🤬 Tottenham's greatest villains: Christian Gross | OneFootball

A new dawn had arrived in the Premier League.

It took a few seasons to take hold but by the time 1997 had rolled around an influx of foreign stars had taken the English game and showed a new way, a better way.

Dennis Bergkamp, Gianfranco Zola and Eric Cantona were the European pioneers who were changing the way people thought about how football could be played.

And there was Arsène Wenger.

A revolutionary figure in the history of the Premier League, who arrived from Japan in a whirlwind of publicity and confusion, and in a few short years transformed Arsenal into one of the biggest clubs in Europe.

The mistake a lot of clubs made though, was thinking that ‘foreign’ equals ‘good’.

That anyone, from anywhere across the world, could be parachuted into the top division and make a seismic impact.

Tottenham thought they had that man in Christian Gross. Tottenham were laughably wrong.

Having won two Swiss Championships with Grasshopper, Gross was highly respected in his home country but little-known across Europe.

It was something as an enormous shock then when Spurs chairman Alan Sugar – acting on advice from Arsenal supremo David Dein, no less – hired Gross, hoping he could be his very own Wenger.

You know that wasn’t going to be the case after his very first press conference.

Having arrived into Heathrow Airport, Gross then boarded a London Tube bound for White Hart Lane and in front of the gathered media, held aloft his train ticket.

“I want this to become the ticket to the dreams,” he said to a stunned press core.

Alan Sugar was stunned but it was the subsequent results that would leave him even more slack-jawed.

His opening game was a 1-0 home defeat to a Crystal Palace side that would eventually end the campaign in last place, and although Everton were beaten 2-0 five days later, Spurs followed those three points up with embarrassing 6-1 and 4-0 losses to Chelsea and Coventry, respectively.

It was drudgery all the way with relegation on the cards all the way until April.

Thankfully, Jürgen Klinsmann’s return on an initial six-month loan galvanised the squad with the German scoring seven goals in the last three games to secure an unlikely mid-table finish.

Amazingly, Gross kept his job over the summer but his decision to make just one signing – Italian defender Pablo Tramezzani – was met with scorn.

So when Spurs lost two of their opening three matches of the 1998/99 season, the writing was very much on the wall.

“I didn’t go, I had to go,” Gross said cryptically on his way back to Heathrow after getting the sack. “There are different reasons but I am not the person to say why.”

And with that, Tottenham’s very own Wenger was out of the door and never to be seen in English football again.