Reasons behind Tottenham dropping Fonseca revealed – Manager feels ‘betrayed’ by Paratici

Tottenham very rarely do things the easy way, and their hunt for a replacement for Jose Mourinho has gone the exactly as many feared.

Once close to Antonio Conte, that move fell down quickly before moving onto Paulo Fonseca.

A deal for the Portuguese coach appeared to be tied up and ready to go when, all of a sudden that had collapsed, and Gennaro Gattuso was suddenly the frontrunner.

That has likewise fallen by the wayside, leaving Tottenham to start the search afresh, with Fonseca and Gattuso 100% out of the running.

We’re yet to know what exactly happened with Fonseca, but Calciomercato have stepped forward today to fill that informational hole.

They explain that as far as Fonseca is concerned, he had an ‘understanding’ to become Tottenham’s new manager via a ‘verbal agreement’ .

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That was with Daniel Levy and Fabio Paratici, and the former Roma boss had even held a meeting with the latter to talk about the transfer market and how to rebuild the team moving forwards.

It was at that meeting that the ‘first differences arose’.

Rather than a ‘fiscal or contractual’ issue, it was planning that caused them to separate, with Fonseca left feeling ‘betrayed’. 

While Fonseca intended to create an attacking team, with only a small part of the budget allocated to the defence, Paratici wants the opposite.

He’d prefers a ‘more conservative’ team with a ‘great focus on the backline’, and that was the first difference between him and Fonseca, albeit not ‘insurmountable’.

What it did do, however, was open the door for more issues to come to the fore.

While Fonseca was willing to accept Tottenham’s demands over his staff – Spurs didn’t want him to bring most of his associates from Roma, he could accept other demands.

One of these was on an announcement date, with him ready to start working from July 5^th and not wait until July 10^th when he would lose ‘some of the benefits’ of Italy’s taxation laws.

The insinuation is that Tottenham wanted him to wait, although that is not made explicitly clear.

Either way, following the summit with Paratici in Milan, Fonseca flew to Ukraine to be with his family and relax ahead of taking the job.

It was in this time Paratici changed his mind and discarded the agreements they had in place to look for a coach who fits more with the ideas of the club.

That man did not prove to be Gattuso, who, like Fonseca, is now out of the running and Tottenham back at square one.