This is the kind of Tottenham story that only gets more awkward the longer you look at it. Sergio Reguilon was told he was in Ange Postecoglou’s plans ahead of the 2023/24 season, only to be booted out of training the very next day and told to find a new club. That is not a minor misunderstanding. That is a wholesale change of direction that makes the Spurs Manager look difficult to follow at best, and plain baffling at worst.
Reguilon has now laid out the sequence in blunt terms. He said he was happy in pre-season, Postecoglou and the staff were happy with him, and then the answer flipped almost overnight. One day it was yes. The next day it was no. For a player to be told he is part of the squad and then removed immediately after is the sort of thing that leaves everyone asking the same question: what changed?
A strange message, then an even stranger reality
In March 2024, Reguilon told The Times that he still did not understand the situation. That is the key point here. This was not a player sulking after being left out for football reasons he could at least see coming. It was a player describing a sudden break in trust, then admitting he still could not explain it. He said, in effect, that he was told: “You want me at the club?” and then: “Yes, I have to make a list and you are in my squad.”
Then came the part that makes the whole episode feel even messier. Reguilon said the next day he was out of training and did not know what had happened. He also said he did not think it was a performance reason, and that in football the player does not control everything. That may be true, but it does not make the decision look any clearer. If anything, it makes it look more abrupt and more like a business move than a football one.
From first-choice talk to loan-loan chaos
Once Tottenham moved him aside, Reguilon went on loan to Manchester United, then joined Brentford for the second half of the 2023/24 season after a four-month loan spell at Old Trafford. That is hardly the path of a player being carefully developed or protected. It is the path of a player whose future was scrambled almost as soon as the season began.
And the oddity did not stop there. The following season, he returned to Tottenham and made substitute appearances under Postecoglou. Then, in 2024/25, he was excluded from Tottenham’s Europa League-winning squad. At the end of his contract last summer, he left. By late 2025, he had signed for Inter Miami. That is a lot of movement for a player who, at one stage, was apparently told he had a place to fight for.
What Reguilon’s case says about Tottenham
Reguilon’s own words are not a full indictment of anybody, but they do expose how messy squad management can look from the outside when decisions arrive without explanation. He was clear about one thing: he did not want to stay and sit in the stadium watching. He also said he was 27 and had too much football to live. That is the blunt reality for many professionals. If they are not in the plan, they move on.
But Tottenham cannot pretend this story is tidy just because the player eventually left. The sudden switch from “you are in my squad” to “find a new club” is exactly the sort of episode that invites scrutiny. Maybe there were reasons not made public. Maybe there was more going on behind the scenes. But from Reguilon’s perspective, and from the outside, it remains a strange one. And when a player says he still does not understand why the answer changed overnight, the club carrying that decision has to accept that the optics are poor.
In the end, Reguilon moved on, Tottenham moved on, and he now finds himself at Inter Miami. But the story of how he was pushed out of Ange Postecoglou’s plans before the 2023/24 season still hangs in the air. For a Spurs Manager, that is not the kind of detail that disappears cleanly.
