YOU have to go back many years to find the last time Tottenham were 10 points clear of Chelsea. You can’t help but feel they are teams heading in different directions, despite Jose Mourinho’s insistence that Chelsea will rise up the table – possibly even challenge for the top four – and despite Tottenham’s many false dawns.

Note, we said “teams”, not “clubs”. The stark reality is that, as a club, Chelsea will regroup, come what may and spend their way back to respectability. And Tottenham will once again continue to build slowly, selling the odd crown jewel, pushing the kids and looking for value, at least until the new stadium is built.

It takes more than a season to shift the balance of power. And yet today could offer the most emphatic sign yet that this is Chelsea’s “new normal”. A Spurs win at White Hart Lane would leave Mourinho’s crew stuck on 14 points after 14 games. Over the past decade, on average, it has taken 71 points to finish fourth. That would mean Mourinho's team would have to churn out results and points at a rate – 57 from 24 matches – unprecedented in recent Premier League history.

Finishing outside the top four would mean no Champions League football. Chelsea recorded losses of £23.1 million in the last financial year – losses they ascribed in part to getting knocked out of Europe in the round of 16, rather than advancing further.

It’s not an apocalyptic scenario, but when you consider their net spend exceeded £20m last summer and that Financial Fair Play restrictions are narrowing, to a maximum of £21.1m over three seasons from next year, you quickly appreciate their room to manoeuvre will be limited.

It almost makes you wonder if this realisation was behind Mourinho’s swipe at Tottenham on Friday. “[There is] no pressure on them, like it is with the other four or five top teams to reach important positions,” he said. “So they have great conditions to do the magnificent work they are doing. Nobody speaks about them as title contenders ... they lose a couple of matches and nothing happens.”

Were Mauricio Pochettino to be unkind, he could point out that, in fact, things do happen when Tottenham lose. Managers get sacked, as evidenced by the fact that they’ve had four in the past five years.

And as for “nothing happening” when you lose games, maybe that’s more the case at Stamford Bridge. After all, Chelsea have lost 10 of 21 games in all competitions this season, the manager is still in charge and significant portions of the fan base still sing his name.

At least, for now.

TOMORROW night brings a top-of-the-table clash in Serie A as Inter, who are two points ahead, visit second-placed Napoli. It’s also, when it comes to the managers, one of the most stark studies in contrast you’ll see in the European game.

Inter manager Roberto Mancini, of course, was one of the greatest players in the last 40 years of Italian football, a prodigy who was starting, and scoring, regularly at the age of 16. After a long playing career, he got his first coaching opportunity immediately after retirement and it came at a top-flight club in Fiorentina.

His opposite number Maurizio Sarri is at the polar end of the football privilege spectrum. He never played professionally or even at semi-pro level. He worked in a bank, playing and coaching in a recreational league in his spare time. He changed teams almost every year and usually won at whatever regional level he was at.

In 2000, aged 41, he took a sabbatical from his day job to coach full-time. Three seasons later he had won three straight promotions with a tiny club called Sansovino, taking them from the seventh into the fourth tier of the Italian pyramid. That’s when he got on the map and that’s when he resigned his bank job.

Since then, he’s continued his way up the pyramid, taking Empoli into Serie A, avoiding relegation and being named as Rafa Benitez’s successor at Napoli.Sarri is now on a hot streak, having taken 34 of a possible 36 points in all competitions.

His experience shows that as entrenched as the class system is in football (famous former pros get many more opportunities) you can still find the odd tale of social mobility. It’s enough to inspire scores of would-be managers who never kicked a ball for pay.

FIFPro, the world players’ union, released their list of contenders for a spot in the 2015 World XI. It’s not a shortlist, it’s a list of the top five vote-getters by position, as chosen by some 25,000 professional footballers in 70 countries who participated in this year’s ballot. These announcements are greeted with hilarity because it’s easy to pick holes. The list includes a whole host of somewhat questionable choices, from Iker Casillas to Pepe to Wayne Rooney.

It leaves you wondering what kind of person would suggest any of those three were among the top 5 in the world at their position in 2015. And you might be tempted to conclude that being good at playing the game to the point that you do it professionally doesn’t necessarily make you an expert on world football.

In fact, maybe the list should be a reminder that footballers worldwide are no different from mass market, casual fans. They vote for the guys who are on television the most, because they’re the most recognisable names in the biggest teams.

Forty-four of the 55 names on the list played for either the two biggest teams in Spain (Barcelona and Real Madrid) or the biggest clubs in Germany (Bayern), Italy (Juventus) and France (Paris Saint-Germain) during 2015.

It’s an indication of how top-heavy the flow of talent in world football is these days as much as it is a sign that many professional footballers aren’t particularly imaginative or insightful beyond what they see on TV or when they are playing Fifa.