Mousa Dembele was the lynchpin of Pochettino’s Tottenham and made the whole system work
Harry Kane was the best player for the Tottenham side built by Mauricio Pochettino’s Tottenham, Christian Eriksen was the cleverest and Dele Alli — who left Spurs last week — was the man who embodied the exciting qualities of the side.
But the most important? That has to be Mousa Dembele, the unique genius in the middle of the pitch, who confirmed his forthcoming retirement on Tuesday morning.
Dembele was the man who made the whole Pochettino system work.
The essence of Pochettino’s “positional game” is structure. Players have to be in the right place to move the ball through the opposition.
Even more important than that, Pochettino’s players have to be in the right places in possession, so that when they lose the ball, they can press to win it straight back. That structure they have with the ball is the structure they need without it. You defend as well as you attack, as Pochettino would say, not the other way round.
And how did Tottenham maintain their structure in the Pochettino years? By giving the ball to Dembele.
He was a remarkable player in many ways but the most important skill he had — the one he could do better than anyone else in the game — was to retain the ball under pressure and still find another white shirt in space ahead of him. By holding onto the ball like that, just for a second or two, Dembele allowed the rest of his Spurs team-mates to get back into their positions. And for the whole team to return to its correct shape, ready to pass through their opponents, or press if they had to.
This made Dembele far more important than any other Spurs player. He was not just responsible for his own actions, but for the functioning of the whole system. He was the mainspring of the clockwork, the keystone of the arch, the rug that tied the room together.
Pochettino knew this better than anyone. When Dembele started the 2016-17 season with a suspension hanging over him from the “Battle of the Bridge“, Pochettino wryly joked: “Without Mousa Dembele, we do not exist. Tottenham does not exist.” (Contrast this with Pochettino’s anger when Pep Guardiola described Spurs as the “Harry Kane team”, and the fact that Spurs were often able to keep playing well with Son Heung-min up front when Kane was injured.)
For a sense of how indispensable Dembele was, just look at Spurs’ record over the 2015-16 and 2016-17 seasons when he was at his physical peak. Over those two years, the only league games that Dembele started and that Spurs still lost were away at Old Trafford, Stamford Bridge and Anfield. With him in the team, they were almost unstoppable.
Remember any of the big wins under Pochettino, they all had Dembele at the heart of it, taking the ball from the defence, holding off one opponent, rolling away from another, inscrutably clever, unmatchably strong, passing the ball forward to Eriksen or Dele or Kane just as soon as his team-mates had got into position. This is how he set the tempo and formed the structure of this Spurs team and made them as good as they were.
What made those peak years of Dembele so impressive was the fact that they represented such an improvement on his first few years at Spurs. Tottenham paid Fulham £15 million for Dembele in August 2012 (the summer when Andre Villas-Boas replaced Harry Redknapp), but it was far from clear that Tottenham had a plan for how to use his talents. For many fans, Dembele was like Paulinho: not a bad player, but not an obvious fit at Spurs.
It took the arrival of Pochettino in 2014 for Spurs to plot a way to use Dembele, but even then, it was far from instant. Dembele only started 10 league games in 2014-15 as he struggled with injuries. Pochettino preferred Ryan Mason (29 league starts) and Nabil Bentaleb (25 starts) in central midfield. Those two could give Spurs the physical dynamism that Dembele could not.
So it was only during Pochettino’s second season that Dembele started to look like the player he would then become. He was stronger, sharper, more consistent and far more influential to what Tottenham did. He finally had a clear role in the team. And Pochettino was full of praise for his assistant Jesus Perez and the rest of his coaching staff for getting Dembele fit and ready to play his football.
Pochettino hailed Dembele as one of the five “genius players” whom he has ever worked with, along with Diego Maradona, Ronaldinho, Jay-Jay Okocha and Ivan de la Pena. Pochettino first used the word “genius” about Dembele after a brilliant display through injury at the Emirates in November 2016. But in those same comments, Pochettino said how much he wished he had started working with Dembele from the age of 18 or 19, and that if he had, Dembele would have been one of the best players in the world. (Dembele turned 27 in the summer Pochettino took over at Spurs.)
It is tempting to wonder just how good Dembele might have been had he got to work with Pochettino for longer. By Pochettino’s fourth year at Spurs, Dembele was already starting to decline physically.
Dembele was the key player in Pochettino’s Tottenham side (Photo: Tony Marshall/Getty Images)
Dembele had a remarkable run of games in early 2018, against Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal and Juventus, maybe the last time that he proved himself able to dominate games against top opposition. Like many great midfielders, it was only at this point, after this actual peak, that Dembele started to get the respect he deserved for his performances. But equally, it was clear by the end of the 2017-18 season that he was on the decline. His performance in a very disappointing FA Cup semi-final defeat to Manchester United was proof of that.
In the summer of 2018, Dembele thought it might be time to leave Spurs, and that one more season of Pochettino football might be beyond him. There was talk of a move to China but ultimately that was delayed. Dembele started the season with Spurs but was not a regular. His last action as a Tottenham player came when he limped off in a game at Molineux on November 3, 2018. Two months later, he joined Guangzhou R&F.
In a recent interview with The Athletic, Kieran Trippier bemoaned the fact that Spurs sold Dembele that January. “In the dressing room, he was an unbelievable person and all the lads loved him but on the pitch, he was the kind of player who would make a couple of per cent difference,” Trippier said. “That’s what wins you things. It baffled me that they would sell him. He was the difference between winning a trophy or not.”
That view is certainly not unique to Trippier either. Speak to any Tottenham player and they will gush praise about Dembele — his intelligence and presence in the dressing room, his performances in training, his rare mix of physical power and technical precision. He was the lynchpin of Pochettino’s Tottenham on and off the pitch.
Now, you may disagree with Trippier’s analysis of what difference Dembele would have made had he stayed for the second half of the 2018-19 season. Dembele did not start that season well and we cannot tell if he would have improved over time. Equally, whether Spurs would have been better or worse with Dembele than with Moussa Sissoko and a patched-up Victor Wanyama for those historic Champions League wins against Manchester City and Ajax is just completely unknowable.
But what Trippier’s comments do tell us is the reverence his team-mates had for Dembele, something that was shared with the coaching staff too. Pochettino knew how hard it would be to find a new Dembele. which explains in part why they took such a big risk signing Tanguy Ndombele from Lyon that summer.
It was three years ago last month that Dembele was sold to China. Three years in which Spurs have had five managers (if you count Mason), lost two finals, finished fourth, sixth then seventh, and given the strong impression at times that they had lost their identity on and off the pitch. And for all the time that we spend talking about the various players, coaches and officials Spurs have had in that time, nobody was more important to Pochettino plans on the pitch than the man who is about to retire.
Mousa Dembele was the lynchpin of Pochettino’s Tottenham and made the whole system work
Harry Kane was the best player for the Tottenham side built by Mauricio Pochettino’s Tottenham, Christian Eriksen was the cleverest and Dele Alli — who left Spurs last week — was the man who embodied the exciting qualities of the side.
But the most important? That has to be Mousa Dembele, the unique genius in the middle of the pitch, who confirmed his forthcoming retirement on Tuesday morning.
Dembele was the man who made the whole Pochettino system work.
The essence of Pochettino’s “positional game” is structure. Players have to be in the right place to move the ball through the opposition.
Even more important than that, Pochettino’s players have to be in the right places in possession, so that when they lose the ball, they can press to win it straight back. That structure they have with the ball is the structure they need without it. You defend as well as you attack, as Pochettino would say, not the other way round.
And how did Tottenham maintain their structure in the Pochettino years? By giving the ball to Dembele.
He was a remarkable player in many ways but the most important skill he had — the one he could do better than anyone else in the game — was to retain the ball under pressure and still find another white shirt in space ahead of him. By holding onto the ball like that, just for a second or two, Dembele allowed the rest of his Spurs team-mates to get back into their positions. And for the whole team to return to its correct shape, ready to pass through their opponents, or press if they had to.
This made Dembele far more important than any other Spurs player. He was not just responsible for his own actions, but for the functioning of the whole system. He was the mainspring of the clockwork, the keystone of the arch, the rug that tied the room together.
Pochettino knew this better than anyone. When Dembele started the 2016-17 season with a suspension hanging over him from the “Battle of the Bridge“, Pochettino wryly joked: “Without Mousa Dembele, we do not exist. Tottenham does not exist.” (Contrast this with Pochettino’s anger when Pep Guardiola described Spurs as the “Harry Kane team”, and the fact that Spurs were often able to keep playing well with Son Heung-min up front when Kane was injured.)
For a sense of how indispensable Dembele was, just look at Spurs’ record over the 2015-16 and 2016-17 seasons when he was at his physical peak. Over those two years, the only league games that Dembele started and that Spurs still lost were away at Old Trafford, Stamford Bridge and Anfield. With him in the team, they were almost unstoppable.
Remember any of the big wins under Pochettino, they all had Dembele at the heart of it, taking the ball from the defence, holding off one opponent, rolling away from another, inscrutably clever, unmatchably strong, passing the ball forward to Eriksen or Dele or Kane just as soon as his team-mates had got into position. This is how he set the tempo and formed the structure of this Spurs team and made them as good as they were.
What made those peak years of Dembele so impressive was the fact that they represented such an improvement on his first few years at Spurs. Tottenham paid Fulham £15 million for Dembele in August 2012 (the summer when Andre Villas-Boas replaced Harry Redknapp), but it was far from clear that Tottenham had a plan for how to use his talents. For many fans, Dembele was like Paulinho: not a bad player, but not an obvious fit at Spurs.
It took the arrival of Pochettino in 2014 for Spurs to plot a way to use Dembele, but even then, it was far from instant. Dembele only started 10 league games in 2014-15 as he struggled with injuries. Pochettino preferred Ryan Mason (29 league starts) and Nabil Bentaleb (25 starts) in central midfield. Those two could give Spurs the physical dynamism that Dembele could not.
So it was only during Pochettino’s second season that Dembele started to look like the player he would then become. He was stronger, sharper, more consistent and far more influential to what Tottenham did. He finally had a clear role in the team. And Pochettino was full of praise for his assistant Jesus Perez and the rest of his coaching staff for getting Dembele fit and ready to play his football.
Pochettino hailed Dembele as one of the five “genius players” whom he has ever worked with, along with Diego Maradona, Ronaldinho, Jay-Jay Okocha and Ivan de la Pena. Pochettino first used the word “genius” about Dembele after a brilliant display through injury at the Emirates in November 2016. But in those same comments, Pochettino said how much he wished he had started working with Dembele from the age of 18 or 19, and that if he had, Dembele would have been one of the best players in the world. (Dembele turned 27 in the summer Pochettino took over at Spurs.)
It is tempting to wonder just how good Dembele might have been had he got to work with Pochettino for longer. By Pochettino’s fourth year at Spurs, Dembele was already starting to decline physically.
Dembele was the key player in Pochettino’s Tottenham side (Photo: Tony Marshall/Getty Images)
Dembele had a remarkable run of games in early 2018, against Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal and Juventus, maybe the last time that he proved himself able to dominate games against top opposition. Like many great midfielders, it was only at this point, after this actual peak, that Dembele started to get the respect he deserved for his performances. But equally, it was clear by the end of the 2017-18 season that he was on the decline. His performance in a very disappointing FA Cup semi-final defeat to Manchester United was proof of that.
In the summer of 2018, Dembele thought it might be time to leave Spurs, and that one more season of Pochettino football might be beyond him. There was talk of a move to China but ultimately that was delayed. Dembele started the season with Spurs but was not a regular. His last action as a Tottenham player came when he limped off in a game at Molineux on November 3, 2018. Two months later, he joined Guangzhou R&F.
In a recent interview with The Athletic, Kieran Trippier bemoaned the fact that Spurs sold Dembele that January. “In the dressing room, he was an unbelievable person and all the lads loved him but on the pitch, he was the kind of player who would make a couple of per cent difference,” Trippier said. “That’s what wins you things. It baffled me that they would sell him. He was the difference between winning a trophy or not.”
That view is certainly not unique to Trippier either. Speak to any Tottenham player and they will gush praise about Dembele — his intelligence and presence in the dressing room, his performances in training, his rare mix of physical power and technical precision. He was the lynchpin of Pochettino’s Tottenham on and off the pitch.
Now, you may disagree with Trippier’s analysis of what difference Dembele would have made had he stayed for the second half of the 2018-19 season. Dembele did not start that season well and we cannot tell if he would have improved over time. Equally, whether Spurs would have been better or worse with Dembele than with Moussa Sissoko and a patched-up Victor Wanyama for those historic Champions League wins against Manchester City and Ajax is just completely unknowable.
But what Trippier’s comments do tell us is the reverence his team-mates had for Dembele, something that was shared with the coaching staff too. Pochettino knew how hard it would be to find a new Dembele. which explains in part why they took such a big risk signing Tanguy Ndombele from Lyon that summer.
It was three years ago last month that Dembele was sold to China. Three years in which Spurs have had five managers (if you count Mason), lost two finals, finished fourth, sixth then seventh, and given the strong impression at times that they had lost their identity on and off the pitch. And for all the time that we spend talking about the various players, coaches and officials Spurs have had in that time, nobody was more important to Pochettino plans on the pitch than the man who is about to retire.
