De Zerbi's Tottenham Bet Is Spiraling Into a Full-Season Crisis

Tottenham have a tell. Well, really it’s a Tel. If Mathys Tel is starting, something has either gone wrong, or is about to. Since winning his first two matches, Tel has started 25 matches for Spurs and won four — two against teams subsequently relegated — and that scrabbling, screeching dive for survival against Everton.

Yes, he’s 21. He’s started fewer than 100 professional matches. His ill-suitedness is not entirely his fault. At a club capable of developing rather than traumatising him, he could be very good at this. At Tottenham, that great air fryer for brains, Tel seems destined to rot. Under September sun at the City Ground he delivered some truly atrocious corners, unless he was aiming for the first man’s groin, ran the road to nowhere, produced no shots and nothing remotely impactful.

Spurs failed to score in three consecutive league games for the first time in just shy of five years. After last season’s final-day reprieve, Roberto De Zerbi spoke of creating “the team I have in my dream in my head.” Just shy of £400 million later, here it is — neither daring nor doing, as empty and blurred as a dream but otherwise still damningly, dangerously real.

This might be their first point of 2026-27, but they should not even have earned that. Neco Williams’s goal was disallowed for handball, yet his hands were only in front of his face to stop Sandro Tonali’s laces rearranging his cheekbones. Jan Paul van Hecke and Tonali had both rushed to clear Morgan Gibbs-White’s chip off the line, only to clear it back into themselves and goalwards once more — symptomatic of a wider desperation carved into everything Spurs do, intense yet disorganised, passionate without much semblance of a plan.

Triggering this panicked frenzy was De Zerbi’s masterplan to keep them up across a six-game stretch. It could be how he gets them relegated across a whole season.

It showed in Omar Marmoush firing balls everywhere but on target, in Tel’s corners, Tonali’s passes to no one, and the general idea of Conor Gallagher. The £85m Mateus Fernandes was benched for the second of three league games and then booked within a minute of coming on. Late in second-half added time Mohammed Kudus was pulled up for a foul throw. Worst of all, on 75 minutes Mykhailo Mudryk emerged, hair freshly bleached, Tel 2.0, De Zerbi’s “I can fix him” project.

Had Williams’s goal stood, Tottenham would not have recovered. They have won zero of their past 44 matches after going behind — a run standing at a year and 10 months. For the third consecutive match they held almost 60% possession at a time most mid-table clubs are fighting to not have the ball, the era of possession for possession’s sake largely dead.

In each of Spurs’ Premier League matches this season, you inevitably end up wondering why they didn’t buy any number of opposition players. For slightly more than their summer transfer outlay — far less factoring wages — Tottenham could have signed every Nottingham Forest player per their Transfermarkt valuations, or bought Brentford in full, taken all their players and coach and started afresh, turned the Gtech into luxury flats.

Tottenham have not just supported De Zerbi but handed him total control. This is his club now, built to his specifications and whims. Van Hecke, Mudryk, and Tonali are all his players, the product of his conceits — and yet he has taken to playing Tonali on the left of midfield, a role he rarely played for Newcastle and one he looks largely uncomfortable in, not quite reading the angles or space.

Punting your club’s future on a man who has spent more than two seasons in the same place only once in the past decade — at Sassuolo — is not just inadvisable but deeply irresponsible.

Unlike the Levy era, they are gambling their future here. They have signed ten players at inflated prices with no realistic expectation of profit on any of them, spent the summer with a “mug me” sticker stapled to their foreheads, and broken their pre-summer transfer record three times. Obliterating their wage structure while still offering long contracts leaves them massively susceptible to anything going wrong and significantly limits their ability to keep tinkering.

What happens if it goes wrong from here? Another reset? Another head coach chasing an impossible perfection? In backing De Zerbi so aggressively, Vinai Venkatesham and Johan Lange are also attempting to abdicate responsibility, protecting themselves by saying they gave him what he wanted — ignoring that this isn’t the same as what he needed.

A thought for Barney Ray, just appointed into perhaps the most difficult job in sport as Tottenham’s sports psychologist — like becoming Charles Manson’s therapist, or Mr and Mrs Incredible’s childminder. For all £380m committed this summer, perhaps Ray is the key signing, the man who really deserves a protracted bidding war and £250,000 a week.

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On the positives: this may have been Tottenham’s best performance to date this season, and yet they still failed to force a save. Marmoush at least attempted to create something for the second straight match. They didn’t concede, technically. And they might not be so reliant on Tel anymore, even if he is contracted until 2031. They’ve got Mudryk now.

Follow TipsGG for continued coverage of Tottenham’s season as De Zerbi’s project faces its most defining weeks yet.