“The job he has done is unbelievable.”
Jamie Carragher has highlighted an incredible statistic about Tottenham Hotspur under Mauricio Pochettino.
On Monday Night Football, ahead of Spurs’ 1-0 loss to Manchester City, Carragher spoke about Pochettino’s achievements with the London club.
Since he became the manager in 2014, replacing Tim Sherwood, the Argentine has turned Tottenham into a top-four team and Champions League regulars. He has done this with a budget the fraction the size of rival teams, as Carragher highlighted.
The Sky Sports pundit showed that Pochettino’s net spend on transfers is just £29m over the last four years, a period that has seen transfer fees skyrocket.
“The job Pochettino has done is unbelievable,” Carragher said.
“To get Tottenham into the top four consistently and overachieve… In five or 10 years, the team will break up and the manager will be gone, and nobody will be looking at net spend and points.
“They will say did they win anything? At the moment it looks like the answer will be no.
Carragher said that, if this Spurs team do not win a trophy, then it will be because Pochettino has not been backed in the transfer market.
“No way should the manager and the players get that thrown at them. If anyone should it’s Daniel Levy and the board. Net spend of 29 million is not acceptable for one of the biggest teams in the country.
“Teams who come up to the Premier League have a bigger net spend. The fact Tottenham are where they are is because of Mauricio Pochettino and the players.
“Daniel Levy has done a great job with the training ground, infrastructure and stadium. But you have the best Tottenham team and manager for 30 years and £29m net spend is not enough if you want them to win something.”
You can watch Carragher here:
"The job he has done is unbelievable"@Carra23 believes Mauricio Pochettino has hugely overachieved at Spurs with the budget he has.
Watch #MNF live on Sky Sports PL or follow: https://t.co/M7lVhopwKi pic.twitter.com/DCbvXlzfJX
— Sky Sports Retro (@SkySportsRetro) October 29, 2018
Ahead of the defeat to City, Pochettino said he was in his lowest moment with the club since he arrived, despite Spurs experiencing their best start to a Premier League season.
“The circumstance that happened in the last years, I think the club is not focused completely in winning titles or winning games,” Pochettino said.
“We have a lot of focus and you know very well when you are competing with sides, like we are in Champions League and Premier League, the most important thing is to fight in the same conditions as others.
Tottenham failed to add any new players to the squad in the summer transfer window after Pochettino signed a new five-year contract and urged the club to be brave.
According to Gary Neville, Pochettino’s comments show that he is perhaps laying the “foundations” for his eventual exit from Spurs.
“Pochettino is a brilliant coach but at some point he was always going to want to manage one of the super clubs in Europe,” Neville said on Monday Night Football.
“There are a couple at the moment that you can imagine will be changing manager in the next 12 months and looking at him, and he will know they are looking at him.
“It feels to me that he has laid the first foundations for a move away from the club and started to prepare the ground.”
