In Italy, the interim manager of a football club is often referred to as “and ferryman” – a ferryman. When waters are choppy, you do not need some ambitious captain with notions of heading out on an adventure. All you really want is someone who can get you safely to shore.
Igor Tudor is not keen on the word. Hearing it applied to him when he arrived at Juventus last season, he observed that every manager, everywhere, is living from game to game. “You can have a contract for five years and get sent home after three matches,” he said. “You have to construct your tomorrow today.”
And yet, he has earned his reputation as a man who people turn to when they see their ship taking on water. Tottenham are the seventh club to hire Tudor during a season. He has not allowed any of the previous six to sink.
His first full management position was with Hajduk Split, the club with which he began his playing career. There was barely a month left in the season but it ended with Tudor’s team winning the Croatian Cup.
At Galatasaray, he took over in February 2017 and qualified them for Europe. The following April, he got the call from Udinese, who had lost a club-record 11 consecutive Serie A games. With Tudor in charge, they picked up seven points from the last four to avoid relegation.
Instead of handing him the job full time, Udinese appointed Julio Velázquez in the summer, then Davide Nicola, before desperately turning back to Tudor in March 2019, as they hovered one point above the relegation zone. They finished a comfortable 12th.
On and on these stories go. At Verona, in 2021, he inherited a team that had seen two of its best players depart, Mattia Zaccagni and Federico Dimarco, and steered them to ninth. Lazio were listing under Maurizio Sarri in 2024, before Tudor took charge and qualified them for Europe with five wins and three draws in nine games. An identical set of results at Juventus last year got them back into the Champions League.
There is a natural inclination to ask why he has not been able to progress from short-term successes to longer-term stability. The 47-year-old has rarely completed a full season with a team, the third-place finish with Marseille in Ligue 1 three years ago standing out as an exception on his CV.
A fair analysis would require diving into the details of every stop, the circumstances of each club in those chapters. Broadly we can say that teams who change manager in mid-season often have deeper issues to begin with.
The unhappy ending to his time at Juventus is illustrative. Despite achieving the targets set for him last season, Tudor was not immediately asked to continue. Only after the Bianconeri failed in their pursuit of other targets did they offer an extension.
Tudor is not one to suffer quietly. He had threatened to walk away if he did not get a deal before the Club World Cup began in June. As he lost his grip in the autumn, presiding over a grim eight-game winless run, he implied that his bosses had failed to support his vision in the transfer market, lamenting after a loss to Como that his opposite number, Cesc Fàbregas, had greater power to pick players he wanted.
A bad look. Como are a wealthy club these days, but Juventus are not built to play the underdog. The results were even uglier. Juventus failed even to score in Tudor’s last four games in charge – their longest drought in almost 25 years.
Nobody deserves their entire career to be judged, though, on such a tiny window. Clarity of intent is a powerful tool in a crisis, and one thing that stands out about Tudor is how consistent he has been in his approach since at least his time with Verona in 2021-22 – when he spoke about updating his methods from zonal marking to a man-to-man approach. He is a Gian Piero Gasperini disciple, preferring a back three, high press and fast, direct transitions.
A straightforward formula that can be implemented quickly, albeit one that does place considerable physical demands on players – perhaps a concern at Tottenham given their injury crisis. It is easy to imagine how Tudor’s team might start to take shape with Destiny Udogie and Pedro Porro in the wingback slots, but neither is expected back for a few weeks.
On the other hand, perhaps he is the perfect candidate to reawaken one of Tottenham’s lost talents. Randal Kolo Muani has not scored a single Premier League goal since joining on loan from Paris Saint-Germain but bagged five in 11 appearances during his brief chapter under Tudor at Juventus. The club’s failure to extend his stay in Turin was one of the manager’s greatest frustrations last summer.
There ought not to be clashes over transfer policy in north London, where Tudor is contracted only until the end of the season. But players can expect to hear him speak plainly. At Marseille he sidelined Dimitri Payet – probably the most technically accomplished player in the squad at the time – over his unwillingness to run and press with sufficient intensity.
In an interview with France Football, Payet described Tudor’s methods as “authoritarian” and “brutal”, though he also said he had come to view that chapter differently. “With a bit of distance, he was tough, maybe too tough, to mark his territory at the start, to show he had arrived and put things in place. Later, it got a bit better. Not exactly laid-back, but better.”
Twelve Premier League games may not be enough for Tottenham to see all sides of Tudor. This is not the moment for high-minded discussions about man-management techniques. The only thing that anybody on a listing ship wants to know is whether they will make it to shore.
