• Among the Everton coaching staff working under David Moyes that night, all of whom were British
• When he first caught English eyes, in 2002, Pochettino could not have been more removed from our game
Image: / REUTERS
On Mauricio Pochettino’s first night in English football back in January 2013, the Everton coaching staff eyed their three Southampton counterparts suspiciously. No-one really knew them: Jesus Perez, Miki D’Agostino, Toni Jimenez. In reality, only a real connoisseur of Spanish and Argentine football or someone who followed Espanyol closely would have done.
Among the Everton coaching staff working under David Moyes that night, all of whom were British, there was a definite sense of threat: that it wasn’t just English managers, like the recently sacked Nigel Adkins, who were being marginalised by globalisation, but their coaching assistants who would wither in the clear-out.
The irony is now apparent. For arguably no coaching team has done more for English football in the last seven years than Pochettino’s, other than Gareth Southgate and Steve Holland. To understand how he has transformed Tottenham into a genuine Premier League superpower on a relatively pitiful budget — and with that helped improve the England team too — we must first understand the man.
When he first caught English eyes, in 2002, Pochettino could not have been more removed from our game, in a superficial sense, with that long-haired mullet haircut that signified a certain type of Argentine centre-half of that era. He is a child of the Pampas, a farmer’s son from Murphy, a remote and tiny settlement some 200 miles south-west of Rosario set up by an Irish emigrant in the 19th century. That day in 2002, when he faced down England in what had become one of the most hyped encounters of the World Cup finals — Japanese TV used footage of the Falklands War to trail the game — he was very much the student of Argentina coach Marcelo Bielsa. The hope of Argentina was that they would record another defeat on the old colonial enemy after the 1998 triumph in France.
Of course, it didn’t end well, neither for Bielsa nor Pochettino. When Michael Owen feinted past him in the box, Pochettino stuck out a leg and Owen fell. “For sure it was a dive,” Pochettino will always say. “I never touched him! Replays confirm there was barely contact. But David Beckham dispatched the penalty and Argentina would go home in disgrace, failing to make even the knock-out stages.
Bielsa seems the obvious place to start when analysing this unlikely tale of how an Argentine farmer’s boy ended up as one of English football’s favourites. It was the current Leeds United manager who first set eyes on him, sleeping in his bed, as a 14-year-old. The extraordinary story, seemingly alarming in our era of child-protection awareness but innocent in this context and culture, is now well told.
Bielsa, youth-team coach at Newell’s Old Boys, and the academy director, Jorge Griffa, would scour the Pampas looking for talent. They were actually visiting nearby Santa Isabel for a coaching course when someone mentioned that in Murphy there was a decent player who was interesting Newell’s biggest rivals, Rosario Central. Bielsa had suggested returning home to Rosario. It was, after all, late and after dark. Griffa insisted they head down to Murphy.
“We arrived at their house at 2 o’clock in the morning” recalled Griffa, 83, when we met in his elegant apartment in the upmarket district of Recoleta in Buenos Aires last year. “It was quite extreme! I knocked at the windows, Mauricio’s mother answered me and she recognised me. We got in and I started to talk about to them soya beans and other crops, which of course were not my interest at all.”
Eventually they got round to the point of their midnight visit. Griffa confirms the famous story, that they really did ask Pochettino’s parents if they could view the sleeping 14-year-old Mauricio in his bedroom and did indeed exclaim: ‘What legs! A footballer’s legs!’ on seeing him.
They weren’t wrong about the innate footballing ability. He proved a very capable centre-half. What you couldn’t know then was quite what an effect Bielsa would have on global football and Pochettino on the English game. Argentina doesn’t seem the obvious place to look for the start of an English football renaissance. But the revolution which had started at Newell’s Old Boys would have a global impact.
Rosario is a pleasant city dominated by oil refining, petrochemicals, manufacturing and the vast Parana river. It is also a city separated by football. Entire neighbourhoods are painted in the red and black of Newell’s or the yellow and blue of rivals Rosario Central. Despite these obsessions it was something of backwater for a country dominated by Buenos Aires.
Ricky Villa, that icon of Tottenham and himself a farm boy from outside the urban elites, puts it like this: “Buenos Aires is the big city of football and Cordoba and Rosario are secondary.” Obviously, Rosario did produce Lionel Messi: but apart from that? Yet in the late 1980s and early 1990s Newell’s started to upset the likes of River Plate and Boca Juniors, and Argentinian football did take some notice.
Under coach Jose Yudica they won the league title in 1988 and reached the final of the Copa Libertadores, the South American equivalent of the Champions League. The following season, a young centre half would make his debut: that boy from back on the farm a few years before had come good. Alongside him would be D’Agostino, his oldest friend. They had shared the rather primitive dormitory - freezing in winter, sweltering in summer - where youth-team players were housed under the main stand of the club’s stadium.
And this was a team made largely of home-grown stars. Griffa has almost mythical status in Argentine football as the star maker, thanks to his work at Newell’s when he discovered Gerardo Martino, Gabriel Batistuta, and Pochettino. Later he would bring through Maxi Rodriguez, Walter Samuel and Gabriel Heinze and then, when he moved to Boca Juniors, Carlos Tevez. Jorge Valdano, the 1986 World Cup winner, former Real Madrid coach and technical director, described Griffa as ‘one of the development gurus in Argentina’.
According to Valdano, the Newell’s team in which Pochettino was integral were placed in a ‘honourary sphere when it came to developing players’: like an Ajax of South America. This is the environment that forged Pochettino: tough, without frills, based mainly on hard work but also with due regard to technique and tactical aptitude. It was a unique culture. Given how many players were coming through the academy to the first team, it made sense to promote the first-team coach to look after the first team, which is how Bielsa got his big break in 1990.
Playing a 3-4-3 and a unique pressing style which will now be familiar to Tottenham fans (and which also hugely influenced Pep Guardiola), Bielsa led the team to another league title and, in an unprecedented era for the club, two finals of the Copa Libertadores.
Griffa recalls: “When Bielsa took the first team job at Newell’s, he told me that we had to buy two central defenders. I told him: ‘You have them in house — Fernando Gamboa and Pochettino’. Those two would form the centre-half partnership for Bielsa’s team.
“It was a team that left its mark in Newell’s history,” says Roberto Sensini, a former team-mate of Pochettino at Newell’s and with the national team. “Mauricio always talked to his team-mates with authority and in clear terms. Mauricio has learned from many coaches, but Bielsa was a man that left his mark on him, like on me as well.”
Bielsa would feature again in Pochettino’s career, when he moved to Spain to play for Espanyol. In fact his old coach reduced him to tears there after accusing him of losing the drive that he had as a young player at Newell’s and slipping into a comfort zone. I’ve never felt so embarrassed,” wrote Pochettino in his book, Brave New World. “Everything he said was right. I’d been blinded, trapped in my own world.”
Pochettino still cites this period of his life and the faith shown in him by Yudica, Griffa and Bielsa as his inspiration for giving young players a chance. Harry Kane, Dele Alli, Eric Dier, Kieran Trippier, Danny Rose, Harry Winks, Luke Shaw, Adam Lallana, Nathaniel Clyne, James Ward-Prowse are just some of the England players who have thrived under him. Unknowingly, they owe a huge debt to Griffa and Bielsa.
None were huge stars before Pochettino arrived. Lallana was probably the best established. You can’t argue that their rise is down to Pochettino alone: MK Dons, Crystal Palace and Burnley were involved as well as Southampton and Tottenham. Maybe some would have hit these heights regardless.