While Roberto De Zerbi is an excellent tactician and a better footballing hire as the next Tottenham Hotspur manager than most of the other options they could have hired - and definitely any of the options they could have hired immediately during the March international break - he is decidedly not the top option that Spurs fans wanted.
No, Tottenham supporters were bristling at the major interest and high salary sent to De Zerbi, as he has not lasted long at any of his previous stops and is a volatile coach. Tottenham want stability, and the fans were also concerned with his past defenses of Mason Greenwood and the sorts of characters he brought into the Marseille dressing room that go againt the values they want from Spurs.
Meanwhile, Mauricio Pochettino was the star manager who never should have left - the man who built up Spurs into a near juggernaut capable of competing for Premier League and Champions League titles. And with his pure love for the club, Spurs fans knew he would be in it for the right reasons and lead the club proudly.
Tottenham are totally missing the point
However, Spurs went with Roberto De Zerbi and didn't seem to think twice about it. Now, we know why, as Ben Jacobs told Last Word on Spurs that the reason for the club leadership not rolling with Pochettino had a lot to do with politics.
Jacobs said of the situation, via The Spurs Watch, "My understanding about Pochettino is that there were senior figures at Tottenham against hiring him as it would be a nod back to the Daniel Levy era even though it was understood it would be a popular move. Vivienne Lewis is understood to be one of those against rehiring Pochettino."
What is most infuriating about this information from Jacobs is that Tottenham's decision to hire De Zerbi over Mauricio Pochettino seems to have had little to do with any valid sporting reasons and was more about the optics of not wanting to go back to the Daniel Levy era.
But the thing is, the mistake Levy made was not the hiring of Pochettino. No, the remnants of the Levy era and what would have been a regression to that time was the fact that Levy never actually backed his best ever manager on the transfer market, leaving him with players who were either not good enough or totally run down and jaded (or outright finished) alongside the superstars Harry Kane and Son Heung-min. Instead of taking ownership and improving the squad, Levy threw Pochettino under the bus, fired him, and then cycled through bigger name managers who could not even touch Poch's results before.
This information from Ben Jacobs only highlights the disconnect and fundamental misunderstanding of the ills of Tottenham Hotspur, probably because the Lewis Family and these long time decision makes themselves are as much a part of the rot as Levy was, though they would be loathe to admit it.