The Igor Tudor era at Tottenham Hotspur begins this week with the Croatian tasked with turning the club away from the Premier League danger and carrying on their Champions League adventure next month.
Spurs have appointed the 47-year-old on a short-term deal until the end of the season to come in and fix the mess at the club which saw Thomas Frank sacked just seven months after being heralded as the man to transform things in a very different way. Tudor must pick up the pieces with the players, fans and club as disconnected as they have ever been and the 16th-placed Lilywhites sit perilously just five points above West Ham in 18th place in the Premier League.
The Croatian's first match is as big as they come in N17 with a north London derby on Sunday afternoon, as Mikel Arteta's title hopefuls make the short trip across the capital.
Tudor has plenty of challenges ahead and when he sat in his new office at Hotspur Way on Monday, after setting the names in his coaching staff, he will have found an in-tray spilling over across the desk. Here are just seven things that will be in amongst them on his to-do list.
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Get the confidence flowing
The Spurs players' confidence was on the floor under Frank. The Dane was a positive person but none of that seemed to transfer to the players, who just didn't look to have any inspiration towards the end of his tenure with just two wins in 17 Premier League matches.
However, when they return after a short break to training on Monday they will find a football firefighter in Tudor. This is certainly not new territory for him and he has gone into numerous clubs and quickly got a reaction from underperforming squads. The Croatian is able to manage big players and egos and make an immediate impact.
For instance, Tudor went into Udinese late in the season and helped them avoid relegation. They had been on a 10-game losing streak and he stopped them getting relegated for what would have been the first time in a quarter of a century. While it didn't get him the permanent job, Udinese came back cap in hand a year later to ask him to save them once more when they were a point off the drop zone and he duly kept them up again.
Those who have seen him operate say Tudor is very good at quickly working out how to maximise what he has at his disposal.
He also turned around Hellas Verona's season and took them to ninth place and his one campaign in France saw Marseille finish third behind PSG and Lens, although it's worth noting that Marseille got more points under him than they did in the previous season when they finished second. He improved them.
The list continues back in Italy in recent years. Tudor stabilized Lazio after Maurizio Sarri quit in March 2024 and his team were unbeaten in the league for his first two months after he joined. He won five of his nine games, losing just once, to secure a seventh-placed finish and Europa League qualification.
Then he went in at Juventus in March last year and his objective was to get them up the table and into the Champions League for the following season. He did just that as he led them to fourth place and Champions League qualification, losing just one of his 11 games in charge, and got himself a contract extension.
In fact both of those recent mid-season appointments at Lazio and Juventus brought exactly the same set of results - 9 games, 5 wins, three draws and one defeat. If he does that for Tottenham then all will be well in the world.
There can certainly be question marks about what happens for Tudor in the long-term at clubs but for this three-and-a-half month spell, he's got all the required tools to kick Spurs up the backside. Some will point to the lack of Premier League experience, but Thomas Frank had plenty of that and it did him no favours. Being an unknown quantity may favour the new man at the helm as opposition managers must figure out his style.
Entertain and get fans onside
It's fair to say that Tudor can't have a worse relationship with the Tottenham supporters than Frank did. For a variety of reasons, the Spurs faithful just never took to the Dane and by the end were booing his every move.
Tudor will not fear public opinion. Life managing Juventus with their passionate supporters and the media hysteria around them probably puts taking on the Tottenham job into context.
One weapon the new man will have is that his brand of football will be a bit more in keeping with Spurs' motto than his predecessor's safety-first, just don't lose mentality which ironically brought defeats aplenty. The Croatian will want to play aggressive, organised football on the front foot with plenty of physicality, with the wing-backs pressing high.
When Tudor joined Marseille four years ago he explained his football like this: "I want courageous and intensive football. Not solely based on the defence. I want people who come to the stadium to be entertained and not disappointed."
Some Italian football experts have said Tudor's football is more like basketball with the transitional play than normal Serie A football and it should get the Spurs fans out of their seats to get a better look rather than leaving them entirely to go home.
Frank also had plenty of missteps in his press conferences and that's something Tudor will need to avoid in the coming weeks and months. His English is very good and you would not imagine a former Juventus boss promising that the team will lose matches. Steer away from that and he should have the backing of the fans.
Fix the defence
For all the talk that Frank was going to fix Ange Postecoglou's leaky defence, the Dane didn't and he had Cristian Romero and Micky van de Ven available for much of his tenure, unlike his predecessor.
Tudor will be without Romero for the next three matches of his suspension but his past as a tough-tackling international centre-back at Juventus should serve him well to get a response out of the back line and respect from the likes of the skipper.
He prefers to play with a back three and it will be key how he manages that without the required numbers right now with Van de Ven and Radu Dragusin the only fit and available senior centre-backs at the club.
Arsenal will face a stern test in his first game with just six days to prepare the backline for what he wants them to do but the initial foundations will be laid in these coming days.
Fix the attack
Spurs going forward under Frank were a huge disappointment. His final match against Newcastle showed little in the way of attacking patterns of play or passing triangles after seven months of training sessions at Hotspur Way.
The bar was so low in recent weeks that even simply getting near the opposition goal felt like a positive rather than the bare minimum it should be. Tottenham have scored 14 fewer goals in the Premier League than they had at this stage last season and they have fewer points.
So Tudor must get Spurs' attack firing again and he must do it with a lack of players after Wilson Odobert's season was ended with his ACL injury against Newcastle. The new man has very few options to work with after the club failed to bring any new attacking help through the doors in the winter transfer window.
One currently available player who could be rejuvenated is Randal Kolo Muani, who netted five times and provided one assist in 11 appearances under Tudor at the end of that season at Juventus as he and the Croatian helped push the Old Lady into the top four.
Mathys Tel will need to become more important after being pretty much discarded by Frank for much of the season and Tudor can tap into the young Frenchman's hunger to impress.
Tudor prefers a 3-4-2-1 formation which should get the best out of Xavi Simons but it might take some adapting for Tel and Kolo Muani unless Conor Gallagher takes the other number 10 spot, allowing for options to change the attack from the bench. Richarlison was also due back around this time according to Frank's last update on the Brazilian.
Visit the treatment room
Tudor will have come into this job knowing full well how atrocious Tottenham's injury record is once again this season. They ended the match against Newcastle with 11 injured players out of action after Odobert went off and a 12th missing person in the suspended Romero.
For the new interim boss it will be key to forge a quick relationship with the medical and performance departments and understand when the next group of players will be returning to the training pitches.
Richarlison and Pedro Porro were meant to be the next cabs off the rank, to use Postecoglou's terminology, while Kevin Danso and Destiny Udogie were termed as weeks rather than months. All four can be key for Tudor with Spurs needing Porro's creativity in particular as a right wing-back.
April could be the busiest month for longer-term returnees such as Mohammed Kudus, Lucas Bergvall, Rodrigo Bentancur and at a push James Maddison, while Ben Davies' return date is currently unclear.
There is also the latest on Dejan Kulusevski to ascertain with Frank admitting to football.london last week that he could no longer be sure if the Swede would be back playing this season after his complicated knee injury.
For Tudor, being as transparent as he possibly can with injuries will be a quick way to win over the fans after Frank's often vague updates.
Sort the discipline
This season's toils are not all on the manager as the players must also bear a hefty portion of the responsibility for Spurs' current woes.
There seemed to be discipline issues both on and off the pitch and that comes down to the players as much as the staff. In the Premier League alone, Tottenham have more yellow cards than any other team with 64 of them and the joint third-highest number of red cards with three.
You had players ignoring Frank's requests at times, a captain who is approaching his fifth suspension of the season and players turning up late for training at times.
Tudor will not take any such nonsense from the players. He knows that continuing down that path of ill discipline will only lead to big trouble and he is a man who demands full respect for the cause.
Whether his background demands more respect from the players than Frank appeared to get will soon be shown. Spurs need a leader right now because they are lacking them on the pitch.
Tudor's discipline will be reflected in who he selects. There will be a lot of running and pressing required in his team and if you don't do that, he won't pick you in the starting line-up. Squad availability is not on his side but that leads us to the last thing in our own in-tray.
Trust the youth
One of the 10 key criteria that Frank was said to have ticked to get the job in the first place was putting faith in young academy players but in end he did no such thing at Spurs.
He would use the established senior teenagers like Archie Gray and Lucas Bergvall, although not as often when he had a fuller squad, but there has been no real pathway for the academy players to do much other than sit on the bench and watch. It was only out of desperation for numbers that Jun'ai Byfield got his debut and shone.
Tudor will need more centre-backs if he is to play with a back three and that means Byfield could get more minutes and the interim boss also needs more attacking options, which could finally see another two 17-year-olds get their opportunities in the Premier League in Luca Williams-Barnett and Tynan Thompson.
All three are very young but all of them are also very talented. It's not the ideal time to throw youngsters into the fray but sometimes that's when you find out who sinks or swims. For Tottenham, it could be a case of Tudor is to do.
