Teddy Sheringham still remembers Ossie Ardiles’ first team meeting as Tottenham manager. “I want everyone to play,” Ardiles told his players in the summer of 1993. “And as soon as the ball goes to Teddy, everyone fly forward.”
“I thought to myself,” Sheringham told The Athletic, “it sounds a little bit extravagant for the Premier League.”
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Tottenham’s extravagance was not just limited to tactics. The following summer they signed Jurgen Klinsmann, Ilie Dumitrescu and Gica Popescu, three stars of the 1994 World Cup, for a combined £7.5 million. It was, in a way that you now have to remind yourself of, entirely unprecedented for an English team to go and buy three foreign players as good as those.
Put the ingredients together, the expansive tactics and the brilliant imports, and you have English football’s first real experiment with that cosmopolitan style that now defines our game. They were thrillingly incongruous, and some people simply did not know what to make of them. The Daily Express jarringly referred to them as “Spurs’ ethnic army”.
On the pitch they played like a vision of a haywire future, attempting football that was more technical, more aggressive and more risky than anything seen before. It failed, of course. Spurs scored plenty but conceded even more, and Ardiles was sacked on October 31, 1994. He was replaced by Gerry Francis, a man more in tune with the ideas of the time. Ardiles never managed in England again.
But just because it did not work does not mean it was worthless. Twenty-five years on, Ardiles’ Tottenham team remain one of the most alluring, exciting and in fact significant teams of the Premier League era. Not just because of the football and the memories and the sight of Klinsmann gleefully diving on to the Hillsborough turf to celebrate his debut goal. But because this was a first faltering step on a long journey English football is still treading.
And it all grew out of Spurs chairman Alan Sugar’s desperation to make a statement. In June 1994 Spurs had been fined, docked 12 points and banned from the FA Cup because of historical illegal payments. Sugar, having won his political battle with Terry Venables, wanted to fight back. The points deduction was halved on appeal but Sugar wanted a new, exciting team for the new season.
It started with Dumitrescu, a star of the World Cup, who cost £2.6 million from Steaua Bucharest. The next day they went one better, stunning the world with the £2 million signing of Klinsmann from Monaco. Sugar did the deal on his yacht in Monaco and then called up Sky TV to break the news himself.
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“I still remember the euphoria of Spurs signing such an iconic player,” Nick Barmby told The Athletic. “There was massive anticipation when he first walked in the door at the old training ground at Mill Hill.”
As well as his obvious talent and skill, Klinsmann’s humility and professionalism endeared him to his new team-mates. “From the day he came in, he was an outstanding inspiration to our younger players,” Gary Mabbutt told The Athletic.
“He had a natural ability to warm around everyone, to make them feel comfortable,” Sheringham said. “He came in as a World Cup winner, he could have come in with airs and graces but he was the epitome of a centre forward with enthusiasm, he wanted to show everyone how good he was, and he wanted them to be good players around him as well.”
Spurs fans reacted with giddy disbelief. It was only recently when most imports from beyond Britain and Ireland were either from Scandinavia or the Low Countries. Players who would easily fit into the rigid English game. To sign a man who won the World Cup with Germany and the UEFA Cup with Inter, who could claim to be one of the best in his position in the world, was a new step for English football. The other big imports that summer, Bryan Roy to Nottingham Forest, Philippe Albert to Newcastle, Stefan Schwarz to Arsenal, simply could not come close. Soon enough, the Spurs club shop had sold out of the letter ‘N’ and Klinsmann’s debut, a friendly at Watford, had to be delayed because of the thousands of Spurs fans stuck outside.
But the wider public’s reaction to Klinsmann was mixed. This was still a time when simply being German was held against him by some, and accusations that he was a ‘diver’ were even worse. He was called a “stuka dive bomber”. John Sadler of The Sun wrote that Klinsmann was “one of the most notorious cheats in European football”, “a curse” on the English game, and that people had been “extremely hasty in forgiving and forgetting” his diving. The same newspaper pointed out that Klinsmann’s Tottenham debut coincided with Channel Four showing ‘Sink the Bismarck’.
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In early September, after the start of the season, Spurs signed Popescu from PSV Eindhoven for £2.9 million. Even though Johan Cruyff had tried to take Popescu to Barcelona, to replace Ronald Koeman. Having Popescu and Dumitrescu, two stars of the Romania team that reached the World Cup quarter-finals, gave Spurs an extra exotic edge. In Sugar’s autobiography, ‘What You See Is What You Get’, he claimed that he remembered one newspaper headline about the two Romanians: “They’re used to mad dictators so they’ll do well at Spurs, sorry Mr Sugar”.
Even more ambitious, foreign and exciting than the signings was the football itself. This was not an era of great tactical sophistication in English football, even after Jim Smith had introduced 3-5-2 with QPR in the 1980s. The ideas that animated the top-flight game were little different from before. Jozef Venglos’ season in charge of Aston Villa had not left a legacy.
Ardiles wanted to change that. He had another vision of football, one that had been tested on the biggest stage of all. He was part of the Argentina team that won the 1978 World Cup, under the management of their romantic long-haired left-wing coach Cesar Luis Menotti. He was a football idealist, a man determined to return the Argentina team to the principles of ‘la nuestra’, the distinctively stylish, creative Argentinean approach that had lost out to a more pragmatic way.
This meant a style of play that prioritised possession, expression and interchanging positions. It was fast and aggressive and relied on an early form of pressing to win the ball back when they lost it. With Ardiles and Mario Kempes the star men, it worked, as Argentina beat the Netherlands 3-1 in the final in Buenos Aires. Afterwards, Menotti declared: “Our victory is a tribute to the old and glorious Argentinian football.”
This is what Ardiles wanted to do at Spurs. And with the technical players Sugar bought for him in 1994, he had the tools to do it. Spurs’ approach that season was often described as a ‘front five’, although the reality was more complex than that. Spurs played a 4-4-2 diamond. Klinsmann partnered Sheringham up front. Barmby was at the top of the diamond with Dumitrescu on the left and Darren Anderton on the right. There was an emphasis on interchanging positions, getting Dumitrescu and Anderton to arrive in the box, with both full backs – Dean Austin and Justin Edinburgh – attacking in tandem.
“It was more of a 4-4-2 really,” Sheringham said, “with Ilie Dumitrescu on the left and then Darren on the right. I would be dropping off from the front, Nicky Barmby would play just off there as well, and Jurgen spearheaded the attack.”
The players loved it. “That was his philosophy, he wanted everybody to fly forward and attack,” Sheringham said. “It was absolutely fantastic to play in as a forward, having so many options around me. It was a real buzz.”
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Even Mabbutt, at the other end of the pitch, enjoyed the experience. “Ossies’ attitude was that if the other team scores two, we will score three. It was a very exciting time. Ossie was a great manager to play under because it was a lot of fun. It was total football. The Tottenham way, extended to the Nth degree. It was a fantastic period.”
And for the first few weeks of the season, in a few weeks of blissful fantasy football, it worked. Better than anyone could have expected. It felt, as Spurs cut teams open at home and away, as if Sugar and Ardiles had torn up everything people knew about the English game. As if they had fast-forwarded the game’s evolution and produced something from its colourful future. All-out attacking football with the best players from abroad? Why not?
Tottenham started the season at Sheffield Wednesday, and Spurs fans still remember the motorways being clogged with fans driving up from London to see the new players for the first time. They got more than they could have dreamed of, an end-to-end 4-3 win that seemed to vindicate Ardiles’ whole approach. “It could have ended up 10-9,” Barmby said.
Four days later was the first home game of the season, with the White Hart Lane crowd desperate to see Klinsmann’s home league debut. They were rewarded with a 2-1 win and a brilliant overhead kick, a goal to tell the world that one of the best strikers in the game did indeed play for Tottenham.
The peak came the following week, with a 3-1 win at Ipswich Town that set a new standard for high quality football that season. It seemed, with nine points and nine goals from their first four games, as if anything was possible for Spurs. A story in The Sun (headline ‘Herr Raid Warning!’) said that Spurs could win the title. Ipswich’s Bulgaria international Botcho Guentchev said that Spurs were “the best, most skilful attacking side I have seen in English football”, both “wonderful to watch and play against”. Ardiles revelled in the realisation of his dream, four games into the year.
But then things started to go wrong. Spurs lost their next three, with a 4-1 home defeat to Forest making them look desperately far away from a serious, competitive side. Teams had realised just how open they were, with the two centre backs and the holding midfielder often the only men left back while the others all went forward. This was the problem with investing everything in attack. What happened when they didn’t score?
“The style of play that he brought in, ‘the famous five’, always put teams under pressure,” Mabbutt said. “It was an excellent approach. I just felt that by having that all-out approach, we lost some of our concentration on the defensive side of our game. It was just… it was nearly right, but not quite right.”
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“There wasn’t any real concept on our defensive side,” Sheringham said. “Everything was geared towards playing with the ball, going forward and expressing yourself with the ball. We didn’t ever plan to sort things out when we didn’t have the ball. Which was probably the downfall.”
It did not help that not every Spurs player was as diligent in his defensive duties as he should have been. Attacking football is impossible without defending from the front. Klinsmann warned after a 3-1 loss to Leicester that Spurs were “not aggressive enough” and that they needed to get “closer together” up front. But it did not happen.
“Ilie Dumitrescu obviously had talent, but he wasn’t one that really wanted to work on the left-hand side,” said Sheringham. “As soon as the game broke down, you expect your left winger to at least jog back into position, if not sprint back into position. And Ilie just had a walk back with his head down. More often than not it would be Nicky Barmby or myself running back into that left-side position, rather than Ilie. It mucked up our team shape a bit.”
Spurs’ season had started on fire, but it burned out before they knew it. They were thumped 5-2 at Maine Road – another game that could have been 10-9 – and then lost 3-0 at Notts County in the Coca-Cola Cup. And that was that. Sugar sacked Ardiles after their next game.
In his book, Sugar explained that “pressure was being put on me to replace Ardiles”. The press and the fans were turning already, and when Spurs lost at Meadow Lane the away were chanting “We want Ossie out”. But with hindsight it does look like a hasty, impatient decision. Ardiles was only given 12 league games that season. Of those, they won five and lost five. They had scored 21 and conceded 24. They were erratic, fragile and desperately flawed. They did not have the consistency or steel to be champions. But they were not terminally bad, either. They might even have ridden out their poor form with more backing and patience. There is still some sadness from those close to Ardiles about how soon it ended, and the reputational damage it caused. Ardiles was written off as a hopeless dreamer and never managed in England again.
“We were nearly, not far off from being a team who could compete for the title,” Mabbutt said. “There were a few things that needed addressing, but whether that would have happened or not is anyone’s guess. You can’t change history.”
But just because this experiment didn’t work, it doesn’t mean it was doomed from the start. Playing football this way, whether in 1994 or 2019, is like building a house of cards. Every piece has to be perfect for the whole building to stand up. And with Ardiles’ Tottenham, not every piece was. The foundations were not robust enough to bear the weight.
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What Ardiles needed to pull this off was a more experienced defence. Players who were good enough to carry the defensive burden for their attacking colleagues. Or, when it became too much, vocal enough to ask for help. That was a common view at the time, both inside the club and out. John Giles wrote in the Daily Express in September 1994 that Sugar needed to buy Ardiles two more players. “They have to be defenders who have proved themselves in their trade. They must have experience, weight of presence, an instinctive sense of position and timing.” He suggested Neil Ruddock or Tony Dorigo. The Times suggested Stuart Pearce. There was some public clamour for Phil Babb.
Sol Campbell says in Chris Slegg’s ‘The Team that Dared to Do’ that “the only reason it did not work out” was that lack of experience in defence. And that had he been five years older, he might have been able to be the vocal anchor that they needed at the back. Especially when it came to stopping all of his colleagues from flying forward at the same time.
Teddy Sheringham agrees. “If we had more experienced players at the back it might have worked,” he said. “Sol Campbell was a very young player then, Dean Austin and Justin Edinburgh were full backs at the time. If they had been a little bit more experienced and just thought to themselves, ‘Hold on a minute, I can’t go forward right at this minute’. If one of them goes forward, you’ve got to have the other one sitting back. But Ossie wanted us all to get forward. If the right back was crossing it, he’d want the left back coming in at the far post. If you’re going to push your full backs on that far, it leaves things very open at the back. And that is exactly what happened.”
If Ardiles had those players, then who knows how it would have turned out. Whether he would have been consigned so quickly to the dustbin of history. Think about what happened on the other side of north London two years later. When a foreign manager was determined to play artistic, expansive football, a type that had not succeeded here before. With brilliant imported players to help him to get there. The difference, or one of them, is that Arsene Wenger was fortunate enough to inherit precisely the type of experienced, reliable, robust back fives that Ardiles never had. The type of back line that you need to play attacking football. What if Ardiles had inherited David Seaman, Lee Dixon, Steve Bould, Tony Adams and Nigel Winterburn? Well, the future might have been very different.
It was Wenger, not Ardiles, who truly began the international revolution in English football. Who started the process that saw all-foreign teams, superstar foreign coaches, Jose Mourinho v Rafa Benitez, Pep Guardiola v Jurgen Klopp, Premier League teams pressing like Borussia Dortmund or dominating possession like Barcelona. In the 2019-20 season, this is now an English league only in the sense of its location. Cosmopolitanism is the Premier League’s defining feature.
Any process of generational change has to start with failure. Ardiles’ Spurs were a necessary first step. And what made them so thrilling and so important was what sunk them in the end. The ambition, the romance, the novelty, the sheer incongruity, too much for English football in the autumn of 1994.
(Photo: Gary M Prior/Allsport/Getty Images)