Tottenham Hotspur had Co-Sporting Directors for just over two months. Now, it looks like — choose your metaphor — the apple cart will be upset and/or deck chairs will be shuffled on the S.S. Hotspur. Fabrizio Romano tweeted yesterday that Fabio Paratici is expected to become the next Director of Football at Fiorentina, pending “formal steps.”
I’ve said before your reaction to this news is likely a Rorschach test for your Tottenham fandom. On the one hand, your favorite club losing its Italian co-Sporting Director just two months after his appointment and a few days before the opening of the January transfer window to go take the same position for the last-placed team in Serie A feels a touch humiliating, no matter how much he might miss his nonna’s cooking, and you’d be forgiven for feeling as though this is another example of the mess at the top of Spurs’ leadership structure.
On the other hand… is it really all that bad? It’s not like many of us were especially enamored by Paratici or his job performance. Sure, he landed us Rodrigo Bentancur and Dejan Kulusevski from his old job at Juventus, but then he got himself banned from football for two years for being involved in the plusvalenza scandals in Italy. His overall player transfer record at Spurs is a bit dodgy, and shoehorning him into a franken-director position with Johan Lange felt weird when it was announced. There were suggestions earlier that Paratici considering the Fiorentina job was a power-play, possibly with the goal of marginalizing or eliminating Lange’s position, but if Paratici actually leaves, it’s hard to know what to think about that. There were also suggestions that Paratici was offered the Co-Sporting Director position by Daniel Levy before Levy’s departure from the club, and Spurs decided to (perhaps reluctantly?) honor that offer despite Levy being pushed out.
So in a sense, Paratici’s departure could be seen as an opportunity for Spurs CEO Vinai Venkatesham to really put his mark on the club’s leadership structure, but it comes at the short term cost of having Paratici’s experience around for what will be a critical January transfer window. Maybe it works out, both in the short and long term, but I gotta say, if you considered Fabio as a necessary foil and counterweight to Johan Lange with regards to Tottenham’s squad construction, I think it’s okay to feel a little nervous going into the start of 2026.