There is no doubt for anybody who follows Tottenham Hotspur or even watches them on television, they would have heard the rather catchy “Mauricio Pochettino is magic” song at some stage as the Spurs faithful love nothing more than to bellow it at full volume.
It is hard to find many Spurs fans who do not have a slight man crush on the charming and charismatic Pochettinio, yet the media and football pundits in general, who despite trying to link him to every top club in Europe, always seem to want to question his achievements.
How many times have you heard the old line, but he has won nothing at Tottenham and therefore achieved nothing? Although this is factually correct, it is also completely and utterly misleading and an insult to the incredible job he has done.
Achieved nothing, how about he has provided more debutants than the rest of the managers in the premiership put together in the last five years or that the bulk of the England squad have been nurtured by him at some time or other?
Pochettino has also taken a club that had been living in the shadows of all the other top English clubs, with the odd sign of life for far too long and developed them into a resilient outfit. Tottenham play with style and panache and are capable of going anywhere in the world and getting a positive result.
He has consistently improved players and introduced along with several other excellent coaches a new dimension to the English game. The biggest testament one can give Pochettino that he has produced a team that consistently qualifies for the Champions League on a budget that most relegated sides spend.
It is far too easy to dismiss this as an achievement, it is in fact by far his biggest. Take this season with a squad of players that were fatigued by their countries late exits from the World Cup, without a single new signing where most of his competitors were spending £100 million-plus each.
This with a Tottenham squad depleted by injuries and with the backdrop of ongoing stadium delays, his charges sit third nearly halfway through the season and have qualified from what looked an impossible situation for the last sixteen of the Champions League.
I can already hear the detractors, “but where are the trophies” and of course they have a point, but what they fail to understand is that Pochettino is not building for one season, he is helping a club who have just built a state of the art training complex, are in the process of building one of the finest stadiums in the world, to establish themselves as one of Europe’s elite, all that without a significant budget to improve the squad.