Mauricio Pochettino was sacked by Tottenham in November 2019 but the curtain really came down on his tenure as manager some five months earlier, with Spurs’ defeat to Liverpool in the Champions League Final.
Pochettino - who will take charge of his first game in English football in four-and-a-half years when his new club Chelsea host Liverpool on Sunday - was emotionally drained after losing with Spurs in Madrid, worn down by more than half a decade of working miracles in north London.
“Afterwards the tank was empty,” recalled Toby Alderweireld, the former Spurs defender, in an interview with Standard Sport in 2021. “When I look back now, we needed a bigger break to really have the desire to go again. The disappointment was too fresh. It was the same for everyone, even Poch.”
Desire has always been central to Pochettino’s ethos. The Argentine prefers working with talented young players - of which there are plenty at Chelsea — who are desperate to prove themselves and prepared to commit to his gruelling double training sessions.
When he first arrived in London in May 2014, joining Spurs from Southampton, Pochettino was bursting with self-belief and a will to succeed.
He was then one of the game’s best up-and-coming managers, a demanding and innovative training-ground coach, who could quite literally command his players to walk on fire for him (when he joined Saints and, then again before the Champions League Final, Pochettino had his squads walk over hot coals barefoot).
The former Argentina defender, though, still felt underappreciated and was determined to prove himself at Spurs against Europe’s leading coaches, having taken a tougher route than most to a job at one of the Premier League’s ‘big six’.
A desire for recognition drove him on, but he believed he could even surpass the likes of Pep Guardiola by winning trophies without his club spending vast sums of money. Instead, as Spurs scrimped and saved to fund their new £1.2 billion stadium, Pochettino promoted and polished young academy players and rough diamonds, including Harry Kane, Dele Alli and Kyle Walker, who later joined Guardiola’s Manchester City.
His determination to succeed was also fuelled by Tottenham falling short of the League title to Leicester in 2015-16. Though he was not bitter about Leicester’s fairytale, Pochettino was frustrated by the sense that the entire country was rooting for the Foxes at the expense of his side.
Spurs were even better in the following season, finishing with the club’s record points haul in the Premier League, only to lose the title to another remarkable team, Antonio Conte’s Chelsea.
In the end, Pochettino never won a trophy with Spurs, his biggest chance snatched away by Liverpool, and it remains the only real caveat to his outstanding five-and-a-half years in charge.
He has since lifted the Ligue 1 title and a French cup with Paris Saint-Germain, where he spent 18 months until he was sacked last summer, but he is returning to the Premier League with Chelsea with a point to prove.
Pochettino has joined a club with a far higher base than Spurs in 2014, despite their dismal 12th-place finish last season, thanks to an ingrained culture of a winning and a squad packed with talented young players. He will be backed by an ambitious board, who have already demonstrated their willingness to spend vast sums on the squad. He has everything to succeed.
Like almost every manager who has been chewed up and spat out by PSG, though, Pochettino seemed to emerge a little scarred from his time in Paris.
Pochettino has inherited a club in the midst of a messy transition on and off the pitch
It is nearly a decade since he first pitched up at Spurs, so determined to make a point, and he is older now, more established and with less need to prove himself.
It would be understandable if he was more cynical after 18 months in the PSG bear pit, perhaps a little more jaded and with more in the way of ego.
For all Chelsea’s potential, Pochettino has inherited a club in the midst of a messy transition on and off the pitch, and there has been little evidence that the new owners will not continue the hire-and-fire policy adopted by former owner Roman Abramovich if they are unsatisfied with the new head coach. It will take every ounce of his ability as a manager to return it to the top in an English top flight which has increased in competitiveness since he left.
So perhaps the only question where Pochettino and Chelsea are concerned is whether the fires still burn as brightly for him as they did at the start of his first stint in London.
At 51, there is no reason they should not and there is no doubting Pochettino as a coach. But to return Chelsea to the top, he will need to ensure the tank is full to the brim once more.
