Mauricio Pochettino taps into players' inner child and Tottenham are moving in different directions to Arsenal as a result

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Ossie Ardiles is a regular in the manager’s office at Tottenham Hotspur’s training ground, but Mauricio Pochettino recently hosted another legend of Argentine football to discuss his views on the game. Jorge Valdano was in town and conversation turned to why Pochettino kept a football on his desk.

The answer goes to the heart of what has made Pochettino such an effective manager and why his Tottenham team play with so much zip and vigour.

In Pochettino’s mind, no-one can ever love football as much as they do when they start playing, at the age of four, five or six. That peak of football-enthusiasm, when you fall in love with the ball itself, is the fuel for every football career. That is how Pochettino looks back on his own childhood, growing up in Argentina.

“The feeling, the emotion when you are a kid and you start to play football, you feel full of happiness,” he said recently. “I felt this passion for the ball, and all my motivation in was to play football.”

But as players grow up, life gets in the way. “With the evolution of life, we strive for different things, and you start to lose that priority,” he said at the launch of his book ‘Brave New World’. “But the moment players lose that priority – the priority of the ball – you stop feeling what you felt when you were a child, that motivation to play, and you cannot perform. You can stay on the pitch, but you cannot translate nothing, to the fans, to your team-mates, or the people that trust in you. And you go in another direction.”

Pochettino’s trick, his whole mission as a manager, is to connect his players with that same feeling they had when they first kicked a ball around in the garden as boys. So, as he explained to Valdano, when the players come into his office for a chat – as they often do – he throws them the ball. So they can touch it, remember their childhoods, and “recover that feeling” they used to have. “Because that feeling must be your priority in life.”

Of course that particular area is just a small part of the complex fabric of science, charisma, spirituality and meticulous detailed planning that makes up Pochettino’s management. But there is no doubt that it works: Dele Alli, Harry Kane and Christian Eriksen all play with that youthful buzz and verve that Pochettino tries to attune them to.

Saturday afternoon Pochettino takes his Tottenham team down the road to the Emirates. For years Arsenal had the narrow edge over Spurs. They just finished one point ahead of Spurs in 2015-16, but last season Spurs pulled away, racking up 11 more points, their first finish ahead of Arsenal in 22 years. This year Spurs are on top again.

It is hard to get past Pochettino as the reason for this turnaround. And harder still to avoid the obvious comparisons between his ambitious management of Tottenham and the stagnant reign of Arsene Wenger. This Arsenal team have long lost any sense of direction, energy or purpose, all of the qualities Pochettino has instilled at Spurs.

Arsenal’s two best players, Alexis Sanchez and Mesut Ozil, are leaving at the end of the season, if not before. They have talented youngsters, like Hector Bellerin and Alex Iwobi, but can there be any doubt those two would be better players if they were at Spurs?

Of course Pochettino was pointedly respectful of Wenger when he spoke in his press conference on Thursday afternoon. He said that what marked Wenger out was his ability to innovate and stay ahead of his rivals for so long. “Wenger was an innovator, he was ahead of everyone, like Sir Alex Ferguson was,” Pochettino said. “It is difficult to innovate in football, but you must try to innovate every season, to create a project where your ideas and philosophy go ahead of other clubs. And he does.”

But the evidence of the last few years at Arsenal, as the team stands still while its rivals move ahead, is that Wenger has long ceased to do that. Up against the next generation of coaches – not just Pochettino but Antonio Conte, Jurgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola – Wenger’s team, and by extension his methods, look passé. And the fact that Pochettino speaks so enthusiastically about his “respect and admiration” for Wenger, in contrast to leaving a foot in on Guardiola over his “Harry Kane team” line, or digs at Klopp and Antonio Conte, shows who he is more motivated to beat.

Wenger, at his own press conference on Thursday morning, was asked whether he saw Spurs as now superior to his own. He said no, of course, and that his team could prove as much on the pitch. Arsenal have still not lost to Pochettino’s Spurs at the Emirates, and until they do, Arsenal cannot be said to have been fully overturned.

“Today, people always take one situation and say it’s permanent,” said Wenger, implying that the trends of the last three years could be about to reverse. “The judgement is definite, permanent and forever. But life is movement. It is down to us to change the opinions of people with our performances. How can I respond to that perception? Not by me talking here. We need to show on Saturday that it's not true.”

This Arsenal team are capable of playing well and beating better teams, as they showed in the FA Cup semi-final and final last season. They could conceivably beat Spurs tomorrow too. But these two teams are moving in opposite directions, because of their managers, as Pochettino taps into his players’ inner child, and Wenger does not.