During the days when Mauricio Pochettino was still feeling his way into the English language, he saw the chance to pull out an idiom beside the pitch at Turf Moor. He could hear his opposite number effing and blinding in the other technical area, swearing at everything and nothing as managers do, and thought he would try a mild interjection of his own.
“Sean Dyche was on the touchline: ‘Fucking this, fucking that’,” he says. “At one moment I turned to him and said: ‘Fuck off, Sean. Hey, Sean: fuck off’.”
Pochettino’s own staff let him know that he had gone in a little too strong and he quickly apologised. “I thought I was saying: ‘Shut up’, he says, explaining that he had the Spanish expletive hijo de puta, which carries slightly less impact, in mind at the time.
It is not the kind of mistake you make twice and Pochettino, who reached the sixth anniversary of his time in England on Friday, rarely wants for clarity these days. He believes he has developed every aspect of his being since – with the persuasion of his wife, Karina, and assistant Jesús Pérez – he accepted the former Southampton chairman Nicola Cortese’s offer to join the south-coast club in 2013.
“I think [I’ve made a] massive improvement,” he says. “I learn a lot; I hope to learn more. I think we discovered a different culture, a different country, [which was] so far [away that] it was impossible for me to know how you live, how you feel, how is your culture. I think personally and professionally it is a massive improvement.”
On Sunday afternoon his Tottenham side visit Fulham and it is another chance to show that the sense of advancement has worked both ways. What few people knew about Pochettino when he arrived on these shores was the extent to which he is a developmental coach, a manager who believes in improving his existing resources rather than stockpiling more.
“Of course, you always need money because it’s going to help you,” he says. “But football is about chapters, periods, projects: you need to say: ‘I want to achieve that after three years, that after five years, that after 10 years.’ And not all the people have that open mind to be patient and back that kind of project.
“It’s like now at Tottenham, because we suffer the injury to Harry Kane and Son [Heung-min] was going to the Asian Cup [people say] we need to change our philosophy. No! Now is the time to be stronger and to believe in the strategy. If we’re scared of the circumstance, we’re going to lose. If we puff out our chest and are positive, we can take an amazing chance to show we are a real team that is going to open the door for young players in the academy. But if we change the strategy because of the circumstance, we are going to fail for sure in the long term.”
That is essentially why Kane will be replaced in-house at Fulham, with Dele Alli a contender to play the false-nine role and the academy forward Kazaiah Sterling in line for a place on the bench.
Pochettino believes the merit of tapping into the person behind the footballer is underestimated in coaching and puts special emphasis on the need not to treat players like two-dimensional cut-outs. “It’s [about] spending time,” he says.
“You can spend time analysing your opponents, or you can spend time analysing opponents and giving your time to these young people, the players in your squad, to try to understand how they think, how they live, what they need. Then, if you really know these people, you can provide better tools to improve and be better and to help in their development.
“The worst thing as a human being is to underestimate the people in front of you. You always need to think that the people in front of you are the most clever people.”
Pochettino was steeped in the blood and thunder of the Argentinian league, which was a no-holds-barred environment on and off the pitch when he emerged as a player with Newell’s Old Boys in the early 1990s. It is perhaps why he speaks with so much feeling about the need to balance passion and technocracy.
“The key point, as it was for Sir Alex Ferguson at Manchester United, is man management,” he says. “At the end, human skills are going to be the most important. And then we are talking about technology, machines, data: they don’t feel anything. They are like the furniture. We are talking about the real human. We need to breathe, we need to feel the love, we need emotion. Football is a contest of emotion. If we forget that, we are going to kill the game.”
The suspicion is that, verbal volleys or not, Dyche would have agreed with him that afternoon in Burnley.