Antonio Conte agreed to resign – Newspaper Kommersant No. 52 (7497) of 03/28/2023

Tottenham Hotspur turned out to be another European top club that fired the head coach during this season. He parted ways with Italian Antonio Conte, who came to the club in 2021 in the status of an effective and trendy mentor with the task of finally bringing the Londoners some valuable prize, and left him amid rather modest results and scandalous statements. In them, Conte, in fact, put all the blame for the failures on the team’s players and its management.

“Tottenham” announced that he terminated the contract with Antonio Conte “by mutual agreement.” And one can find fault with this wording, because usually it means the absence of sharpness, conflicts. In this case, there was a conflict. Leading British media outlets had no doubts that Conte would be sacked a few days ago, recalling his speech at a press conference after the England Championship match against Southampton, the last one before the March window for national teams. Tottenham played with the outsider of the championship in a draw – 3:3, squandering a two-goal lead. Antonio Conte, commenting on what happened, was extremely frank, saying that before that he “hid the situation”, but now he considers such a position “unacceptable.”

Conte called the players of his team “selfish”, and also focused on the fact that “for 20 years” Tottenham has been owned by Daniel Levy and the club “has never won anything.”

“Why?” asked the Conte rhetorical question. Such statements would hardly have left any mentor with a chance to keep the post. They ended a short spell at Conte’s Tottenham that they saw not so long ago as hope for a major breakthrough.

Antonio Conte actually described the specifics of the London club quite accurately. It has been owned by Daniel Levy since 2001 and over this long period has managed to acquire a specific status. Tottenham are financed and staffed at a level close to that of the undisputed English giants, but, unlike them, suffer from a terrible shortage of prizes. In fact, in two decades, often finding himself next to titles, he took only one, and then, in fact, a minor one – the 2008 English League Cup. At the same time, the management of Tottenham, in search of a way to break the tradition, constantly changed coaches. In the “Levi era” they were managed by 11 mentors, most of whom did not last long at the club.

Such was the fate of Antonio Conte’s predecessor, Nuno Espirito Santo. He worked at Tottenham for four months before losing the job to Conte in November 2021. Italian appeared at the club, being considered an extremely efficient coach (he won championship titles with all the top teams that invited him – Juventus, Chelsea and Inter) and trendy, applying all the advanced knowledge regarding football tactics and training methods.

But it was in Tottenham that Conte failed to confirm his reputation.

He spent an incomplete debut season in the new team well, given its problems before his arrival: the Londoners finished fourth in the national championship and returned to the Champions League. But the current season is unlikely to deserve at least a rating of “satisfactory”. In March, Tottenham, to the whistle of their fans, flew out of the main European Cup, losing to the seemingly quite convenient rival Milan, who did not score a single goal in two matches, and Sheffield United, who played in the second-ranking division, knocked him out of the FA Cup. In the national championship, the club occupies the fourth line, but it will be difficult for it to keep it in the remaining ten rounds: Newcastle are only two points behind with two meetings in reserve. At the same time, the game of Londoners is terribly unstable: even two consecutive high-quality matches are very rare for them.

At the end of the season, Tottenham will be coached by Antonio Conte’s assistant Christian Stellini. But it is clear that he is an intermediate figure.

The list of those who, according to various British sources, can lead the club in the summer, is huge. It includes Julian Nagelsmann, who had just been fired from Bayern (it is known that the club wanted to hire him back in 2021), Luis Enrique, Roberto De Zerbi, Ruben Amorim, Vincent Kompany, and even Mauricio Pochettino, who was already in charge of Tottenham, under which the team made its most notable take-off when they played in the Champions League final four years ago.

Alexey Dospekhov