Tottenham's Transformation: From Tears in Sunderland to New Ambitions
There was a point last spring when Roberto de Zerbi looked around the Tottenham dressing room and wondered out loud: “Did we pass away?”
Players lay flat on the floor at the Stadium of Light, some in tears, after a 1-0 defeat at Sunderland in his first game in charge. Spurs were brittle, broken and staring down the barrel. Seven games to save a season. Seven games to save a club from the humiliation of relegation.
They survived on the final day. Barely. But four months on, the scene could not feel more different.
From tears in Sunderland to coffees in Sydney
In Sunderland, the mood was funereal. In Sydney, it’s almost carefree.
On a private floor of the team hotel, a short walk from the Harbour Bridge and Opera House, De Zerbi’s squad move with an ease that felt impossible back in April. Laughter carries down the corridor. Players drift between coffees poured by their own barista and fiercely contested table tennis matches. The tone has changed, and so has the team.
Tottenham have dropped a club-record £237m on new signings, and the pre-season tour has become an early laboratory for a rebuilt side that wants to climb back into English football’s elite and chase silverware again.
Sandro Tonali, the £100m centrepiece from Newcastle, is already in the thick of it. So is £85m midfielder Mateus Fernandes, snapped up from West Ham. Jan Paul van Hecke has slotted into defence, Andrew Robertson has arrived to add steel and delivery from the left, and Martin Dubravka has joined the goalkeeping group.
Marcos Senesi, fresh from Argentina’s World Cup final run, was given extended leave and missed the trip to Australia and New Zealand. He’s now back at Hotspur Way, starting to fold into the new structure.
“I deserve to want the top players, because now Tottenham deserves to build up a top team,” De Zerbi says. There’s no apology in the line. Just intent.
Plan A, not Plan B
Spurs came into the summer with two transfer blueprints: one for survival, one for relegation. The margins were that thin.
De Zerbi insists he would have stayed even if they had dropped into the Championship. Instead, he gets to work from Plan A – the version that involves Champions League-level midfielders, a reshaped spine and the delicate handling of stars who may still leave.
Club captain Cristian Romero and goalkeeper Guglielmo Vicario could yet move on. De Zerbi talks about “respecting the will” of players, but he made the stakes clear when he walked through the door in April.
“At the beginning of my time in April I had one million individual meetings,” he jokes. “They told me if they didn’t want to be here. I said: ‘Yes, help me to stay up, and then I help you to leave.
“‘If you don’t help me to stay up, you stay underwater with me’.”
The message landed. Spurs clung on.
A new power structure, same sharp coach
The club around him has changed almost as radically as the squad.
New chief executive Vinai Venkatesham now runs Tottenham on behalf of the Lewis Family Trust. He and technical director Johan Lange – the only survivor from the previous hierarchy – front the negotiations.
Behind them, director of football operations Rafi Moersen and performance director Dan Lewindon, both recruited from City Football Group, are reshaping the machinery. Lewindon’s brief is blunt: fix Spurs’ injury record.
De Zerbi, though, inserts himself everywhere. He revels in it.
“In the transfer market, when I want one player, I become like a shark,” he says. “No chance to say no.”
That predator’s instinct helped land Fernandes and Tonali for a combined £185m. These are not background signings; they are declarations.
“I love working in the transfer market. It’s not a pressure, it’s one of the nicest parts in my work, in my job,” he explains. The attraction, he says, comes from the responsibility.
“When you take the decision, you take the responsibility. If the coach calls the player, you can build a special connection at the beginning. With Mateus Fernandes, I spoke with the mum, with the father.”
He told Fernandes’ father he would be the midfielder’s “second dad” in England. It is part sales pitch, part promise.
Beating the giants and texting the enemy
Spurs’ new aggression has not gone unnoticed across the league.
They took Fernandes ahead of Manchester United and Manchester City. They signed Tonali when the expectation was that he would stay central to Newcastle’s project. They persuaded Van Hecke to join despite interest from Chelsea.
Insiders describe a clear strategy: move fast, push hard on fees and wages, and deploy De Zerbi as the closer. Transfers as game theory, with a manager happy to play the starring role.
The personal touch can be ruthless. After a 2-2 draw with Brighton in April, when Georginio Rutter’s 95th-minute equaliser rocked Spurs’ survival bid, De Zerbi went straight to the source of his frustration.
Van Hecke had provided the assist.
“You wanted to push down Tottenham for Brighton when you made the assist to Rutter, now you have to come to me, you have no choice,” De Zerbi told him in a message.
For Tonali, the move began the day after survival was secured with a final-day win over Everton. De Zerbi texted the midfielder, then flew to meet him at his home in Brescia. That conversation proved decisive. Club staff handled the rest.
Now he talks about one more attacking “bomba” – two forwards expected, one of them Manchester City’s Savinho. The rebuild is not finished.
Spending big, thinking long
From the outside, £237m in one window looks like a gamble. De Zerbi rejects the idea that Spurs are throwing money around without control.
He points to the £100m injection from the Lewis family in June and notes that Chelsea, Arsenal and Liverpool have all operated at similar levels in recent seasons. He insists he is under “no pressure” from above, only the demands he places on himself.
There have been exits too. Luka Vuskovic’s £45m move to Brighton brought in a substantial fee. The futures of Lucas Bergvall and Djed Spence remain uncertain.
“We assessed the request of Vuskovic [to join Brighton], with Vinai, with Johan together, because I consider Tottenham’s money my money,” De Zerbi says.
“It’s like the owner is my father, I think you don’t want to ask your father to lose money.
“Like all the big clubs, we have to sell a player at as big of a price as possible and we have to bring a player with a small price, we are starting for a plan of five seasons because we are building.”
That discipline also underpinned the decision not to take Joao Palhinha permanently from Bayern Munich. It was not about talent; it was about the financial package. Spurs walked away.
Cleaning the air after Sunderland
The damage from last season ran deeper than the league table. The Sunderland defeat didn’t just crush the players; it seeped into the staff.
“The day after I organised a meeting without players and I said, ‘The first one I see say something negative, I send you home immediately’,” De Zerbi recalls.
He knew he had to scrub the negativity out of the building. The club had finished 17th the year before as well, but that campaign came with a Europa League triumph under Ange Postecoglou and none of the same dread. This time, the fear was real.
So he changed tack. In May, he took the players out.
“One big dinner in Mayfair, with alcohol,” he says. It wasn’t a team-bonding exercise out of a manual. It was a reminder that they were still allowed to feel like footballers, not survivors clinging to a ledge.
He believes Spurs were unlucky in their final matches and could have secured safety earlier. More importantly, he thinks the players saw themselves in a harsher light than the outside world did.
“I think they considered themselves in that moment worse than the people thought,” he admits. The healing is not complete.
“I hope next time they organise [dinner and drinks] for themselves.
“With love, friendship and care, you become top, top, top.”
The question now is whether that love, and a £237m rebuild, can drag Tottenham from the edge of the abyss back to where De Zerbi insists they belong.
