Jose Mourinho has revealed what Everton’s Carlo Ancelotti told him about Tottenham Hotspur’s stadium.
Spurs moved into their new £1 billion new home toward the end of the 2018-19 campaign after a couple years of playing at Wembley.
The stadium has been praised for its innovative features, such as the retractable pitch and the glass walkway which allows Tottenham fans direct access to their iconic cockrel emblem above the stand.
With a huge debt to repay and no Champions League qualification on the horizon this season, it’s thought that the Lilywhites’ transfer budget could be affected.
But Mourinho has sidestepped questions about that and instead focused on the aesthetic quality of the arena, noting that Ancelotti was blown away by it.
He told Football London: “The first thing that Ancelotti told me – and you can imagine Ancelotti managed some of the best clubs in the world in the Bernabeu, the Allianz Arena, the San Siro – the first thing Carlo told me was ‘wow this stadium is absolutely incredible’.
“So when it’s my stadium I don’t think about anything else in relation to the stadium except the beauty of the stadium and the comforts and the motivation it is to play for a club that owns that stadium.”
Things haven’t been going right in a football sense since the move.
Tottenham, then under Mauricio Pochettino, lost the Champions League final to Liverpool in Madrid last June, before the Argentine was fired a few months into the 2019-20 campaign after results declined in a big way.
Spurs need the Champions League revenue to help with the stadium repayments and if Mourinho doesn’t get them back into the top four next season, he can expect to follow Pochettino.
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