Fabio Paratici’s first official spell at Tottenham Hotspur lasted just under two years. His second will last just over three months.
Paratici’s departure to Fiorentina after this transfer window closes in early February will bring an end to his four-year association with Spurs. First, as managing director of football from June 2021 to April 2023, before he was brought down by the plusvalenza scandal. Then, while he was banned from football, for two and a half years as a consultant. And this autumn and winter, for roughly 16 weeks, as one of the club’s two sporting directors.
Football executives appear two times, as Karl Marx might have put it. The first as tragedy, the second as farce.
It has been a tumultuous time at Tottenham, a year of extreme highs and lows, where more changed than anyone might have thought possible. So perhaps it is fitting that 2026 has started this way. With the much-vaunted new football structure — Paratici and Johan Lange working simultaneously as sporting directors — lasting from October 15 until the end of the winter window. Even Nuno Espirito Santo, who Paratici appointed as head coach in June 2021, managed four months before being sacked.
In recent months, sources in the football industry have wondered how long this new balance would hold for, how long Lange or even Thomas Frank would last with Paratici back in an official position of power at the club. Paratici did not see Brentford boss Frank as the right fit for Tottenham, and wanted his own man in place on the bench. But the clear view of the Tottenham hierarchy is to stick with their new head coach. And, to the surprise of many, it is Paratici, rather than Lange or Frank, who will be first out of the door.
When Paratici was brought back in October and placed at the heart of Spurs’ new structure, the hope was that he would be able to hit the ground running in this transfer window. Chief executive Vinai Venkatesham explained the division of labour between Paratici and Lange in a video interview for the club, saying that the Italian would be focused on “players, the transfer window and the loans and pathways department”.
The hope, for many fans at least, was that Paratici would do again for Spurs what he had done in previous windows. That he would fly his sleigh into Hotspur Way and unload some late Christmas gifts for Frank to unwrap: a midfielder who could move the ball forward, maybe a reliable goalscoring striker. They would go straight into the team. And the decision to bring Paratici back would suddenly look astute and far-sighted.
Maybe that will still happen. But these next few weeks will be Paratici’s last at the club. After the window shuts, his sleigh will not be returning to north London. He will be delivering players to Fiorentina in the summer instead. It adds an extra potential distraction to what is already one of Spurs’ most significant midseason transfer windows in recent years. The team looks desperately in need of reinforcements after an unconvincing first half of the 2025-26 campaign. And the majority-shareholding Lewis family, under more scrutiny since their dismissal of chairman Daniel Levy in September, need to convince the fans that they have the ambition to deliver success on the pitch.
In time, there will be more questions about Spurs’ strategy in future windows. In one sense, the Paratici restoration was required because of Levy’s dismissal. For almost 25 years, Levy had taken so much responsibility for transfer negotiations that his departure in September left an experience gap. There were questions in the football industry about who at the club would get their hands dirty in the market. So Paratici’s return felt like an acknowledgement that Tottenham needed his contacts book and his ability to get deals done. When his re-appointment was announced in October, Venkatesham hailed his “fantastic network”. One of the many questions for 2026 is how recruitment is going to work post-Levy and post-Paratici, with a new director of football operations set to join.
What makes Paratici’s sudden departure even more dramatic is the fact that his arc over the past three months was already surprising enough.
When Levy was sacked, the conventional wisdom was that Paratici’s four-year connection with Tottenham was over. Because Levy was always his patron at Spurs. It was Levy who reorganised the club to bring him in as their first (and only) ‘managing director of football’ in June 2021. It was Levy who stuck by him when he was banned. And it was Levy who leant on him as a consultant during his wilderness years, seeking his advice in the transfer market and also regarding managers. So once Levy was told to clear his desk, it felt like Paratici would have to look elsewhere for work, too.
But all of those expectations were confounded by what actually happened.
On October 15, less than six weeks after Levy’s dismissal, Paratici was unveiled as one of Spurs’ two new sporting directors. After two and a half years acting as a consultant, he was back in a big, visible role; one of the public faces of the club. It was a striking return to favour, Paratici working for a new patron, just weeks after his original backer had been ruthlessly removed.
It was not a universally popular move. There have always been staff at Tottenham who thought that the scandal which brought down Paratici tarnished the club’s reputation, especially when they were so keen to stick by him at the start of 2023. So some were aghast this autumn when the club decided to re-attach themselves to Paratici in such a visible way.
It left a series of questions hanging over his restoration. Was this the start of a new era at Spurs, one with Paratici and Lange working in harmony, bringing their complementary skills together? Or would there only be room for one of the two of them? What did this mean for Lange’s data-led focus on signing younger players? Would the club go back to a more traditional contacts-led approach to recruitment? (One associate once said that, during a transfer window, Paratici would speak to leading agent Jorge Mendes “15, 20 times” a day.)
What was clear was that the people now in charge at Tottenham had reached the same conclusion as Levy did about Paratici: that he was worth having around.
While it was initially Levy’s plan to bring Paratici back, the new hierarchy signed off on the plan after the former’s departure. And so in November, Paratici was in the Bahamas with the Lewis family (along with Venkatesham and Lange) for a series of planning meetings, and a social event on patriarch Joe Lewis’ yacht. It felt like the clearest sign yet of Paratici’s return to prominence under the revamped leadership. And it got people wondering what his plans for Spurs in 2026 would be.
The fascinating question, of course, is why Paratici would walk out on Spurs so soon after rejoining them. He loves the Premier League, and dividing his time between Italy and London. There has always been speculation about a return to his homeland: at the start of last summer, he was close to taking over as sporting director at Milan, before they went for Igli Tare instead. Ultimately, his personal circumstances have changed and some sources believe that is why he is going back to Serie A.
There is no disputing that Paratici will have far more power at Fiorentina than he has at Tottenham. He will be assuming total control of the Florence club’s football activities. And there is a theory that Paratici has found in recent months that he could not quite get both hands on the steering wheel at Spurs. He used to have quite a lot of leeway under Levy — he was even allowed to appoint Nuno — but the club have a different structure now, with two sporting directors and a CEO.
If Paratici hoped he would have total autonomy and control at Tottenham, then that was never on offer. As mentioned earlier, he did not think Frank was the right fit for Tottenham, but the position of the hierarchy supporting the Dane has been very clear in recent weeks. If Paratici thought he was getting total control, he should have known what he was walking into in the new structure.
The sudden conclusion to this story, this curtailed final act, means that Paratici will never get to write a final chapter of his time at Spurs.
He still has a clear legacy at the club, in the players that he has signed (or advised on their signings) over the years. Cristian Romero, Dejan Kulusevski and Rodrigo Bentancur were all very good acquisitions, arriving for far less than market rates. Pape Matar Sarr and Destiny Udogie have developed well. Guglielmo Vicario, James Maddison and Micky van de Ven were all important to Ange Postecoglou’s side and last season’s Europa League triumph. Some will argue that Paratici signed some good individuals but oversaw the decline of the level of the whole group. Others will point out that the bigger strategic decisions were out of his hands.
Paratici never quite achieved what was hoped for in 2021 — that he would bring “Juventus standards” to Tottenham.
Now that he is about to disembark from the ship again, responsibility will lie with others to start turning it around.