The unbelievable XI that Tottenham would have now if they’d listened to Mauricio Pochettino | OneFootball

The Mauricio Pochettino era provided Tottenham fans with memories they’ll never forget, but it comes tinged with regret.

The Argentinian coach built what was comfortably the club’s best team of the modern era, finishing above Arsenal for six straight years, but they famously failed to lift any silverware.

Looking back, the board failing to back the manager and continue to build can be start of the start of a decline that now sees the club unthinkably battling relegation.

We’ve put together a full XI that Tottenham might have ended up with had they landed their major transfer targets in the Pochettino era.

GK: Hugo Lloris

Lloris had his critics, but there’s little to suggest that Pochettino wouldn’t have retained his faith in him had he remained at Tottenham.

He only left Spurs in 2024, outlasting his old boss by five years, eventually going to MLS after being frozen out by Ange Postecoglou.

Who knows the tack the club would’ve taken had Pochettino been around to oversee a wholesale rebuild.

We can easily have imagined him linking up with another World Cup winner, his compatriot Emiliano Martinez, but that’s purely speculation.

RB: Achraf Hakimi

Pochettino revealed that he’d tried to sign Hakimi, now widely regarded as the best right-back in world football, when he eventually got to work with the Morocco international at PSG.

“Achraf is a young player [I have] been following since [I was] at Tottenham,” Pochettino told reporters back in 2021.

“We were on the edge of signing him for Tottenham, but then he went to play for Dortmund.

“He has a great capacity to run, his physical potential is huge. He is young, he’s maturing at the defensive level, but he makes a lot of contributions in attack.”

CB: Malang Sarr

Bit of a weird one, this.

Sarr and Pochettino have had an awkward relationship during their time together at Chelsea. It’s said that the coach incensed the French defender after an Ancelotti-esque ‘Who?’ in a press conference.

“I felt like smashing everything up when he said that because I know what’s going on behind my back…” Sarr reflected on the incident, speaking on a podcast.

“He’s doing it on purpose. I know he knows me. It’s impossible he didn’t know me.”

Sarr went on to claim that Pochettino tried to sign him at Spurs back in the day:

“Look who’s here, we tried to sign him at Tottenham, and now we are working together here!” he alleged Pochettino told him when they linked up at Cobham. We’ll take his word for it.

The centre-back never settled at Chelsea, but he’s found his feet back in France, playing a key role in a Lens side full of ex-Premier League misfits who have surprisingly pushed PSG in the Ligue 1 title race this season.

CB: William Saliba

In fairness, you can’t say that Pochettino wasn’t listened to with this one.

Tottenham did move to try and hijack Arsenal’s deal to sign Saliba back in 2019, when he was a highly-rated teenager at Saint-Etienne.

At the time, Spurs could offer Champions League football and Arsenal could not. They’d finished a point ahead of their North London rivals to nab fourth place the season prior. But still the rising star chose the Gunners.

In hindsight, this can be seen as a key moment in the trajectories of both clubs ever since. How different might things have been had Spurs really pushed the boat out and mounted a serious enough offer for Saliba to have changed his mind?

LB: Ryan Sessegnon

We don’t need to speculate about the position of left-back. It was one of the few areas that the club actually invested in during Pochettino’s latter years.

But an early injury denied the highly-rated teenager a chance to work under the manager who signed him.

“He [Pochettino] was a big part of me coming to the club,” Sessegnon said at the time.

“I knew they had been watching me for a while and to finally come to the club and play under him was a dream come true. Then, for him to go suddenly after not working with him at all was disappointing. It’s part of the game and I’m just trying to work and improve under the new manager.”

After looking like a top prospect in the Championship, he never really kicked on or nailed down a place under Pochettino’s string of successors.

He’s now back at Fulham and proving himself a decent enough Premier League full-back, but in another life he stayed injury-free, developed under Pochettino and became a serious, top-level player.

DM: Youri Tielemans

“Tottenham are no longer recognisable as the team that Mauricio Pochettino built,” read a headline in The Telegraph, published shortly before Pochettino’s sacking in September 2019.

All the pressing and intensity that was a hallmark of Spurs at their best under the Argentinian had dissipated, while marquee signing Ndombele struggled to adapt to the structure and tactical demands.

Mousa Dembele hadn’t been adequately replaced, Victor Wanyama had dropped off a cliff, and the midfield looked the area most glaringly in need of restoration.

Scouring through the archives, it’s actually difficult to find Spurs linked with too many game-changing midfield signings that would’ve ushered them into a glorious new era.

Tielemans would’ve been an interesting one, though. Tottenham registered interest in the Belgian back in January 2019, but he moved to Leicester instead.

Might he have made a difference when things grew so stagnant in Poch’s final year?

CM: Donny van de Beek

Hey, we didn’t say all of Pochettino’s transfer targets were going to be hits, did we?

Given the midfielder’s struggles at Manchester United, and his completely forgettable loan stints at Everton and Eintracht Frankfurt, we can safely mark this one down under ‘bullet dodged’.

But you never know. Van de Beek was widely considered one of the most promising young midfielders in Europe after the starring role he played in Ajax’s unforgettable run to the Champions League semi-finals in 2018-19.

Had Pochettino got his hands on him, as he’d reportedly tried to in the summer of 2019, then perhaps his career would’ve gone on a completely different path.

We’ve seen countless players chewed up and spat out at Old Trafford. Maybe he’d have had better luck with injuries, although with Tottenham’s medical team that’s far from a given.

FWR: Son Heung-min

It’s approaching seven years since Daniel Levy made the controversial decision to sack Pochettino, just months after he led them to the Champions League final.

So in this counterfactual, it’s a bit tricky. Son is now 33 and enjoying a well-earned victory lap out in the California sunshine, having departed Spurs after captaining them to Europa League glory last season.

At the time, there was never really a question of signing a right-sided forward because upgrading on the South Korean was nigh-on unthinkable.

As with Lloris, we’re sure other potential successors would’ve been mooted as he began slowing down, but really – like Harry Kane – there’s a sense of frustration he didn’t play alongside players of a similar level in his peak years.

CAM: Bruno Fernandes

Here’s the big one.

“The first club that was close to signing me was Tottenham,” Fernandes revealed, speaking on Instagram Live back in 2020.

“With Pochettino…But I don’t know maybe they thought the amount Sporting wanted was too much so in that moment Sporting decide they don’t want to sell.

“Tottenham came in the summer but Manchester [United] was in January. Maybe Tottenham came again in January but when I knew Manchester was interested I just wanted to talk to Manchester.

“At that time [last summer] it was Tottenham that was closer to me. There was other teams from France, one team from the Spanish league but for me when I talked the first team was Manchester.”

That means the summer of 2019, Pochettino’s last transfer window when Tottenham were crying out for freshening up. They signed Tanguy Ndombele, Jack Clarke and Ryan Sessegnon.

Imagine Fernandes feeding Kane. Things could have been so different.

FWL: Jack Grealish

Grealish was said to be “disappointed and disillusioned” after Tottenham saw a reported £25million bid rebuffed by Aston Villa in the summer of 2018.

He was tearing up the Championship at the time and really coming into his own. He continued to be linked with a move to Spurs in the coming years as he inspired Villa to promotion and established himself as a Premier League superstar, eventually moving to Manchester City for £100million.

It’s easy to look at Grealish now and turn your nose up, but he was an important player in City’s 2022-23 treble.

You can imagine Pochettino being exactly the kind of arm-around-the-shoulder coach he needed to fulfil his potential and become the confident, dazzling world-beater that always looked in his destiny during his prime England and Villa days.

Pochettino has also mentioned Sadio Mane among the names that he tried and failed to sign while at Tottenham. Maybe not in 2026, but he’d have been incredible had Spurs beaten Liverpool to his signature a decade ago.

ST: Harry Kane

There’s a prevailing sentiment on social media that Kane, now chasing the Ballon d’Or as the main man in a truly elite team, will regret all the years he’d spent some way off that at Tottenham.

He was 30 when he signed for Bayern Munich and spent his entire twenties without silverware. But it shouldn’t be forgotten that he was once challenging for Premier League titles and reaching Champions League finals under Pochettino at Spurs.

Being his boyhood club’s all-time top goalscorer isn’t nothing, either – just ask Alan Shearer what that means.

The England captain is thriving and seems to be loving life in Munich, but you’d imagine his ideal scenario would have been having a team at that level at the club that made him.

It wasn’t to be, of course, and their post-Pochettino decline made his departure inevitable – but there’s an alternative reality in which they kept Pochettino, built this superteam, and he stayed to captain them to trophies.