s teams typically do. Of course, they’d be hiring Pochettino to change all of that and essentially do some version of what Pep has done with City: maximize a set of resources than only a couple other clubs can compete with. It’s always seemed like an obvious move to me -- they can pay him crazy money, and he’d be their first great coach since Sir Alex Ferguson -- and he’s also the betting favorite to win this job. Except, it’s unclear if the gig is actually gonna open up. According to Stats Perform data, United have the third-best xG differential in the league this season, and they beat Man City right before everything shut down. It doesn’t seem like Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s job is in danger, and that’s why these odds only suggest around a 15 percent chance of this actually happening.

Newcastle United (-110): The odds are basically putting this at a coin-flip. In case you haven’t heard: the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia is on the verge of buying the team that currently employs Jonjo Shelvey and Steve Bruce. We will save the discussion of sports-washing for another newsletter -- listen to this if you wanna get a sense for Saudi Arabia’s global MO; there’s the murder of Jamal Khashoggi and the frequent killing of civilians in Yemen, for starters!  -- but we’re pretty quickly getting to the point where the only way to field a competitive soccer team at the elite level of European soccer is to either be a legacy clubs that sucks up a significant portion of of the league’s resources (Liverpool, Manchester United, Arsenal, Bayern, Juventus, Barca, and Real) or be funded by the obscene wealth of a resource-rich autocracy or an oligarch (Chelsea, PSG, and Manchester City). Pochettino helped Tottenham break into that tier, and he did it without billions of dollars behind him. If this sale goes through, Newcastle might make him the highest-paid manager in the history of the sport. And he’d get to build up the team in a sort of super-charged version of what he did at Southampton. Putting the geopolitics and ethics aside -- an increasingly necessary caveat! -- it’d be a fascinating competitive experiment, and there’s a pretty good chance we’re gonna get to see it.