Mauricio Pochettino's favourite word is “bravery”.
He uses bravery to explain almost every decision he makes and almost everything he believes in, from why he kept his hair long as a player to what he wants from his sides as a manager: pressing high and dominating possession.
Sometimes, his interpretation of bravery is fluid. One summer during his period in charge of Tottenham Hotspur, he called on the club to be “brave” and strengthen the squad with new players. When they subsequently failed to make a single signing, he called the decision to believe in their existing squad “brave”, too. His 2017 book, an unusual mixture of a first-person diary of the 2016-17 season and a biography by Guillem Balague, was entitled Brave New World.
Somehow, everything comes back to bravery.
Therefore, predicting which current Chelsea players Pochettino will favour is probably less about their technical attributes, their preferred positions and their performances this season. Pochettino cannot separate personality from tactics and his assessment of each player's level of bravery will be crucial. That is very much required at a time when various members of Chelsea's current squad appear jaded, complacent and lacking in commitment.
The curious thing about Pochettino's managerial career thus far is that his two most prominent jobs, with Tottenham and Paris Saint-Germain, have been the complete opposites. Tottenham had a squad full of youngsters, PSG had a squad full of superstars. Tottenham was a long-term project, PSG was a short-term stopgap. At Tottenham, he performed well but was mocked for not winning trophies, at PSG he found life difficult but trophies were inevitable. At Tottenham he arrived as an outsider but became a huge fan favourite, at PSG he was returning to a club where he'd been a player but never quite felt at home. It is clear Tottenham suited Pochettino. The worry is that the stature of a club like Chelsea is more similar to that of PSG.
Chelsea's spending spree over the past 12 months made life near-impossible for Thomas Tuchel, Graham Potter and Frank Lampard. The squad was too big, the first XI was never settled. Several players desperately want to leave and Pochettino will be delighted to get rid of those who have become complacent and lost their drive. The promising thing about Chelsea's squad, though, is that most of the newcomers are youngsters, with the exception of Kalidou Koulibaly, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang and Raheem Sterling. Pochettino's experience in developing young players seems the major factor in Chelsea's decision to appoint him.
Looking back through Pochettino's comments and interviews over the years, his preference for working with young players is a deep-rooted belief that stems from his own formative years, when Marcelo Bielsa — later his manager for both Espanyol and Argentina, too — handed him an early chance at Newell's Old Boys along with other promising players who went on to make a major impact in the first team.
There are various factors in Pochettino's own prioritisation of youth. He believes it's difficult to change the mentality or the habits of seasoned veterans and therefore sometimes unable to adjust to his methods. Pochettino seems to believe that youngsters, on the whole, offer more commitment and drive and have more to prove. He seems wary of allowing a couple of big names to dominate the dressing room — this is a man who played alongside both Diego Maradona and Ronaldinho in his playing days and endured a protracted war with club legend Raul Tamudo during his formative coaching experience with Espanyol.
He has criticised the 'cult of personality' within English football, too. It's difficult to imagine Pochettino thriving in the old Chelsea dressing room dominated by experienced players, but this current squad seems more to his liking.
Youngsters are better for his focus on pressing, too, although Pochettino rejects the idea this is about physical capacity. He, in keeping with Bielsa and other major advocates of pressing, believes the initial effort in sprinting to regain possession is ultimately less draining than having to make recovery runs back into deeper positions. Again, he insists that it's not about their physical ability to run, but how much they want to.
Pochettino's emphasis on pressing has become steadily less intense, however. In his early days with Espanyol, he created an ultra-aggressive side that set out to rattle opponents as much as outplay them. His Southampton side, too, were more notable for their aggressive style than their actual level of performance — they recorded the best statistics in the Premier League in terms of regaining possession but only actually finished eighth, a respectable placing for a recently promoted side, but they would improve in the next two seasons under the less ideological Ronald Koeman.
Pochettino's period at Tottenham saw them becoming less and less based on pressing as his reign progressed. Initially, his Tottenham were all about energy at the expense of any serious identity in possession. Later, there was more authority in possession, attacking players were coming into their peak years, and there was more tactical flexibility.
By Pochettino's final full campaign at Spurs, they reached the European Cup final, but in the Premier League they were pressing much less, probably because they were exhausted — Pochettino would say mentally rather than physically.
That tallied with Tottenham's poorer underlying numbers — they were creating fewer good chances and allowing the opposition more good chances than previously.
And then at PSG, he failed to impose his pressing game upon a side whose front three were accustomed to switching off without the ball. PSG's general approach in big matches was to press with intensity for the first 20 minutes or so, then collapse into a broken side that allowed their opponents oceans of space in midfield. Here's a classic example from a fortunate group-stage win over Manchester City at the start of 2020/21 – seven players defending, three nowhere to be seen.
It was the complete opposite of Pochettino's ideal strategy and might prompt him to react by trying to re-assert his belief in heavy pressing at Chelsea. He's been known to construct pressing exercises in training that feature 10 v 11 sessions, encouraging the 10 men to close down despite their numerical disadvantage, forcing them to overcome a natural fear of being bypassed.
In an attacking sense, there was relatively little in common between Pochettino's approach with Tottenham and PSG. There was some common ground between his Southampton and Tottenham sides, however, in the emphasis on getting runners in advance of the No 9 and into goalscoring positions.
He got the best from both Rickie Lambert and Harry Kane, not just in terms of scoring goals but also in terms of receiving the ball to feet and laying it off to onrushing midfielders. Adam Lallana, Jay Rodriguez, Dele Alli and Son Heung-min all benefited from that approach. Chelsea, evidently, have plenty of attacking midfielders but lack a proper No 9. Kai Havertz would need to undergo a significant transformation to play with the authority and confidence Pochettino wants from his central strikers. Romelu Lukaku remains a Chelsea player but his future is unclear.
Pochettino's formation choices are broadly in keeping with that of most modern managers. A 4-2-3-1 has featured heavily throughout his career. He rarely used 4-3-3 at Tottenham…
… but favoured that approach at PSG because of the presence of three big-name attackers.
The real question is how often he uses a three-man defence, which became a major part of his armoury during his peak years with Tottenham. Initially, he used this approach primarily when playing against a two-man strikeforce — a relatively rare proposition in English football — but gradually it became a more regular feature. It was especially useful that Eric Dier could shift between midfield and defence, allowing Pochettino to fluidly switch between the two approaches. Enzo Fernandez, while hardly the same sort of player, will presumably be the cornerstone of his midfield at Chelsea, offering the perfect blend of aggression without the ball and intelligence in possession.
Chelsea have generally looked most comfortable with a back three over recent years, essentially since Antonio Conte's mini-revolution of English football convinced Pochettino and others to follow suit and play a three-man defence. They struggled to play wing-backs successfully when Ben Chilwell and Reece James were out injured earlier this season, but both are comfortable enough as conventional full-backs, too, and the young, adaptable nature of the squad means few players would have a problem with Pochettino playing either defensive system.
A greater question is the simple stylistic fit with Chelsea. On the whole, Chelsea managers who have arrived with philosophy and emphasised the non-negotiable concept of dominating a game have been broadly unpopular — Andre Villas-Boas, Maurizio Sarri, Graham Potter — and the more functional, pragmatic managers have proved more successful. It is arguable that Chelsea are the last of the Premier League's big clubs not to have undergone a successful revolution in terms of modernising their playing style, and fans have often relished Chelsea being the unloved party poopers who win few plaudits but plenty of trophies. That's the antithesis of Pochettino's approach, particularly as he seemed rather ambivalent towards winning cup competitions at Tottenham.
There is, of course, the peculiarity that Pochettino is joining the club which once felt like his old club's major rivals. His time at Tottenham was dominated by clashes against Chelsea: the 5-3 victory on New Year's Eve in his first season that felt like his side's coming-of-age performance, the 2-0 League Cup final defeat later that season when Chelsea typically ground out a scrappy win, the 2-2 draw at Stamford Bridge late in 2015-16 that confirmed Leicester's status as champions, the controlled 2-0 win in 2017 to deny Conte's Chelsea a record 14th straight Premier League victory, and the 4-2 FA Cup semi-final defeat shortly afterwards when he surprisingly used Son Heung-min as a left-wing-back.
After that game, as Pochettino recalls in his aforementioned diary of that season, he had a lengthy chat with Conte in the dressing room. “Two different approaches to football collided,” he recalled. “Talking to the manager of a club like Chelsea is a good way of confirming how different things are. We're competing in the same league and are based in the same city, but our problems are completely different.”
Now, there's been a role reversal. Conte didn't find Tottenham to his liking. Will Pochettino adjust better to life at Chelsea?