If, as appears to be increasingly expected among his players, Antonio Conte's time at Tottenham comes to an end sooner rather than later, the Italian's era at the club will be viewed in different ways by those around him.
A handful of Spurs first team players returned to Hotspur Way on Tuesday - just four fit outfield ones - while Conte normally returns later in the first week of an international break after a spell back in Italy with his family. Tottenham remain silent over reports that he may not return at all and if he does whether it is to discuss his fate directly with chairman Daniel Levy. The mood at the sprawling training complex at Enfield is certainly one of a club that feels yet another change is coming.
It says everything about the environment that Conte was thrust into, and seemingly will be thrust out of, that his departure will mean Spurs have not had a manager last a full season at the club since the 2018/19 campaign. The stability of the Mauricio Pochettino era has given way to three permanent managers and one caretaker one within four years as Levy has lurched from decision to decision, trying and failing to push pieces into a jigsaw that simply won't go.
READ MORE: The truths and flaws in Antonio Conte's explosive Tottenham tirade and Daniel Levy's decision
There was a genuine excitement within the club when they managed to land Conte at the second attempt back in November 2021.
The first time Spurs had spoken to the Italian, in the summer that year, they were unable to find a common ground. Conte did not believe the club had the same ambition as he did to win the top prizes and Tottenham felt that his demands could end up being unrealistic and unmanageable.
The two parties went their separate ways at that point and after a few twists and turns, Spurs' managing director of football Fabio Paratici convinced Levy to turn to Nuno Espirito Santo, showing the initially reluctant chairman videos of the former Wolves manager's Valencia team from years before, with their attacking football.
The Portuguese was appointed but within months was gone, the football dreadful and the fans calling for his head after he quickly showed that his promise to 'make you proud' was a hollow one.
Levy went back to Conte and this time he benefited from the absence of any other vacancies at big clubs. The Italian was desperate to return into work, itching to get back on the training pitches and he compromised his ambitions for what he knew would be a slower road to success than he was used to.
Conte won everyone over in his first season at the club, despite the inconsistencies and limits of a squad that had been built for others. After the low energy Espirito Santo era, he swept in with energy, passion and a real desire to be on the training ground.
His attention to detail has been described as "remarkable" by those who know him and the repetition of his training sessions and the patterns of play worked on over and over again brought a real understanding for the players of their important roles within his system.
They would speak of knowing exactly what was being asked of them and so detailed and drilled were the sessions that observers of training could tell you exactly where the ball would end up next during matches because they had seen the same patterns of play being worked on at Hotspur Way so many times.
Conte also has an eye for the potential of fellow coaches and he surrounds himself with the best he can find. Cristian Stellini is highly regarded among the players and that was reflected in the way they stepped up for him in Conte's illness-enforced absence this season.
Conte saw the potential in Ryan Mason after watching him take the early sessions when he was awaiting the work permit for his move to the club. Mason had previously rejected the opportunity to be part of Espirito Santo's team but when Conte asked him to join his team he knew it was too big an opportunity to pass up, the chance to learn from one of the game's most decorated coaches.
Everyone recognised Conte's incredible desire to win and it was something that swept through the club. The Italian lives and breathes football and second place is not good enough, which is why his compromise with Tottenham was always unlikely to end in smiles.
His frustrations have boiled over at the club, his emotions running wild whenever they lost and he has little control when he does not like what he sees. Those with a grasp of Italian around the dugout can frequently hear the expletives he shouts at his players when they are not doing exactly what they had been trained to do.
Often after defeats or painful draws he would leave the players to stew in the dressing room without his words, perhaps knowing he would fly off the handle. Instead he would need to collect himself with his coaches before heading out to face the media with a different face.
That passion though galvanised the club when it really needed it last season and Conte's cause was aided in January by the astute transfers of both Dejan Kulusevski and Rodrigo Bentancur.
That window remains Paratici's best at the club as he brought in two players absolutely perfectly primed to step into the Conte system and, having come from Juventus, they would have known of the demands of an Italian coach and in particular would have heard the stories of Conte that still sweep around the Turin club.
The disappointing cup performances that season did at least lend themselves to helping the Spurs head coach drill those patterns of play into his players with clear weeks in between games in the second half of the season and the end results were clear.
Conte's system puts a lot of pressure on the work in transitions from a compact base, with the central four - the wing-backs and central midfielders - having multiple roles to play. They are roles that he believes can only be taken on by the most tactically intelligent of players.
Tottenham achieved a top four finish and in the weeks before the season came to a close Conte's narrative changed from a complete lack of committal over his future to a slightly more promising outlook, especially with Champions League football on the table.
Behind the scenes, Conte made it clear that he was willing to remain for the second year of his contract and a planned meeting between Levy, Paratici and the head coach to thrash out his future instead became a more informal meet-up between the latter two in Turin in May to discuss their transfer targets.
However, this season's transfers have not reached the heights of that first January window for Conte. He got an early target through the door in his former Inter man Ivan Perisic but the £90million splashed out on Richarlison and Yves Bissouma is yet to be deemed a success. The Brazilian has been plagued with injuries and has scored in just one match all season and Conte admitted the Mali international struggled to take on the defensive aspects of what he wanted from him.
Clement Lenglet was a back-up option after the club were unable to convince Alessandro Bastoni to leave Inter, while Leipzig had no intention of letting Spurs' top target Josko Gvardiol go and it's doubtful that the north London club would have seen off the top tier competition for his signature if they had.
Fraser Forster was brought in as an experienced back-up for Hugo Lloris after Paratici's big hope for the club's goalkeeping future - Pierluigi Gollini - struggled to rise to the challenge.
Then there were the clear club signings. Paratici had scouted Nottingham Forest on a few occasions the previous season and had been taken with Djed Spence, Brennan Johnson and James Garner in particular. He felt that Spence ticked all of the boxes to be a Conte wing-back.
Conte even played his part in convincing the England U21 international to come, as he did with all of the players in that transfer window. However, in the days before the transfer had even been officially confirmed, the Italian was already stating during the summer tour in South Korea that the then 21-year-old was very much a club signing.
Conte is not someone who will be forced or even feel the slightest bit of pressure to play someone he did not specifically ask for. While he can see the potential in young players, he will always turn to experience and those players he trusts unless there is simply no alternative. Even the most expensive new signings can have long adaptation periods under him.
With a packed Spurs squad and after Conte had a one-to-one conversation with Emerson Royal, who did not want to leave Spurs despite the interest of Atletico Madrid, Spence found himself arriving as third choice right wing-back despite turning down plenty of Premier League clubs and others in Europe to make the move. Just five months later and the now 22-year-old had to head out to Rennes on loan to reignite his career, gaining widespread praise this weekend in keeping out Kylian Mbappe and Lionel Messi at PSG in a 2-0 win.
A similar situation happened in January with Arnaut Danjuma. With Spurs expecting Bryan Gil and Lucas Moura to leave that month, they looked for a replacement attacker or two. In the end the Brazilian remained to see out the final six months of his contract and more permanent targets remained out of reach at that stage of the season.
Enter Danjuma from stage left, just as he was about to complete his move to Everton. The signing of the Netherlands international was led by Paratici and the club's recruitment team, who saw value in a loan with an option-to-buy deal for a player who had scored six Champions League goals as Villarreal reached the semi-finals. He had netted a goal in almost every other game in La Liga the previous season despite injury problems halfway through the campaign.
The only problem was that nobody at Spurs appeared to have checked with Conte over whether Danjuma fitted his system. Within weeks of signing the player, the head coach declared that he felt sorry for the 26-year-old.
"The club wanted to sign on loan this player. For sure he has good characteristics, good quality and maybe he has not specific characteristics to be a number 10, maybe he is more a second striker or a winger," he said.
Spurs did manage to sign a fourth right wing-back for the squad in Pedro Porro in what will be a £40million deal and that move at least appeared to please Conte.
However, this was a tough season for all concerned. For Conte, he lost three close friends in quick succession. Gian Piero Ventrone, the world-renowned fitness coach Conte had been close to for decades, died in October, before his friend and former Lazio defender Sinisa Mihajlovic died in December. That was then compounded by the death of Conte's former Juventus and Italy team-mate Gianluca Vialli in January.
Those around Conte have admitted that those three deaths in such a short space of time took a lot out of the Spurs head coach, each hitting him hard like repeated punches.
Then came the health problems that required him to have emergency surgery to remove his gall bladder a couple of weeks after Vialli's death, Conte admitting that he feared a far worse diagnosis from the doctor after all of that recent tragedy.
On top of that, the Spurs boss continued to juggle his work and family life with his wife Elisabetta remaining in Turin to keep their teenage daughter Vittoria settled at school.
On the pitch there have been injuries galore to key players, including captain Hugo Lloris, Bentancur and Bissouma, while another hamstring injury for Ryan Sessegnon, who Conte likes for his tactical understanding, meant overloading the 34-year-old Perisic with game time.
There has also been the drop-off in form from one of Spurs' biggest stars in Son Heung-min. Conte helped push the South Korean to his best ever season in the Premier League, winning the Golden Boot last year, but in this campaign the 30-year-old has been a shadow of that player and his relationship with Perisic has not gelled on the pitch.
Harry Kane, with his contract running towards its final year, has been left to carry the team on his shoulders once again and he has obliged with 21 goals in 28 Premier League games and it's worrying to think where this team would be this season without his contribution. It will be of some relief to the Tottenham fans that the England captain's future is not understood to be tied up with Conte's future.
In contrast to the good feelings last season there has been a growing frustration around the club, both from and with Conte. The Italian admitted that the reality he found within the club to what he expected before he walked in was vastly different and there was a growing acknowledgement that the path to the silverware he craves would be far longer than anticipated or really wanted.
Likewise, some frustrations among the players and the club towards Conte began to linger. There is no doubting the hard work and application of the head coach, exemplified when he returned far too quickly from his surgery, but there has always been a feeling that the Italian saw that he was doing the club a favour while waiting for a better opportunity to arise.
The performances have been difficult to watch at times this season with Spurs struggling to click in their rigid system and the defence has not progressed under Conte this season, conceding 40 Premier League goals already this campaign, worse than anyone in the top 12. The Italian may later point to the tools he has to work with but the same defence, barring Lenglet, conceded 40 goals across the whole Premier League season last time out so they have regressed.
When frustrations grow so the repetition that brought success begins to become a chore. Some players have begun to find training sessions boring with plenty of 11v11 work but often against static opposition, going over the same patterns for long periods of time.
Conte will often raid the U21s of most of their players to use in the sessions, leaving the development squad training sessions occasionally devoid of participants and sometimes using their players for training on the morning they were due to play in academy matches a couple of hours later.
Frustrations reached boiling point for Conte after a week in which Spurs meekly limped out of the Champions League and FA Cup. A temporary bounce in performance against a poor Nottingham Forest side was followed by the collapse at Southampton and then came that press conference.
It makes you wonder whether had that late soft penalty not been given against Pape Matar Sarr there would be have been such an outburst, with Spurs instead in third place for the international break. Yet Conte claimed he had been holding this in for too long and presumably it would have all come out anyway.
Conte let it all out, calling his team "selfish" and that he had "11 players playing for themselves" while taking aim at the easy culture created within Tottenham over the years, although he later sought to clarify with the powers-that-be that he was not attacking them, only the players.
The problem is that he said none of this to the players beforehand. He left them stewing as he often does in the dressing room, so the first they heard of his explosive tirade was on their phones on the way home or on car radios as some were driven separately to link up with their international sides.
Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg, part of Spurs' leadership group within the squad, was asked about the press conference on Tuesday while on Denmark duty: "Ha ha, yes, how did I experience it? I think we’ve all seen it. Very honest and very open press conference he gave. It is because he is not satisfied. You don’t do that if you’ve reached the quarter-final of the Champions League and if you’re in the semi-final of the FA Cup.
“It comes from the fact that, unfortunately, we did not get the results we as a team and club wanted. We are still where we want and need to be in the Premier League. But yes, it’s hard, I should say. I understand that if you want to be successful as a team, you need 11 men who are committed to a project and a culture, but I think he has to elaborate on how he feels before you as a player can start measuring and weighing.
"The coach has not been satisfied, and that is what I will take with me. You do what you can to please him. What I do know about myself is that I am an honest player. I am a player who always gives 100% of myself for the team."
He added: "Let me put it this way: He didn’t tell us what he wanted to say at the press conference, but it is clear that you work with each other every day, you want the best for each other and you want to be successful together, and sometimes the waves go high in football."
Conte had plenty of truth within his words but those who have followed Conte over the years have seen these type of public tirades before from him at each club. The Italian is always keen to vociferously question those who disappoint him but there are rarely any questions, at least publicly, posed about his own part in any failures.
The hours ahead will decide what happens next for Conte, with a fear that the dressing room may now be more apathetic towards him than ever, and whether yet again the Tottenham Hotspur machine will have ground up and spat out another manager or head coach.
If Conte is to question himself and what he could have done better this season then so must the club's board and Levy as they face yet another search for a manager to place something in that dusty trophy cabinet.
There are only so many times that you can hire managers who have either won silverware before or after their time at your club before you start to wonder why they could not do it for you.
Conte might not be perfect and this was always set to be a tempestuous marriage destined for divorce as he sought something in Tottenham that was seemingly not there to be found, but he's only part of a series of decisions that have not worked out for the club's hierarchy.
Whether their next decision leads them to a new future or a step backwards in order to eventually go forwards, there has to be an understanding of exactly what Tottenham Hotspur wants to be and then stick to it.
If Conte does depart this week then Levy will have sacked 12 permanent managers in the same amount of time Arsenal have had just three and their north London rivals are showing them this season exactly what comes from choosing a path and sticking with it through the tough times.
Spurs will recognise much of the work put into what their rivals are doing down the road with their young coach, playing good football with young players and instilling a close-knit family within the club while the fans and players have never been closer. It's all very eerily familiar but the difference was that Arsenal had the courage to stick with it and the means to back their man. Take note Tottenham.
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