Mauricio Pochettino says Moussa Sissoko is falling short of expectations

Mauricio Pochettino has expressed disappointment with the impact made by Moussa Sissoko since the midfielder’s club‑record arrival at Tottenham Hotspur in the summer, and suggested the France international had yet to demonstrate in training or in his appearances in the first team the quality the management anticipated.

Sissoko cost £30m from Newcastle United on transfer deadline day at the end of August, having made clear his desire to leave the club with whom he was relegated last season. Yet the 27-year-old, whose progress was interrupted by a three-game ban for an elbow flung at Harry Arter during a draw at Bournemouth in October, has started only four Premier League matches and, having underwhelmed, was omitted from the matchday squad entirely for the defeat at Chelsea on Saturday.

Pochettino confirmed the midfielder was “at home” while his team surrendered their unbeaten league record and insisted he had been omitted for “tactical” reasons. Yet the Argentinian had voiced frustration at comments made by Sissoko after the midweek exit from the Champions League, where the player appeared to contradict his manager by claiming Spurs’ squad does boast the necessary strength in depth to compete on two fronts and that the players would prefer to play any Europa League games at White Hart Lane having dropped out of Uefa’s elite competition.

“Football is not about money,” Pochettino said when asked about Sissoko’s absence. “It is about players being better, and that they show on the training ground that they are better than another team-mate and that they deserve to be involved or not. In my opinion, I need to take the decisions and I believe that the players that started in the game [on Saturday] and the players on the bench deserved to be involved in the game. There’s nothing else to [read into] it.

“It’s not frustrating for me. It’s about football. We can see in football different things that happen. You sign a player and then you expect something, and you don’t find what you expected … If another deserved to be involved, like maybe [Georges-Kévin] Nkoudou or Josh Onomah, or [Vincent] Janssen, then why not? Just because we pay money [for someone], do they deserve to play? Sissoko needs to work hard and to show in future that he deserves to be on the team.”

Pochettino, whose side have won once in 10 games in all competitions, expressed satisfaction with the depth of his squad in the wake of the 2-1 defeat at Stamford Bridge but suggested Spurs were playing catch-up with clubs such as Chelsea in terms of their team’s development. “We are in a different process,” he said when asked about the relative strength of the two teams’ benches. “We are Tottenham, we cannot change that. I am happy with my squad.

“We were very excited to play in the Champions League but we cannot change the fact we are Tottenham and we are in a different process. We feel very disappointed to be out of the Champions League but we cannot do anything more on that. We have missed different things this year. You need to understand that, when you compete in the Premier League and the Champions League, you cannot analyse things like we did last season, or the season before when we rotated a lot the squad to play in the Europa League.

“At that time, I think we shared all the minutes between all 24 or 25 players, so that season was completely different [to this one]. We still need to find the answer to that question [for this season]. But I think there is nothing wrong. We are in a good position in the Premier League. Maybe we are out of the Champions League, and that is a little bit tough, but on the day after Monaco I told you we maybe could not cope with both competitions and struggled to show our quality.

“You can see against Chelsea that this was a very different performance to Monaco. That happens. To be fresh to play in both competitions is too difficult, and we need to learn about that and try to do things better.”