Tottenham manager Jose Mourinho has called for backing from the club’s hierarchy to create a united dressing room after accusing outside influences of disrupting his team.

Spurs beat Aston Villa 2-0 on Sunday to relieve the pressure on Mourinho and lift the gloom following their humiliating 3-0 defeat to Dinamo Zagreb, which dumped them out of Europe.

After the loss in Croatia, Mourinho accused his players of not following his instructions and lacking professionalism, while captain Hugo Lloris painted a grim picture of a divided dressing room in a post-match TV interview.

Speaking after returning to winning ways at Villa Park through goals from Carlos Vinicius and Harry Kane, Mourinho appeared to confirm Lloris’s suggestion that Spurs’s players are not all pulling in the same direction and called for time to develop the right spirit at the club.

Asked about dressing room harmony, he told Sky Sports: “Football nowadays is not easy in relation to that.

“The selfishness is around, the individual interests are around, the agents are around, the connections between agents and press are around.

“And instead of developing a feeling of a team, empathy, ‘I do for you, you do for me’, ‘I win if I play 90 minutes, I win if I am in the stands’. This is something that you need time to develop this in a group. Nowadays you need time because society and the psychological profile of younger people is not an easy one.

“I want to be proud of my players, it does not matter the result. And during my career I was proud of my players many times after defeats. I was not proud last Thursday or at the Emirates.

“For me, more than thinking about what position we are going to finish, whether we are going to win the [Carabao Cup] Final, is to try to develop this spirt that we need. But I cannot do it alone. I have to do it with my club. I have to do it with my players in the dressing room. But tonight I am really happy with what they did.”