Mauricio Pochettino is not the type of manager who tends to rock the boat with his public statements. The Argentinian is extremely pragmatic and he has long been happy to leave things like transfers and other bits of club business to the higher-ups. It is one of the reasons why Daniel Levy, the Tottenham Hotspur chairman, likes him and has turned to him to lead the club in the countdown to the new stadium move.

Pochettino, though, is obviously no shrinking violet and it is not difficult to imagine his true feelings as he exits the summer transfer window with only one recognised striker in his first-team squad. He had made it plain that he needed an alternative to Harry Kane and, last Thursday, he applied a little gentle pressure on Levy when he likened the pursuit of a striker to the quest for true love.

“It’s like when you are in love with a lady – there are a lot of women around the world but you want only one,” Pochettino said.

Pochettino wanted only one striker and it was Saido Berahino of West Bromwich Albion, a young and pacey player, blessed with penalty box ruthlessness, who he felt would fit perfectly into his philosophy. We now know how badly that move broke down.

The previous Thursday Pochettino had said that, “if you have only one target and you fail, you are dead” but it was a comment he made towards the end of last season, on 23 April, that has come to resonate most strongly.

“We need to try and build a strong team for next season to fight for the top four,” Pochettino said. “We need to be clever and to move quick to build the team. If we achieve Europa League or not, we need to move quick.”

Pochettino did not want to see Levy waiting until the last moment to get the striker which was so sorely needed or, indeed, the defensive midfielder to give the team increased bite and balance. But that was exactly what he got and not for the first time Levy faces uncomfortable questions over his approach to the market.

It is all very well having the consent of the player but that of the selling club can be an entirely different matter and Levy ran into a brick wall as the clock ticked towards 6pm on Tuesday. Axel Witsel, the Zenit St Petersburg midfielder, said that he wanted to move to Tottenham but his club had said no. “They can’t find a player to replace me,” Witsel said. “They told me I couldn’t leave. Even for €70m.”

Victor Wanyama, the Southampton midfielder, had told his manager, Ronald Koeman, last week that he wanted to join Tottenham and he was left out of the squad for Sunday’s home win over Norwich City. But it made no difference. Southampton were never going to sell one of their key players so late in the window. When Tottenham offered a package worth £20m, including either Andros Townsend or Erik Lamela on loan, it was dismissed in a heart-beat.

The situation with Berahino was not dissimilar. Tottenham had made their opening offer on 18 August but they did not put forward anything close to being acceptable until deadline day and by then the position of Jeremy Peace, the West Brom chairman, had become entrenched.

Berahino went further than Wanyama by submitting a written transfer request on Monday of last week but it made no difference, even though Tony Pulis, the West Brom head coach, did not want to keep an unhappy player. There was a time when the formal transfer request was the nuclear option and, once the button had been pressed, the deal would always go through. Clubs would feel they simply had to take the money. But that no longer applies.

The riches that the current TV deal has bestowed on the Premier League’s clubs – and the assurance of 60% more from the next cycle, which runs between 2016-19 – have empowered the medium-sized and smaller ones to resist the big offers for their stars. Everton, for example, stood firm when Chelsea offered massive money for John Stones – another player who had put in an official transfer request.

Levy stands accused of misjudging the market while his tried and trusted brinkmanship came to look outdated. Was there ever going to be a financial plus from taking in-coming business down to the wire? West Brom might have sold Berahino for £25m but never for less and it is fair to say that Tottenham were made fully aware of that. Their chances of signing Berahino would have been far greater had they offered £25m a few weeks ago.

There is also the issue of Levy’s previous coming back to haunt him. Put simply, you can only put noses out of joint so many times. Southampton felt sore last summer when Levy took Pochettino from them, and followed that up by making unacceptable moves for Morgan Schneiderlin and Jay Rodriguez. They were never going to let Wanyama go this summer and they were absolutely never going to sell him to Tottenham.

There are numerous stories within the game of Levy making offers that serve only to infuriate – most recently, one of his bids for Berahino featured payments of £3.5m each year for five years. It might have added up to an OK bid but it did not create the right climate for further negotiations. At West Brom they joked that Tottenham would still be paying their proposed add-ons when Berahino was drawing his pension. Levy is a famously hard negotiator but he can and does make things more difficult for himself.

Pochettino has been left to count the cost and it has been easy to make the connection between the team’s disappointing start to the season and the unbalanced nature of the squad, even if the manager himself refuses to do so. Tottenham have three points and three goals from their opening four matches.

The Argentinian is playing the 21-year-old centre-half, Eric Dier, in defensive midfield while the burden on Kane seemed to get to him when he missed a one-on-one with the Everton goalkeeper, Tim Howard, on Saturday.

There has been an attempt to paint Son Heung-min, who joined from Bayer Leverkusen for £22m last Friday, as a possible solution up front but he is more renowned for playing off the flank, as is the other attacking new boy, Clinton Njie – who joined from Lyon for £10m two and a half weeks ago. N’Jie has yet to feature as he is short of fitness, after an injury in pre-season.

Levy has succeeded in shipping out most of the dead wood in the squad, not to mention retaining Kane and the goalkeeper, Hugo Lloris – both of whom were on Manchester United’s list of targets.

In broader terms Levy has presided over consistently decent league finishes while balancing the books and playing out of a stadium that generates revenue from only 36,000 seats. In the past six seasons, starting with the most recent, Tottenham have finished fifth, sixth, fifth, fourth, fifth and fourth, which represents their most sustained level of achievement since the glory, glory days of the 1960s.

Then, there is the new stadium which, when the club finally get there, in 2018-19, stands to lift them in so many ways. In the meantime, though, Levy must continue to run a tight ship and it has been difficult not to link his low net spend on transfer fees in recent windows (it was £5.7m in this past one) with the imperative to bankroll the project, which will cost between £400m and £450m.

Stadium naming rights will not cover it and the TV money that the club receives will play a big part. Consequently Levy wants to preserve as much of it as possible, rather than going on a transfer market blow-out and, besides, a lack of debt will help to secure better deals from the banks. The financial upside of the new stadium would be seriously negated if Tottenham had to pay themselves out of the red for years and years.

There is something of a post-window daze at Tottenham and a section of the fan-base has rebelled against Levy over the gaps in the playing staff.

Nobody came out of the Berahino affair well, least of all Tottenham, and Pochettino must now rouse his young squad – half of whom are aged 23 or under. The pressure on Son and Njie will be substantial and one final thing is clear: the team desperately need a win at Sunderland on Sunday week.