Mauricio Pochettino has suggested a “painful” summer rebuild is needed if Tottenham Hotspur are to challenge for major trophies next season.
Spurs have failed to sign any players since January 2018 when Lucas Moura arrived from Paris Saint-Germain.
The club allowed Mousa Dembele to leave for the Chinese Super League in the recent January transfer window but opted against replacing the Belgian.
Pochettino’s squad is thinning out due to injuries and a lack of personnel at a crucial stage of the season with Tottenham competing in the Champions League semi-finals.
And the Argentinian believes Spurs must rebuild this summer in order to be successful in the future.
“When you talk about Tottenham, everyone says you have an amazing house but you need to put in the furniture,” Pochettino said (via the London Evening Standard).
“If you want to have a lovely house maybe you need better furniture. And it depends on your budget if you are going to spend money. We need to be respectful with teams like Manchester City or Liverpool who spend a lot of money. We are brave, we are clever, we are creative.
“Now it’s about creating another chapter and to have the clear idea of how we are going to build that new project. We need to rebuild. It’s going to be painful.”
His comments are partly similar to what he said at the end of last season; after the final day, he urged Tottenham chairman Daniel Levy to begin a new project by changing the way the club goes about recruitment.
If anything, however, Levy spent even more cautiously in the build-up to the current campaign, perhaps because of the rising costs of the club’s new stadium.
Hopefully this time around Spurs are willing to solve the clear problems and gaps in the squad.
Pochettino said more or less the same thing last summer and nothing happened or was done; just more bla bla as far as I am concerned.