When you look at the recent history of Tottenham Hotspur, it’s pretty grim viewing. Since the departures of Harry Kane and Son Heung-Min, Spurs have seen a pretty precipitous decline in their fortunes. Despite Ange Postecoglou taking Spurs to a Europa League title, Spurs finished 17th in two consecutive seasons, including last season where they were a loss to Everton away from being relegated in the final match of the season.
One constant throughout this process is technical director Johan Lange,
who has been present throughout all of the past few seasons, and has spearheaded Tottenham’s refresh. That has included overseeing recruitment and player acquisition, and if you ask Tottenham fans about his job performance, the results are… well, “mixed” is putting it kindly. Spurs’ new leadership, backed by the children of former Spurs owner Joe Lewis, have publicly backed and supported Lange even as they consider hiring a new Director of Football to oversee all sport-related activities at the club. That said, a lot of Tottenham supporters, including myself and staff members on this blog, are staring fixedly at Lange as though he’s wearing a hot dog suit and investigating a car crash involving a wiener-shaped automobile.
Interestingly, Lange invited Danish magazine Borsen Pleasure to Tottenham to discuss Spurs and his role in reinventing the club under new ownership. The interview, which was conducted before the scoreless draw against Everton on September 12, was summarized by Sport Witness, which also posted a screencap with the full text in Danish. I ran that through an OCR program to extract text, and then translated it to conversational English for purposes of this article.
The article states, in part, that Lange has never felt as though his job was on the line, despite two disappointing seasons, a near relegation, and a slow start to this campaign under Roberto De Zerbi. And in fact, Lange seems to be putting most of the blame on Spurs’ long-time former chairman Daniel Levy.
“I actually didn’t [fear for my job]. Our CEO, the owners and the board could see that Tottenham had ended up here because of something that had happened over many years. And they agreed with the strategy and could see that we were on the right track in several areas. So no, I never felt insecure in my job.”
The interview paints Lange as a calm figure, an oasis of stability in what has been a pretty tempestuous sea of chaos over the past couple of seasons. Whether that’s an accurate depiction of Lange is up for interpretation and debate, but that’s definitely the image that he is putting across. That said, even the article admits that the job is difficult, and that Spurs fans are hardly known for their capacity for patience.
“Time is our friend,” he says. Trust the process, as they say over here. The new players need to learn to play together, and the head coach needs time to implement his tactical ideas. Most of the summer plan has succeeded, Lange says, but he will not put a date on when that should start showing in the league table. So many changes take time. He knows that from both F.C. Copenhagen and Aston Villa, where he also helped rebuild teams after difficult periods.
In the stands, people would probably say they have had plenty of practice waiting. The disappointment from last season is still sitting with people. Later that day, I meet a journalist who covers the club closely.
“Tottenham fans aren’t patient,” he says.
No kidding. But that’s unlikely to change no matter who is in the job — and no matter how well, or poorly, Spurs are doing in the table. Expectations are high. Everyone admits that things haven’t been great, and that while positive change is happening, it’s happening too slowly for a lot of people.
In the interview, Lange describes himself as a generalist, not a specialist, which depending on your outlook could be considered a positive, or a negative.
Johan Lange sees himself as a generalist, he says. His job is to ask the right questions of the people who know more than he does about, for example, flooring. To put the right team in place off the pitch, make it all fit together — that sort of thing. Each employee should feel empowered and free to make decisions, as he puts it.
These are very much ideals he brings from home. At his former club Aston Villa, where the organization was more hierarchical, they struggled a bit with that at first. “I’m not saying they laughed, but maybe they didn’t always tell the whole truth,” he recalls.
Johan Lange expects his staff to give their honest opinion, even when they disagree with him. It may not sound particularly revolutionary, but over here it is not a given. He believes his Scandinavian leadership style fits well in a modern football club, where more and more specialists need to work together.
“The best people in their fields should not be micromanaged,” he says.
“I strongly believe you have to uncompromisingly hire the best people for your leadership team. They then hire the best specialists for their teams, and slowly but surely you build a fantastic organization and culture.”
That generalism and willingness to listen to experts ties into everything Lange does, from details about weight room flooring to data analysis.
“I don’t know what kind of flooring is best for lifting weights, but we have experts who do. So when they recommend that it be changed, I listen to them. Same thing if an analyst comes with a recommendation to change our data structure in scouting so we can get better at finding players outside the biggest leagues.”
That kind of acknowledgement that he doesn’t know everything about everything and is comfortable delegating to others can be laudable in some industries. It’s perhaps a bit concerning when you’re dealing with a hyper-intense job like running a football club. It’s basically an admission that Lange doesn’t know ball, knows he doesn’t fully know ball, and has layered the club with multiple levels of outsourcing in order to mitigate his lack of structural ball-knowing. I’m not sure how laudable that actually is in this case. I want my technical director to be fully versed in, say, player scouting and data analysis, since it’s so critical to the future development of the club. It’s good to know your limitations and to surround yourself with people who know more than you do, and good organizational structures are frequently built around this kind of system. That said, I’d rather my technical director have actual strong opinions that uses recommendations from his staff to reinforce and refine opinions and not solely be a sponge that sucks up recommendations from underlings and regurgitates them as top level decisions. It’s the difference between being competent and merely appearing to be competent.
It’s also a bit wild that even now Lange and others continue to pin the blame for Tottenham’s current state, albeit obliquely, squarely on Daniel Levy. It’s a bit weird to still be trotting out that line multiple years into a rebuild that doesn’t seem to be going as well as anticipated, especially when Lange and others were present while Levy was still in the job.
In the end, this article is mostly a Rorschach test on your prior opinion of Lange and the job he’s doing at Spurs. If you were predisposed to be discontented with the way Lange and others have run the club over the past few seasons, this is unlikely to change your mind — there are multiple little moments buried in the text and subtext that made me side-eye Lange even more, most notably his admission that he’s a generalist that prefers to surround himself with people who know football more than him, and that football talent agency CAA Base has their own luxury box at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. But likewise, it’s a piece that doesn’t try to make any major statements about how Lange is doing in the position, and if you’re a person willing to give him a chance to turn things around, there’s quite a bit in here that would reinforce that position as well.
I’m curious as to how others view this piece and what conclusions, if any, one can draw from the interview. Place your opinions and reads in the comments.
