Where does Messi’s Argentina’partner’ Lo Celso fit into Mourhino’s Tottenham it unusual contract clause kicks in

Charlie Eccleshare

A few weeks into the Jose Mourinho era, and Tottenham have a dilemma: what to do about Giovani Lo Celso?

The summer loan signing from Real Betis (technically pronounced “Lo Chelso” due to the name’s Italian origins) impressed in Mauricio Pochettino’s final couple of games, but has featured for just seven minutes under Mourinho.

On the face of it, this is a pretty standard situation — in a big squad like Tottenham’s, there will always be certain players struggling for game time. Mourinho has always liked a settled first eleven, and in the early days of his spell at Tottenham, Christian Eriksen (albeit in special circumstances) Juan Foyth and Danny Rose are among those that, like Lo Celso, have barely featured. Foyth is yet to play at all under Mourinho.

Lo Celso’s situation is a lot more complicated however. According to his parent club Real Betis, Spurs will be obligated to make the deal permanent for €40 million (£33.6 million) at the end of the season should they qualify for the Champions League (following a reported loan fee of £12.6 million in the summer). That’s a lot of money for a player that so far under Mourinho has been below even the departing Eriksen in the pecking order. And Champions League qualification is a scenario that suddenly looks altogether more possible, with Mourinho’s fast-improving team just six points behind fourth-placed Chelsea. As for any wiggle room, these sorts of agreements are non-negotiable once written into contracts, according to one well-placed agent.

Another option, according to the Betis vice-chairman Jose Catalan, would be for Tottenham to pay a smaller fee of €32 million (£27.3 million) if they signed Lo Celso in January. But given his lack of recent game time, that is unlikely to happen.

What certainly won’t happen is Lo Celso returning to Betis in January. There is no option for the player to do so, and even if there was there would be no desire from Tottenham to let him leave next month, The Athletic understands. Mourinho has spoken positively about Lo Celso in press conferences, and hopes to give him more minutes when the fixture list becomes even busier this month — starting on Wednesday night against Bayern Munich.

For the moment though, Mourinho is understandably content with a team that has recorded four victories and scored 16 goals in his five matches in charge. And like his predecessor Pochettino, Mourinho has also stressed Lo Celso will take time to adapt to the Premier League. “Giovani was in France and Spain, a completely different football world to England,” Mourinho said on Friday. “Many great players do not click automatically. He needs time to adapt to the Premier League. Even with Mauricio (Pochettino), an Argentine like him, and easy communication, even in those surroundings of support he could not explode immediately. But give him time to develop and he is going to be a good player.”

According to recent reports in Spain, however, Lo Celso is growing impatient — especially as he had worked his way back into the team under Pochettino before his sacking last month. Having suffered a hip injury that kept him out for more than a month soon after joining Spurs, Lo Celso started both of Pochettino’s last two games in charge, and shone in the 4-0 win at Red Star Belgrade where he scored the opening goal.

The 23-year-old’s performances in those two matches — as well as standing out at Red Star, he was arguably Spurs’ best player in the disappointing draw against Sheffield United three days later — gave supporters a tantalising glimpse of what they had been waiting for since the midfielder signed in August. They were enough to convince many that he should be starting games, or at least seeing more action than the occasional late substitute appearance. As for his team-mates, midfielder Harry Winks said after the Sheffield United game: “Gio has come in and been excellent, he’s shown his quality. He’s very technical and can receive the ball in between the lines. He’s got an eye for a goal and an assist as well, and he’ll be a key player for us.”

Thus far, it has not worked out like that. Instead, Lo Celso’s next chance to impress will come in Wednesday night’s Champions League dead rubber at Bayern Munich, where he is expected to start for a heavily-rotated Tottenham side. The target will then be to nail down a place in Mourinho’s team, either on the right-hand side of the front three behind Harry Kane (a position Lucas Moura has pretty much made his own over the last few weeks) or as part of a central midfield two. Dele Alli’s form meanwhile means the No 10 position is taken for the moment.

Wherever he has played, Lo Celso’s technical ability has been what has set him apart. A decade ago, it took just five minutes for Rosario Central’s youth co-ordinator and legendary former defender Aurelio Pascuttini to decide that the club should sign Lo Celso, then a 13-year-old trialist. “I saw in just five minutes that he should sign,” Pascuttini tells The Athletic. “He played with his head raised and had very good technique to give passes to the strikers despite his young age.

“After about half an hour, I said to Giovani: ‘Go sign’. His face was puzzled, he was like: ‘Really? Me?’ He couldn’t believe it. But finally he was so happy.”

The ability to dominate games and link midfield and attack is what defines Lo Celso, according to one source who has closely watched his career: “Giovani’s a player who needs to be in constant contact with the ball. He’s not someone who can be without the ball for a time and then make a divine intervention. He has to be getting a lot of touches and setting the tempo of the game — it’s then when he grows.”

It’s these qualities that that some felt Spurs were missing in their 2-1 defeat at Manchester United.

In his early days at Rosario Central when a teenager, Lo Celso established himself as the team’s “enganche” (playmaker), and was largely spared from worrying too much about defending by having two central midfielders behind him. “He immediately got warmth from the fans and with just a few games everyone knew he was a different player,” recalls Aquiles Cadirola, who covers Central for Radio Mitre Rosario. “He’s clearly very popular at Central and the fans miss him a lot.”

He was most dangerous playing in between the lines, prompting Lo Celso’s coach at the time Eduardo Coudet to describe him as having: “The typical qualities of the classic No 10.” There were even comparisons made to Argentina’s legendary former playmaker Juan Roman Riquelme, though Lo Celso is far more dynamic — and someone like David Silva would be a better stylistic comparison.

What became clear soon after joining Paris Saint-Germain from Central in 2016 is that Lo Celso is not suited to playing as a defensive midfielder. Having prospered as a No 10 in Argentina, Lo Celso was frequently asked by head coach Unai Emery to play in a deeper, holding midfield role while at PSG — partly because of Thiago Motta’s loss of form.

The nadir for Lo Celso came in a 3-1 Champions League defeat at Real Madrid in which he gave away a first-half penalty and was exposed as lacking the physicality to play as a defensive midfielder.

That said, playing in a deeper role forced Lo Celso to improve his positional awareness, which could ultimately prove beneficial to his Tottenham career under a manager in Mourinho who demands defensive intelligence even from his more attacking players. Mourinho also said after beating West Ham in November that his central midfield preference is for one of the pair to create with their passing, and the other to be more “positional” (i.e defensive). Lo Celso would be much more suited to the former role, with a holding player like Eric Dier alongside him.

Lo Celso’s experiences at international and club level since leaving PSG for Real Betis, initially on loan in 2018 and then on a permanent deal the following summer, have reinforced the idea he is more suited to a position that accentuates his creative qualities.

It was at Betis that Lo Celso rediscovered the joie de vivre of his Central days. Evolving into a more of a No 8 than a No 10, and frequently popping up in the inside-right channel — where he was nominally stationed for Spurs in his two starts — Lo Celso became the heartbeat of the Betis team.

The headline stats were 16 goals and five assists for Betis last season, with an impudent chip against Villarreal in April a particular highlight. But there were other, less glamorous, moments that demonstrated how Lo Celso had become the team’s fulcrum. In a match against Eibar in May, he charged back into his own half, won the ball back with a slide tackle, before striding forward and driving towards the opposition penalty area. It was the sort of thing Mousa Dembele once did for Tottenham, and foreshadowed Lo Celso’s goal on his full debut against Red Star — when he won possession in his own half to start the move that ended with his stabbed finish to give Spurs the lead. It was a moment too to demonstrate that Lo Celso possesses the sort of diligence Mourinho demands from his midfielders.

Lo Celso also has the ability to move the ball quickly and turn defence into attack, something that Spurs have struggled to do away from home throughout much of 2019. One of his trademarks for Betis was cutting inside from the right and pinging accurate diagonals to the left wing.

What he does lack though is a yard of pace, which might partly explain why Mourinho has so far overlooked Lo Celso for a team that has generally looked to get on the front foot and overwhelm opponents.

As for his experience with Argentina, Lo Celso has been most effective in getting into the box and linking up with Lionel Messi. After starring in a World Cup warm-up match against Haiti last May, sections of the Argentine press hailed Lo Celso as the partner (or “socio”) Messi had been crying out for — though this is something they had also done with Javier Pastore, Sergio Aguero, Riquelme and so many others.

In the short term, Lo Celso’s performance proved to be a false dawn, as exactly a month later Argentina were dumped out of the World Cup by France, with Lo Celso not playing a minute in the tournament. There were even rumours that Lo Celso and Messi, who were both born in Rosario, had fallen out over a game of football tennis. These have subsequently been denied, but it was a hugely disappointing few weeks for the Tottenham player.

He enjoyed a far more effective tournament in the summer just gone, playing all six of Argentina’s matches as they reached the Copa America semi-finals — mainly in a No 8 role. Lo Celso also dovetailed beautifully with Messi in a pre-tournament friendly against Nicaragua, and he was called up by Lionel Scaloni for their friendlies against Brazil and Uruguay last month despite having only recently returned from injury.

But as it has turned out, that Brazil game on November 15 was the last time Lo Celso started a match. He didn’t feature against Uruguay three days later, and has since made just those two substitute appearances for Tottenham, with Mourinho settling on a front four that doesn’t include him and not yet opting to play Lo Celso in his more changeable midfield two. In that time, Lo Celso has also seen the man who signed him sacked as Spurs manager.

Pochettino’s presence at the club was a big consideration for Lo Celso when deciding to join Tottenham in the summer. The pair are not just compatriots but are from the same part of Argentina — Pochettino’s hometown of Murphy is a couple of hours drive from Rosario.

Upon arriving at Tottenham, Lo Celso was instantly put at ease by Pochettino, who is synonymous with Central’s arch-rivals Newell’s Old Boys. The pair spoke about the intense Central-Newell’s rivalry, but Pochettino is understood to have joked that they should not talk about it too much in case it led to an argument.

With Pochettino and his staff gone, Lo Celso is reliant on Tottenham’s remaining Argentines like Erik Lamela, Juan Foyth and Paulo Gazzaniga to help him settle. Foyth even acted as a translator for Lo Celso after the Red Star win in Belgrade, when the latter was stopped by reporters in the mixed zone.

Lo Celso is learning English but is naturally a shy character. He very rarely spoke to the media in France, and was renowned in the PSG dressing room for being extremely mature and sensible. He still lives with his father, who is also his agent, and in Paris never did anything to catch the attention of the tabloids. Off the pitch, he is happiest staying in and enjoying a cup of Argentinian mate — after the Red Star game, he clutched a personalised flask as he spoke to the media.

Though above all, what he really wants to do is play football. Lo Celso will surely get that opportunity on Wednesday night and in the coming months — but if he doesn’t seize it and Spurs end up finishing in the top four, the club will be faced with a highly unusual situation.