Mauricio Pochettino is one step away from becoming the new coach of the Paris Saint Germain after announcing the club this Thursday the dismissal of Thomas Tuchel, half a year after the end of his last season of contract.
The Argentine coach, who played for PSG between 2001 and 2003 and has not trained for a year, is the favorite to take over the team.
Pochettino, 48, is the number 1 candidate of the Qatari owners to take over the entity, according to the radio RMC Sports. The Argentine was fired in November 2019 from Tottenham, his last club experience so far.
If confirmed, it would be the fourth team that Pochettino trains, after having made his debut at Espanyol, which he led between 2009 and 2012, Sauthampton, between 2013 and 2014, and Tottenham, between 2014 and 2019, the club he led to the final of the 2019 Champions League, which they lost to Liverpool.
Born in Murphy, Santa Fe, the Argentine never hid his desire to one day coach PSG, one of the most prestigious clubs in which he played.
Trained at Newell’s, Pochettino arrived as a player at Espanyol in 1994 and played seven seasons, before joining PSG under Luis Fernandez.
After a brief stint at Girondins de Bordeaux, he ended his playing career again at Espanyol in 2006.
The dismissal of Tuchel was taken by the club after the team finished first in their group in the Champions League, where they will face Barcelona in the round of 16, but after several disagreements with the board.
The dismissal comes after a comfortable 4-0 victory against Strasbourg on Wednesday, which keeps the team third in the table, without the sense of domination of past seasons.
But the straw that seems to have filled the glass of the patience of the Qatari owners were the statements made by the coach on German television “Sport 1” in which he assured, among other things, that PSG did not behave like a great club .
Tuchel, 46, came to the Parisian bank in 2018 as a replacement for Spaniard Unai Emery and after having managed Borussia Dortmund for three years.
The coach triumphed in the national field, but the requirement of the Qatari owners of PSG is in Europe, where last year he managed to qualify the team for the first time for the Champions League final, where they lost to Bayern Munich.
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