Tottenham‘s marriage of convenience with manager Antonio Conte is over. The story of his 16 months as head coach is one of perpetual internal tension, an awkward alliance founded on a mutual desire to win silverware urgently yet never in agreement about how to actually achieve it.
Spurs thought they knew what they were getting themselves into. Conte does not stick around long — the 53-year-old has never stayed for more than three years in any managerial post — but he is a serial, bonafide winner with five league titles in Italy and England. It almost always ends in acrimony. That was true at Inter Milan, Chelsea and Juventus, his last three club jobs, where his relationship with senior executives frayed to the point of collapse. With Conte the trajectory is clear: trophies then turmoil. Except at Spurs, where he skipped the first bit.
Inevitably, each side blames the other. Conte felt Spurs failed to go far enough in their transfer spending to overhaul the squad; Spurs believed they made a series of concessions and should have got more for the money they did commit to his cause.
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Sources have told ESPN that Conte was expressing privately for some time what he ended up saying publicly after his final match in charge at Southampton, where the players reinforced his most disparaging assessments by allowing a 3-1 lead to slip in the last 15 minutes to draw 3-3 against a team bottom of the Premier League.
“Tottenham’s story is this — 20 years there is this owner and they never won something — why?” It is a question he has asked internally. Conte branded the players “selfish” and suggested the owners are willing to accept mediocrity and hide their own shortcomings behind a succession of managers (seven permanent appointments since Juande Ramos won the League Cup in 2008.) He grew tired of not being listened to. Spurs had enough of the broken record.
There were many supporters willing to chant Conte’s name until recently, those who believe the failure to take that final step and lift a first trophy since the 2008 League Cup is symptomatic of an ownership prioritising finance over football. Yet the club have been so difficult to watch for the vast majority of the season, prioritising functionality over flair in a manner fundamentally at odds with the club’s “To Dare Is To Do”‘ mantra, that fans gradually shifted their focus to Conte. Their ire was most obvious in an insipid Champions League round-of-16 exit to AC Milan, which epitomised the worst of Spurs under the Italian: sterile, stagnant and soulless.
As Conte’s anger grew louder, something had to give. Sunday night’s confirmation he had finally left the club was inevitable. It couldn’t go on like this.
