The question that Tottenham Hotspur supporters will be asking this morning is not whether Juande Ramos is a better manager than Martin Jol, but whether the Spaniard is as good as Arsène Wenger, the Arsenal manager. For Ramos to make his mark at White Hart Lane, the 53-year-old has to emulate Wenger by not only winning, but winning with style.

For the first dozen years of his coaching career, nothing that Ramos did suggested that he was in the Wenger class. Wandering from club to club in Spanish football’s backwaters — he has been with ten different clubs in 15 years — he struggled to make an impact until he took Rayo Vallecano into La Liga in 1999 and led them into the Uefa Cup two years later. Almost immediately, he packed his bags and moved to Real Betis, whom he also took into Europe. From there, he went to Espanyol and Málaga before he found his spiritual home at Seville 2½ years ago.

Seville’s progress to become a team of Champions League quality was based on an attacking style that will warm the hearts of Spurs supporters who were raised watching players such as Glenn Hoddle, Paul Gascoigne and Jürgen Klinsmann. In his first season at Seville, Ramos’s team recovered from the departures of Júlio Baptista, the Brazil forward, and Sergio Ramos, the Spain defender, to lift the Uefa Cup by beating Middlesbrough, managed by Steve McClaren, 4-0 in the final — the club’s first trophy since 1948. They proved that it was no fluke by repeating the trick in May, beating Espanyol on penalties.

Speaking to The Times in March, Ramos made it clear that he was flattered to be linked with Chelsea and Barcelona and boasted that he could make Roman Abramovich’s side unbeatable if he received an offer from Stamford Bridge. “I want to reach the pinnacle of the game,” Ramos said. “I want to get the best players in the world playing with my philosophy, as I think that’s an invincible formula. If I had the best players in the world and gave them that belief and that doctrine, then I would be invincible.”

Not since Osvaldo Ardiles thrilled White Hart Lane — before losing his job — by playing with five forwards in the 1990s will Tottenham have had a manager who is so committed to attacking football. “My ideology is always to attack, to entertain and never to spoil a game,” he said.

Ramos loves the “beautiful game” so much that, as coach of Rayo Vallecano six years ago, he took the unprecedented step of reducing his team to ten men because he was unhappy with his players coasting to a 2-0 win. “The players were not trying, so I took the drastic step of taking a player off as I wanted them to work,” he said. “We played with ten men and won 2-0. I knew I could have been killed by the press and the fans, but I wanted to teach the players a lesson.”