Divided squad, dreary football and why Daniel Levy snapped: the inside story of Jose Mourinho’s sacking

It was on the journey back from Goodison Park last Friday night that Daniel Levy made up his mind that it was no longer worth persevering with what ultimately became an expensive vanity project.

The Tottenham Hotspur chairman had wanted to work with Jose Mourinho for well over a decade before finally hiring him 17 months ago, so it is little wonder that it was Levy who was practically the last man inside Spurs to give up on him.

As far back as February, just a couple of months after Tottenham had topped the Premier League table, Levy was being told that it was time to consider making a change and ditching his Mourinho win-at-all-costs experiment.

There was concern that the style of football was not good enough and would not be accepted by Spurs supporters when they eventually return to stadiums, and that divisions had emerged between Mourinho and some of his players.

Initially, though, Levy was determined to ride the storm, still believing Mourinho could combine Champions League qualification, through the Premier League or by winning the Europa League, with a first trophy success for 13 years in the EFL Cup. 

As recently as two weeks ago, Levy had told close contacts that he was not planning to make a change before the end of the season. But, having watched Spurs toil to a draw with Everton that left them five points behind fourth-placed West Ham United ahead of Sunday’s final against Manchester City, he gave in.

West Ham’s slip at Newcastle has kept alive the smallest possibility that Spurs may yet push their way into the top four over their remaining six league games, with Levy adamant that the club, currently placed seventh, cannot accept finishing outside the top six. He will be relying on the psychological impact of Mourinho’s departure providing extra motivation for Sunday’s EFL final against City.

Tottenham last won the competition in 2008, which remains their last trophy success, when the club stood at a similar crossroads and decided to ignore the gap that had developed between their squad and the manager at the time, Juande Ramos.

Failure to qualify for the Champions League resulted in Spurs losing both Dimitar Berbatov and Robbie Keane the following summer and the bad run of results at the end of the season spilled into the start of the next campaign, forcing Levy to sack Ramos in October and draft in Harry Redknapp to clear up the mess.

As they did with Berbatov, Tottenham know they face a battle to convince Harry Kane that his future remains at the club and Levy would have been well aware that replacing Mourinho a few months into next season would be far more difficult than it is ahead of the summer.

By acting now, Levy will hope that he has given Tottenham, under caretaker manager Ryan Mason, the chance to save their campaign and build momentum that the next permanent head coach could benefit from next season.

Tottenham have denied that the timing of Mourinho’s sacking was in any way connected to the club’s participation in the European Super League breakaway, but the extra money generated from it would certainly soften the financial impact of sacking the former Chelsea and Real Madrid manager. It could also lift their chances of keeping Kane if he can be convinced that, along with competing in the top European competition in the future, Spurs can find a new head coach to help them to compete for silverware.

Mourinho had not lost the entire dressing-room, some of whom found out that he had been sacked after Telegraph Sport broke the news on Monday morning when they were still trying to get their heads around the ESL news. But the divisions have been there for all to see since the very first game of the season, when Mourinho substituted Dele Alli at half-time against Everton, a decision that shocked the former England international’s team-mates.

Other than Dele, at different moments, Mourinho has frozen out Danny Rose, Harry Winks, Steven Bergwijn, Serge Aurier and, perhaps most significantly, loan signing Gareth Bale, who did not come off the substitutes’ bench in the draw with Everton in front of Levy at Goodison Park.

Bale’s return had been driven by Levy and reluctantly accepted by Mourinho, whose decision to drop the Welshman after substituting him in the North London defeat to Arsenal went down badly. Bale had scored six goals in seven games before the trip to the Emirates, but he was dragged off after 57 minutes against Arsenal last month and has not started a game since.

Mourinho threw on Bale with half-an-hour remaining in what proved to be the most damaging result of his reign – the 3-0 defeat to Dinamo Zagreb that saw Tottenham crash out of the Europa League. Having won the competition on his two previous appearances in it, Mourinho was able to use potential qualification for the Champions League from the Europa League as a carrot to dangle in front of Levy, but, with that gone, there was little for Spurs to cling on to.

It was after the humiliation in Zagreb that captain Hugo Lloris laid bare the dissatisfaction and divisions within the squad that had already been hinted at when Aurier had left the Spurs stadium after being substituted at half-time against Liverpool in January.

Lloris said: “We are a club full of ambition, but the team at the moment is just a reflection of what is going on at the club. To behave as a team is the most difficult thing in football. Whatever the decision of the manager, you have to follow the way of the team. If you only follow the way of the team when you are in the starting XI it causes big problems for the team.”

But perhaps the words that will prove to be the epitaph on Mourinho’s time at Tottenham will be the statement that in many ways confirmed there was no way back for him.

“Same coach, different players,” was how Mourinho summed up Tottenham’s inability to hold on to a lead at Newcastle United. 

Ultimately, Levy decided on the same players, but a different coach.