During his days at Tottenham, Mauricio Pochettino used to sit on a sofa by the entrance to the canteen and observe his players’ moods.
Once, he saw a first-teamer choose a plate of lasagne for lunch an hour before training and promptly dropped him. The meal, he thought, was too heavy.
So we can take it that Pochettino is a ‘small details’ coach, and this is one of the things that makes the signing of Lionel Messi by Paris Saint-Germain so interesting.
Not that Messi doesn’t sweat the small details of his own career.