This week marked the fourth anniversary of one of Antonio Conte’s less remembered outbursts as Tottenham Hotspur head coach.
On February 23, 2022, after Spurs had slumped to defeat at Burnley (their fourth loss in five league matches), a frustrated Conte questioned if he was the right man for the job, saying he was “ready to go” and encouraging his superiors to “make an assessment about me”.
Conte had only been at the club for three and a half months but already appeared to regret answering Tottenham’s call at the second time of asking.
The Italian carried on at Spurs for another 13 months before finally being put out of his misery after his much more memorable rant at Southampton in March 2023.
Conte’s evisceration of his players at St Mary’s has become a dark footnote in the club’s modern history, but as present-day Spurs sink into a full-blown relegation battle, it is not the most instructive of his various outbursts.
In taking aim at his players — describing them as “selfish” and lacking “heart” — but pulling his punches when it came to how the club was run, Conte’s 2023 tirade ended up feeling hollow.
It came across as self-serving, deflecting the blame for his part in Spurs’ underwhelming season, and self-incriminating. As head coach, Conte was responsible for motivating his supposedly feckless players.
Instead of mulling over the wisdom of Conte’s final press conference, it is much more illuminating to consider a warning he fired to Spurs a year earlier, in March 2022, not long after his frustration at Turf Moor.
As his side prepared to host Frank Lampard’s Everton, then mired in a relegation fight, Conte predicted that Spurs could soon find themselves in a similar situation.
“The level of this league is so high,” he said. “You have to pay great attention and it’s my forecast that in the future it will be worse… it will be very, very difficult and then you’ll have to pay greater attention.
“Teams that at this moment seem to be in the middle, they could slip. Everton is a good example. You look at the Everton squad, their players, and you can think it’s impossible that Everton is fighting relegation.
“They had such an important coach in Rafa Benitez, who won the Champions League and titles, and was sacked. And now they’re fighting for the relegation zone.
“Everton is a good example to understand that this league is very, very difficult and in the future, it will become much more difficult.”
Looking back now, Conte’s “forecast” is remarkably prescient.
At the time, it was widely considered “impossible” that Spurs could be dragged into a scrap at the foot of the table.
They were part of English football’s ‘Big Six’, and their dressing room was led by Hugo Lloris, a World Cup winner, and Harry Kane and Son Heung-min, two of the finest forwards in Premier League history.
Spurs also had their own “important coach” in Conte, who had won titles wherever he had been, and were still punching at the top end of the table, despite a turbulent few years.
As if to illustrate the absurdity of Conte’s claim, the day after his gloomy prediction, Spurs thrashed Everton 5-0, with Son and Kane (twice) on the scoresheet, and they finished that season in fourth.
Yet, within three years, Spurs would end a campaign in 17th, one place above the drop zone, although they were never seriously in a relegation battle last season.
This time around, it is different: Spurs are four points from safety with 11 games to play, and without a league win since December.
With no momentum, no confidence, a horrendous injury list and the teams around them seemingly scrapping harder (West Ham United in 18th have taken 11 points from their past six games, while Spurs have taken two), no one should be in any doubt about the gravity of their situation under interim head coach Igor Tudor.
Conte’s prediction that the Premier League’s overall level would increase and that complacent clubs would plummet down the table has come to pass. Aston Villa, Newcastle United, Bournemouth, Brighton & Hove Albion, Fulham and Brentford have moved ahead of Spurs.
Perhaps Conte was catastrophising, but he sensed that for all the star quality in his squad, Spurs were built on “fragile foundations” — to borrow a phrase from his successor, Ange Postecoglou — and would inevitably “slip” if they continued to operate in the same way.
He would have been aware that Kane could soon force his way out of the club (the England captain had angled for a move to Manchester City before Conte arrived and would eventually follow him out of the club, joining Bayern Munich in August 2023) and that Son, who turned 30 that year, would eventually decline — leaving precious little quality in the squad.
In his mind, Spurs’ determination to operate with one of the top flight’s strictest wage structures would quickly catch up with them in a hyper-competitive league, where more clubs could dream of European football.
Conte believed that the muddled thinking and questionable ambition of the club’s hierarchy, then led by chairman Daniel Levy, would also be costly.
The prediction illustrates a simple point: Tottenham’s crisis has been years in the making and did not come as a surprise to those with knowledge of the club’s inner-workings.
Thomas Frank may have accelerated Spurs’ decline before he was sacked this month but he did not cause the rot. Neither did Postecoglou, nor Conte himself.
Speak to Spurs supporters and you will hear myriad suggestions about when the rot really began to set in. A common claim is the summer of 2018, when Spurs became the first Premier League club to not sign a single player since transfer windows were introduced in 2003, but a case could be made for any number of other junctures over the past decade.
The writing has long been on the wall for Spurs. Years of chronic mismanagement from the top have taken them here.
Conte was a bad fit from the start and played a small part in their decline. Criticising his employers is part of a tedious pattern that has repeated elsewhere.
But he was on the money about the club’s trajectory and is not the first Spurs manager to criticise their running, even if he was unusual for doing so while still in the job.
This month, Postecoglou said Spurs are “not a big club” because of their refusal to compete in the transfer market. Last year, Jose Mourinho suggested that Levy was more motivated by finances than titles.
In time, Frank or even Tudor may have their say on the latest chapter of a decline that has been long in the making.