Tottenham looking for midfield depth in Ligue 1

Tottenham could once again look to Ligue 1 to add to their depth in a key area this summer, though they will hope with better results this time around.

OGC Nice midfielder Jean Seri is suddenly a hot commodity in European football, and Tottenham could be entering a crowded race for the 25-year-old should they make a move for him.

The word “revelation” gets thrown around a lot, especially in Ligue 1, but Seri might actually live up to the adjective.

Much of his early 20s were spent bouncing around clubs in Portugal and his native Ivory Coast. Though he never quite found much traction, Nice’s scouts evidently saw something in him all the same. They paid just €1 million to Portugeuse club Paços Ferreira last summer to secure his signature.

It’s worth noting the situation Nice found themselves in last summer when they recruited Seri and a number of other players. After a remarkable season that saw them qualify for Europe, their two best players — Hatem Ben Arfa and Valère Germain — both left the club, as did coach Claude Peul. They needed to rebuild, and didn’t have a lot of resources to do it.

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Check out the Guardian for a more in-depth look at Nice’s remarkable turnaround since the summer. From Tottenham’s point of view, the biggest takeaway is that Seri ended up adjusting to the rigors of a big league fairly quickly. In 31 appearances for the club in the league, he’s scored six goals and set up nine more from central midfield.

With Mousa Dembélé aging and Harry Winks still an unpolished gem, a player like Seri might be precisely what Mauricio Pochettino needs to fill the space next to Victor Wanyama. He might lack Dembélé’s dribbling ability, but he makes up for it with a range of passing and vision that appears not altogether dissimilar from Christian Eriksen’s.

Crafty midfielders — as we’ve said countless times before — aren’t precisely what Spurs need most however. Pochettino would be better off looking for options at centre-back and, should Kyle Walker leave, right-back as well.

He might also be wary of Ligue 1. Though the French league occasionally produced some standout players in recent seasons. — see: Yohan Cabaye and Dimitri Payet — it also spits out some thoroughly underwhelming duds.

Tottenham are all too familiar with the latter. Over two successive seasons, they invested in Clinton Njie from Lyon and Georges-Kévin Nkoudou from Olympique de Marseille, neither of whom have lived up to even modest expectations. It remains to be seen if they even have a future with the club beyond this summer.

Next: Who starts for Spurs at West Ham?

One season in the lowest of the top five European leagues might not be enough for Spurs to table anything but the most modest bid for Seri’s services. They are certainly not about to compete with bigger clubs who might be less concerned with spending big.