New Swansea boss Paul Clement poaches two Tottenham coaches

Swansea City just hired Paul Clement as their new manager to replace former USA manager Bob Bradley, and the Swans’ new skipper is taking a couple members of Tottenham Hotspur’s coaching staff along to his new gig in Wales.

The Guardian is reporting that Spurs coaches Nigel Gibbs and Karl Halabi will leave Spurs to join Clement’s staff as he retools Swansea in a desperate bid to avoid relegation to the Championship this season.

The new manager will be joined at the club by coaches Nigel Gibbs and Karl Halabi, who arrive from Tottenham Hotspur. Gibbs steps in as Clement’s assistant coach from a post with Spurs’ academy, while Halabi has been named as head of physical performance.

Tottenham’s website lists Gibbs as Spurs’ Assistant Head of Coach and Player Development under Academy Manager Dean Rastrick. Halabi isn’t on Spurs’ website at all, but his LinkedIn profile lists him as Spurs’ U23 Physical Performance Coach.

I don’t have strong takes on these moves, because I really don’t know much about either coach. Gibbs is taking big leap up from academy coach to assistant coach under Clement, and it appears Halabi will be doing much of what he does now at Spurs but for Swansea’s first team. Someone closer to the academy coaching staff like Windy could probably say more about whether these are big losses for Spurs’ player development or not. Either way, these are steps up for both of them, so good for them.

This is the kind of thing that happens all the time in football, so it’s probably not anything we should be concerned over. Or we could ask for Gylfi Sigurdsson in part exchange. That’s a good deal, right?