From Sunderland Tears to Sydney Smiles: Tottenham's Transformation
There was a point last spring when Roberto De Zerbi looked around the away dressing room at the Stadium of Light and wondered aloud: “Did we pass away?”
Players were flat on their backs. Some were in tears. Tottenham had just lost 1-0 at Sunderland in his first game in charge, the first of seven matches to save a club drifting towards the Championship. Survival came only on the final day. The mood was funereal.
Four months later, the scene could not be more different.
From Sunderland tears to Sydney smiles
In a plush Sydney hotel, a short walk from the Harbour Bridge and Opera House, Spurs’ squad now buzzes with life. Laughter leaks out of a private floor reserved for the team. A club barista serves coffees. Competitive table tennis matches run late into the evening as a record £237m worth of new signings settle in.
Sandro Tonali, Mateus Fernandes, Jan Paul van Hecke, Andrew Robertson and Martin Dubravka have all pulled on the shirt on this pre-season tour of Australia and New Zealand. Marcos Senesi, fresh from featuring in the World Cup final with Argentina, skipped the tour on extended leave but is now on the grass at Hotspur Way.
The contrast with that broken Sunderland dressing room is stark. So is De Zerbi’s ambition.
“I deserve to want the top players, because now Tottenham deserves to build up a top team,” the 47-year-old insists. He no longer talks about staying up. He talks about building.
Two plans, one escape
Tottenham had drawn up two transfer blueprints last season: one for relegation, one for survival. The club came perilously close to activating the wrong one.
De Zerbi says he would have stayed even in the Championship. He is relieved he never had to prove it. Plan A, the Premier League plan, is in full swing.
At the heart of that plan sits a blunt conversation he had with his squad in April.
“At the beginning of my time in April I had one million individual meetings,” he says with a grin. Players who wanted out were told to be honest. The answer back from De Zerbi was even more direct.
“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.”
Some of those players, such as captain Cristian Romero and goalkeeper Guglielmo Vicario, could yet move on. De Zerbi says he will “respect the will” of those who want a new challenge. But he does so from a position of strength, not panic.
New faces, new power structure
The overhaul at Spurs has not stopped at the touchline. The club has shifted structurally as well as emotionally.
New chief executive Vinai Venkatesham now fronts the organisation on behalf of the Lewis Family Trust. Technical director Johan Lange, the lone survivor from the previous regime, works alongside him on recruitment. They are joined by director of football operations Rafi Moersen and performance director Dan Lewindon, both hired from City Football Group.
Lewindon’s brief is simple and ruthless: improve Tottenham’s injury record.
De Zerbi, though, is not a coach who stays in his lane. He has thrown himself into every corner of the club, none more so than the transfer market.
“In the transfer market, when I want one player, I become like a shark,” he says. “No chance to say no.”
That relentlessness has underpinned two record-breaking deals: £85m for Fernandes from West Ham and £100m for Tonali from Newcastle. This is not a coach reluctantly tolerating recruitment meetings. This is a coach who relishes them.
“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.”
Why? For De Zerbi, the answer lies in ownership.
“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 Fernandes, that connection began not with the player, but with his family. De Zerbi spoke to the midfielder’s parents and told his father he would be a “second dad” to Mateus in England.
Beating the giants
Tottenham have not just spent. They have competed.
They signed Van Hecke despite interest from Chelsea. They beat Manchester United and Manchester City to both Tonali and Fernandes. For a club that flirted with relegation, that is a sharp change in perception.
Insiders describe Spurs’ approach as aggressive and quick. That aggression applied to fees and wages, but also to De Zerbi’s personal involvement. He did not sit back and wait for presentations; he picked up the phone.
After a 2-2 draw with Brighton in April, when Georginio Rutter’s 95th-minute equaliser damaged Spurs’ survival hopes, De Zerbi went straight for Van Hecke, who 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,” he told him.
With Tonali, the pursuit was just as targeted. The day after Spurs secured their Premier League status with a final-day win over Everton, De Zerbi sent the midfielder a message. Then he flew to Brescia to meet him at home. That conversation proved decisive. Club staff closed the deal in the days that followed.
And he is not done. De Zerbi teases one final attacking “bomba” – two forwards expected, one of them Manchester City’s Savinho.
Spending with a plan
The numbers are eye-catching. So is the context.
The Lewis family injected £100m into the club in June. De Zerbi insists he is under “no pressure” from that investment and rejects the idea that Tottenham are spending recklessly. He points to Chelsea, Arsenal and Liverpool as recent examples of clubs forced to pump money in to compete.
There have been exits too. Spurs banked around £45m from Luka Vuskovic’s move to Brighton. Uncertainty lingers over midfielder Lucas Bergvall and England full-back Djed Spence.
“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 logic also drove a notable non-transfer. Spurs chose not to sign Joao Palhinha permanently from Bayern Munich, not because De Zerbi doubted the player, but because the overall financial package did not fit the model.
Discipline, he believes, is as important as ambition.
Cleaning the air
The Sunderland defeat did not just scar the players. It seeped into the training ground.
“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 survival alone would not fix the atmosphere. Spurs had finished 17th the previous season under Ange Postecoglou, but that campaign came with a Europa League triumph and none of the same fear of relegation. Last year felt different. It left marks.
De Zerbi has set about changing the “behaviour, attitude and spirit” of a group he felt had started to believe the worst about themselves.
He took the players out for “one big dinner in Mayfair, with alcohol”. It was not a team-building exercise dressed up as a lecture. It was a night out. A reminder that footballers are human, that they can enjoy each other’s company without a whiteboard in sight.
He still thinks Spurs were unlucky in their final matches and could have secured safety earlier. But he also thinks the squad’s self-image had sunk lower than the public perception.
“I think they considered themselves in that moment worse than the people thought,” he says. The healing, he admits, is ongoing. “I hope next time they organise [dinner and drinks] for themselves.”
That is the endgame for him: a team that polices its own standards and nurtures its own bonds.
“With love, friendship and care, you become top, top, top.”
From Sunderland’s tears to Sydney’s table tennis, Tottenham have dragged themselves off the floor. The question now is not whether they can stay up, but how high this rebuilt, re-energised club can climb.
