High priest of wing-backs Antonio Conte finds his acolytes for Tottenham

Summer signings Djed Spence and Ivan Perisic fit the classic Conte wing-back mould and can help elevate Spurs

When Neil Warnock loaned Djed Spence out last summer, he said the wing-back would either end up in the Premier League or non-league. It transpired the man who has managed more games in English football than anyone else wasn’t quite right. Spence is also bound for the Champions League.

Tottenham’s newest recruit has had a remarkable rise. Deemed Middlesbrough’s second-finest option in his position last summer – Isaiah Jones, who Warnock preferred, is at least a good player in his own right – he blazed a trail as much the best in the Championship, helping Nottingham Forest to promotion, doubling up as the scourge of Arsenal and Leicester in buccaneering displays in the FA Cup, and has now been signed by the high priest of wing-backs, Antonio Conte.

If Pep Guardiola is indelibly associated with passing midfielders, Conte seems defined by a position that feels more pragmatic but, in the way many have adopted a back three since he won the title in 2017, makes him similarly influential.

Tottenham have made six signings this summer. Richarlison is the most expensive and there are reasons to believe Yves Bissouma could prove the best. And yet the two most symbolic are the wing-backs.

In their different ways, Ivan Perisic and Spence reflect the different partnerships Conte often has. There is normally a converted winger (Victor Moses or Ashley Young) and an attacking full-back (Marcos Alonso or Achraf Hakimi).

As his time at Inter showed, he can tend to have an age-defying veteran on one flank and a relative youngster on the other. Some of the Conte wing-backs can be players who reach heights that were rarely forecast for them beforehand: the relatively prosaic Chelsea pair of Alonso and Moses were cases in point.

Alonso may be the premier example of a full-back whose defensive deficiencies could be camouflaged by a more attacking brief. Arguably Conte’s greatest triumphs, however, have come in adding more defensive duties to a winger’s role without them becoming a weak link. As Inter manager, he loaned Perisic out, apparently due to doubts he could play as a wing-back. He won Serie A with the Croatian the following season and has signed him at 33. If Perisic is seen as an upgrade on rather younger Sergio Reguilon, it may be with a winger’s quality in the final third. The Croatian got eight goals and six assists in Serie A last season, the Spaniard just two and three respectively in the Premier League.

That quest for greater productivity could relieve the burden on Tottenham’s front three. Harry Kane, Heung-Min Son and Dejan Kulusevski racked up goals and assists in copious quantities under Conte; but when they didn’t – and Spurs had no shots on target in back-to-back games against Brighton and Brentford – no-one else did.

It highlighted the way Spurs missed Matt Doherty, a limited player but a specialist at getting into dangerous positions in the final third and whose last six starts of the season came in games when Tottenham scored 21 times. It is worth remembering a January target was Adama Traore who, while famously short of direct goal contributions, at least has the capacity to take a host of defenders out of the game on barnstorming solo runs. He certainly has the stamina required. Spence marked his arrival by promising to bring “excitement, speed, skill.”

It was not the traditional formula for a right-back but Conte’s wing-backs are charged with completing a front five as well as a back five. Being a one-man flank demands running power, making the exploits of thirty-somethings testament to his fitness coaches. If he makes them fitter, he tends to reshape squads in his own image, acquiring potential wing-backs and sometimes dispensing with those, like the Chelsea stalwart Branislav Ivanovic, who lacked the necessary attributes.

He joined Tottenham in the years after they sold two very different right-backs with differing qualities to flourish at wing-back, in Kyle Walker’s pace and Kieran Trippier’s crossing. Now Spence is the third right-back signed in as many summers after Doherty, who proved unable to play in a back four, and Emerson Royal, who struggles with the attacking element of the wing-back’s role.

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In the summer when Spence was released by Fulham, Perisic scored in the 2018 World Cup final. When the Englishman had just finished 17^th in the Championship, the Croatian won the 2020 Champions League with Bayern. It is an illustration of the diverse paths to becoming a Conte wing-back and the differing personnel who are reinvented as such.

But while their manager showed his fondness for a back three by switching to the system immediately on his appointment, Tottenham may not have been a pure Conte side without classic Conte wing-backs. Now, furnished with two signings in pivotal positions, they might be.