Ben Davies’ departure this summer will mark the end of the last living connection to the Mauricio Pochettino era at Tottenham Hotspur, and as painful as it is to admit, closing that chapter might be the best thing that has happened to this club in years.
When Ben Davies signed for Tottenham in the summer of 2014, he was Mauricio Pochettino’s first piece of business: a reliable, quietly excellent left-back from Swansea who went on to rack up 358 appearances across 11 years in north London. He was there for all of it. The title challenge. The Champions League final. The slow decline. The Europa League win in Bilbao.
And now, with a fractured ankle having effectively ended his season and his contract expiring in the summer of 2026, it is almost certain that Davies will not be a Tottenham player next year. Twelve years of service, gone. That hurts.
But here is the thing. As a fanbase, we have spent the better part of a decade carrying the Pochettino era around like a talisman, like if we held onto it tightly enough, it might somehow come back.
Ben Davies staying at the club, year after year, was part of that. He was proof that the era still existed. That the team which reached a Champions League final, which went unbeaten at White Hart Lane, which made Tottenham genuinely exciting to watch, had not fully dissolved. Now it has. And Roberto De Zerbi has arrived to build something that bears no resemblance to any of it.
We have now identified why this clean break is not only inevitable, but necessary.
The nostalgia was always holding Tottenham back
There is a reason Spurs Web’s own retrospective on that 2016/17 squad lands with such emotional weight. That team was extraordinary. Second in the Premier League, unbeaten at White Hart Lane in its final season, Harry Kane bagging 29 league goals, Dembele gliding through midfields. Toby Alderweireld himself called it a golden generation, and he was right.
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A Champions League win that year would have been one of the most remarkable achievements in the club’s history.
But that squad peaked in 2017. The 2018/19 Champions League final run was a last miracle, not a sign of strength. The squad had not been refreshed, the intensity Mauricio Pochettino demanded was costing the players physically, and the club’s refusal to invest properly was catching up fast.
As one forensic piece on SpursWeb puts it, Pochettino himself warned that “we are playing with the same players as three years ago.” His system needed roughly 20% annual renewal to stay sharp. It never got it.
The problem is that Spurs, as a club and as a fanbase, never really accepted that the era was over when Pochettino was sacked in November 2019. Instead, we spent years measuring every manager against his ghost.
Mourinho was not Poch. Nuno was not Poch. Conte was not Poch. Postecoglou felt, for one glorious October, like the spirit had returned. It had not. The nostalgia was not just harmless sentiment. It was actively clouding the club’s decision-making for the better part of a decade.
Ben Davies deserved better than being a symbol
None of this is a criticism of Ben Davies. The man gave Tottenham Hotspur everything. He played under seven managers across 12 years. He captained the side. He was an honest, loyal professional when the club around him was often a mess.
He deserved to lift a trophy long before the Europa League final in Bilbao, and when he finally got his medal as an unused substitute in 2025, it was impossible not to feel that justice had been done, however belatedly.
But the way the club kept extending his contract – triggering a one-year option in June 2025 to make him the longest-serving player in the squad – said as much about Tottenham’s institutional reluctance to let go of the past as it did about Davies’ undeniable value as a squad member. He was excellent in that role. He was also a reminder, every single week, of a chapter the club needed to close.
It remains to be seen whether his ankle injury means he has played his last game, but either way, the summer represents a natural ending point.
It would be wrong to reduce his legacy to a symbol. Davies was a footballer first, and a good one. But the fact that the club arrived at 2026 with the last Pochettino-era player still in the building tells its own story.
What the last six years actually cost us at Tottenham
Of course, romanticising the Mauricio Pochettino era at Tottenham is understandable. It was the most exciting sustained stretch of football most of us have watched in our lifetimes. But the honest assessment of what followed is less comfortable.
The club’s hierarchy interpreted reaching a Champions League final not as the ceiling of an overachieving squad, but as confirmation that Spurs were now a permanent fixture among Europe’s elite. That misreading led directly to Mourinho, to Nuno, to Conte, and to the squad that limped into the 2025/26 season sitting 14th in the Premier League by January 2026.
Three managers this season alone. Thomas Frank, who could not build on the Europa League win. Igor Tudor, who went 44 days without a Premier League victory. And then De Zerbi, appointed at the end of March with seven games remaining and Spurs one point above the drop zone.
We will not pretend the road that brought us here was anything other than a disaster. The 2018 transfer window that produced nothing, the managerial carousel, the absence of any coherent footballing identity for years on end these were structural failures, not bad luck. The nostalgia for Pochettino was a symptom of that. When you have no clear vision for what your club should look like, you retreat to the last time it felt right.
Why De Zerbi represents something different
What makes Roberto De Zerbi’s appointment genuinely exciting, even now, even in the shadow of a potential relegation battle, is that he is not being positioned as a stop-gap.
He has signed a five-year deal with no relegation clause. He has been handed significant influence over squad building, the kind of structural power no Spurs manager has had in a generation. And he has made it clear, publicly and unambiguously, that he is here to build something long-term – not to paper over another short-term crisis.
Speaking to Tottenham’s media after his appointment, De Zerbi said he wants to eventually see Spurs competing at the very top of the Premier League. “In my plan, for sure, there is the idea to stay for a long time,” he said. “To try to put Tottenham… in the first position in the Premier League because there are all the parts to reach that level.” That is not a man looking at the exit. That is a man with a vision.
De Zerbi’s style : possession-based, high-press, technically demanding, is closer in spirit to Pochettino’s football than anything we have seen in years. His first training sessions already focused on one and two-touch play.
Lucas Bergvall, Mathys Tel, Pape Matar Sarr – these are exactly the kind of young, dynamic players who thrive in that system. The clean break is not just a departure from a person. It is the beginning of an identity that makes sense again.
Is this the rebuild Spurs have needed for eight years?
It would be naive to ignore the risks. De Zerbi has a history of strong opinions on transfer activity and has clashed with club hierarchies before. The appointment was not universally welcomed by supporters either, with three supporters’ groups raising legitimate concerns about comments he made during his time at Marseille. The club addressed those concerns directly, but they will not disappear overnight.
And yet, if we step back from the short-term noise, the conditions for a genuine rebuild are better now than they have been since Mauricio Pochettino left Tottenham. A manager with real technical identity, a long contract, squad-building authority, and no pressure to produce results by Tuesday on pain of dismissal. A group of young players who could genuinely be the next generation.
And, finally, no more living connections to an era that defined us but also, for too long, paralysed us.
Ben Davies gave Tottenham Hotspur everything. When he walks out of the door this summer, we should thank him properly and without ambivalence. But we should also recognise what that moment means. The last thread tying us to 2014, to Pochettino’s first session, to that extraordinary white-knuckle run to Madrid, has finally come loose. That is a loss worth grieving.
It is also, finally, permission to move on.
