Tottenham Hotspur will appoint Franco Baldini as Technical Director: BBC

The BBC, through Ben Smith, is reporting that Tottenham will apoint Franco Baldini as their new technical director. I'm not sure how much this is just putting one and one together to make two and how much of this is actual news, but the BBC is usually fairly trustworthy, so we'll go with it for now.

This is one of those rumors that has been slowly simmering for a while now. Earlier this year Tottenham Hotspur manager Andre Villas-Boas said that he would like to work with a technical director. That really got the rumor mill going and before long the club had been linked with a number of qualified people including former right-hand man to Fabio Capello, Franco Baldini.

This week, the Italian left a similar position with AS Roma after a disappointing season. How much of the blame should be placed on Baldini for the season is a bit of a guessing game. Leaving Rome opened the door for speculation about Baldini's future and that has immediately led to these reports.

At present, Tottenham do not have a director of football, and have not had one since Damien Comolli left the club back in 2008. Since the Frenchman's departure, Daniel Levy has done much of Tottenham's transfer dealings on his own. Perhaps it has been pressure from Villas-Boas that has finally pushed Levy to bring in someone as Technical director.

As with just about anything, take this with a grain of salt until the club itself actually reports it, but I'd say there's a pretty good chance that this move is announced by the end of this week.