BREAKING: Arne Slot to remain at Feyenoord, will not join Tottenham

There are days when I hate the fact that I live five hours behind England, because I end up waking up late to big news. And this one is big, but not in a good way. Multiple outlets have reported that Tottenham Hotspur’s top managerial target, Arne Slot, will not be joining Tottenham and will instead sign a new contract that will keep him at Feyenoord.

The news is still fresh so we don’t yet know all the details. There’s also conflicting info floating around, depending on which source you look at. Sky Sports is saying that Spurs balked at Feyenoord’s asking price — reportedly £10m to get Slot out of his existing Feyenoord contract (which has a buyout clause that doesn’t kick in until 2024) and an extra £5m for his preferred assistants. That’s a LOT of money for a manager — it’s as much as Spurs paid Antonio Conte and Jose Mourinho a year for their work, and that’s just to get Slot out of the Netherlands, much less to pay him for his work. OTOH it’s not a ton of money in comparison to what we pay for a player transfer.

Other reports are hinting — without evidence — that Tottenham were used as a stalking horse by Slot and his manager to extract a new contract from Feyenoord. We’ll probably have to wait to know for sure.

But I won’t pretend that I’m not disappointed and sad. I’ve been excited about Slot ever since I did the initial DLIS write-up on him last month. He looked perfect for the job. But stupidly, Feyenoord can offer Slot something Spurs can’t — Champions League football next season. And if he plays his cards right and keeps succeeding, there’s every possibility that he could end up with bigger and potentially better job offers in another year. We know he’s an ambitious manager. This might be a result of that ambition.

But it sucks. This is going to provoke a lot of anger and doomerism from Spurs fans, and rightly so! And I have no idea where the club goes from here — the other name mentioned alongside Slot was former Spain manager Luis Enrique, Ruben Amorim was also mooted but he’s recently said he plans to stay at Sporting. Ange Postecoglu is still doing his thing over at Celtic. There’s also [swallows] an unemployed Graham Potter or Brendan Rodgers.

Not much more to do than to turn the page and head to the next target. The summer transfer window opens in three weeks.