Mauricio Pochettino’s transfer history is one of the most interesting in football today. He has managed tiny clubs with small transfer budgets, giant ones who love to spend big in the transfer market, and everything in between.
His current club, Chelsea, are set to splash the cash in the summer and bring in even more players to help the Argentine bring them back to the Champions League.
With all of this in mind, let’s take a look at some of the biggest flops, success stories, and Pochettino’s transfer preferences.
Biggest Flops
In his 15-year managerial career, Mauricio Pochettino has signed 87 players. Not all of them have worked out. In fact, quite a few have been very, very bad. Here are three of Mauricio Pochettino’s worst signings.
Vincent Janssen
Mauricio Pochettino’s signings at Espanyol and Southampton were actually pretty shrewd, so we have to skip ahead to Poch’s Tottenham days to find his first ever major transfer flop. That first flop can be no one else than Vincent Janssen.
Spurs signed the Dutch international for €22 million ahead of the 2016/17 EPL season. Pochettino had watched Janssen play against the Republic of Ireland for the Netherlands and said Janssen “ticked all the boxes we needed.” This turned out very much not to be the case.
Janssen played 27 EPL matches for Tottenham in the 2016/17 season and scored just two goals. He was shipped out on loan to Fenerbahçe for the 2017/18 season before missing all of the 2018/19 campaign due to injury and for not being good enough.
Spurs sold Janssen for €9 million to Mexican side Monterrey in 2019. He scored just two league goals for Tottenham in his three years at the club.
Tanguy Ndombele
The second biggest flop on our list is another Spurs signing. It’s not just any Spurs signing either. It’s their club record signing.
Spurs spent a whopping €65 million on Tanguy Ndombele. That’s more than double they paid for Heung-min Son, four times more than they spent on Toby Alderweireld, and almost ten times more than they paid for Dele Alli.
What did Spurs get for their €65 million? Six league goals, reported attitude problems, and a player who’s still under contract with the club even though he hasn’t played for them since 2022.
Tottenham bought Ndombele just four months before Pochettino was sacked, so it feels harsh laying all the blame on him, but Ndombele was definitely one of his signings.
Maybe it would have turned out differently for Ndombele had Poch stayed. We’ll unfortunately never know.
Lionel Messi
It feels sacrilegious to call the GOAT a transfer flop, but hear us out.
In Lionel Messi’s first season with PSG, he scored just 11 goals across all competitions. The only times he’s scored less than that was in his first two seasons as a Barcelona first-team member in the 2004/05 and 2005/06 seasons.
Yes, Messi did have 14 assists in the league and won the Ligue 1 title that season, but that championship was PSG’s only title that season and they were knocked out of the Champions League in the Round of 16.
The 2022/23 season, after which Poch was sacked, wasn’t much better for Messi.
He scored 16 league goals, racked up 16 assists, and was named in the Ligue 1 team of the season, but PSG again fell short in the Champions League. Messi left the club surrounded by booing fans.
Poch probably isn’t to blame for why Messi struggled to adapt to life in Paris, but there’s no denying that he did struggle. That’s putting it nicely. For us, there’s really no other way to describe Messi’s time at PSG besides saying that he flopped.
Biggest Successes
From flops to spectacular signings, let’s now look at some of the most successful signings in Mauricio Pochettino’s transfer history.
Dejan Lovren
Southampton went on a legendary streak of signing soon-to-be-world-class players in the mid-2010s. Sadio Mané, Virgil Van Dijk, and Adam Lallana are just some of the names we all remember coming through at Southampton and being sold on for big money later.
What a lot of people forget though is that very few of these big names were actually Mauricio Pochettino signings. Poch made just four signings at St Mary’s before he was poached by Spurs ahead of the 2014/15 season. One of those signings was Dejan Lovren.
He may not have had as Sadio Mané or Virgil Van Dijk, but Lovren was an immense signing for Southampton. The Saints signed him for just €10 million in 2013 and sold him for €25 million the next year.
The funds from that sale allowed Southampton to sign players like Sadio Mané in 2014, and well, the rest is history.
Toby Alderweireld
Spurs signed Toby Alderweireld for €16 million in 2016, they probably didn’t think they were signing someone who would become one of the best defenders in club history.
He joined the club from Atlético Madrid coming off a solid season on loan with Southampton.
After joining Spurs, he would go on to make nearly 250 appearances for the club and help Tottenham make it all the way to the 2019 Champions League final alongside his countryman Jan Vertonghen at the center of Spurs’ back line.
Heung-min Son
Like with Alderweireld, we’re sure Poch had some confidence in Heung-min Son when he signed him, but there’s no way he expected him to be this good.
Spurs signed Son for €30 million from Bayer Leverkusen in 2015, just a month after signing Alderweireld. In the years since, Son has become a global superstar and was once a part of arguably the most dangerous duo in football with Harry Kane.
Son is now the third in Spurs’ all-time top scorer list with 157 goals and counting. The legendary Jimmy Greaves is ahead of the South Korean superstar at 194.
Pochettino’s favorite positions
We’ve scoured through Mauricio Pochettino’s transfer history for this article. Like most managers, his go-to signings are usually ones in positions where the club needs strengthening. Given a blank slate though, Pochettino definitely has some preferences.
First of all, Poch definitely likes to sign attacking players over defenders. Besides the somewhat ridiculous signing of Davinson Sánchez for €42 million, most Pochettino signings in defense are fairly modest transfers for players in their prime.
When it comes to attackers though, Pochettino is willing to spend a little more and risk taking a punt on a player with less pedigree.
We saw this with Vincent Janssen, Clinton N’Jie, and Georges-Kevin N’Koudou, three attackers who ended up not working out at Spurs.
Out of everything, midfield is the position that Pochettino has spent the most on. His Spurs teams spent years trying to find the perfect midfielder to tie everything together, which led them to spend €62 million on Tanguy Ndombele in 2019.
Pochettino’s Chelsea side are in a similar position to his Tottenham teams in needing a solid midfielder.
Unfortunately, the Blues have already spent nearly half a billion pounds on midfielders already, so we’re not sure Todd Boehly will be willing to spend on Pochettino’s favorite position this summer.
