The Argentine reportedly rejected the Aston Villa job, as he intends to focus on returning to the game with a Champions League club
Mauricio Pochettino passed on the manager’s job at Aston Villa this month, and would have required rather less time to do the same for the post that subsequently became available at Villarreal, as the managerial universe realigned and one of its favoured sons re-evaluated his options.
The new era of Pochettino is not yet upon us, although it is a curious quirk of a time when so many clubs are searching for a style of club-building, player-whispering manager that one of the brand originators is biding his time out of the game. This is, after all, the man who was for a while in the top three of the most sought-after coaches in European football. The man who constructed the modern, robust, Tottenham Hotspur only to find himself first caught within his creation, and then ultimately evicted from it.
The big clubs came at the wrong time for Pochettino. Real Madrid, when Zinedine Zidane left for the first time in 2018 and Pochettino had just signed a new deal at Spurs. There was no possibility of meeting the price that Daniel Levy had placed on his manager’s head. Then, the same Spanish club returned soon after Pochettino had accepted the Paris St-Germain job, and again there was no way out. At PSG, where a manager could pick two Champions League ready XIs from the available squad and be wrong both times, the fit was never right for Pochettino.
For Manchester United, in the wake of the sacking of Ole Gunnar Solskjaer a year ago, the same problem of PSG’s intransigence presented itself and deterred those at Old Trafford from making a move. At PSG, Pochettino was at a club more firmly attached to the idea of not letting their manager join a European rival than they were to the idea of the manager himself. Strange place. In fact, so many of the PSG title-winning alumni have gone on to do better things post-Paris: Carlo Ancelotti, Thomas Tuchel and Unai Emery.