In total, 22 former players came to the ‘Alumni Lunch’ at the Tottenham Hotspur training ground on August 13.
The oldest of those meeting the current players were the two 81-year-olds, Pat Jennings and Phil Beal, veterans of Bill Nicholson’s team of the 1960s. There were players from the Keith Burkinshaw era, too: Steve Perryman, Glenn Hoddle, Chris Hughton, Mark Falco and Graham Roberts. There were winners of the 1991 FA Cup, Erik Thorstvedt, Gary Mabbutt, David Howells. And more modern greats, from Les Ferdinand to Jermain Defoe to Michael Dawson.
Between them all there were a combined 6,509 Tottenham appearances and 41 major trophies. It is hard to remember a greater concentration of combined Tottenham wisdom, Tottenham understanding, in any given room at any time.
After they watched training — as far as was possible given it was the hottest day of the year — the veteran players had lunch with the current Tottenham squad, and head coach Roberto De Zerbi. Giving them a rare chance to share with what in some cases were players young enough to be their grandchildren what it meant to them to play for Spurs.
Behind this was a simple idea, one that has been a big part of Tottenham’s busy summer: to reconnect the club to its past, to remind everyone of its roots and the people who had come before them. Which is why there has been a new focus on ‘Legacy Numbers’, for both the men’s and women’s teams, to place every individual player in the long line of those who came before them.
Next month Tottenham will relaunch their ‘Hall of Fame’ by the players’ tunnel in the new stadium, with new inductees in addition to the current 45.
All of this might sound very obvious. Or, worse than obvious, like heart-warming shareable PR content to juice the mood on the eve of the new season. But the reality of Tottenham Hotspur in the last few years is that the club has become unmoored from any real sense of what it means to be Tottenham. And one of the big questions and challenges for the club going into this new season is to finally reconnect.
The face of the club now is Roberto De Zerbi, who will start his Tottenham tenure in earnest on Saturday with the opening weekend trip to Brentford. He was an enthusiastic participant in the ‘Alumni Lunch’ and his football — attacking and innovative — is integral to this Spurs resembling a true Spurs team this season.
But ultimately the solution to this has to be bigger than just one person. Because the problem is itself so deep, something that has grown and grown since Tottenham moved into their new stadium in 2019, if not before.
The story of modern Tottenham has been the story of near-constant resets, relaunches, rethinks, restructures, reboots, reviews and even returns, in the case of Fabio Paratici’s three months back as a co-sporting director last season.
And hanging over every single one of these attempts to draw a line under the recent past and start afresh has been a question: What is this football club trying to be?
In simple terms, it has always felt as if Tottenham Hotspur was being pulled apart by at least two competing impulses. Should it be a club that leans into its roots, its traditions, the local area, historical expectations about its style of play? Or should it instead look boldly out to the world, unencumbered by tradition, ruthlessly adopting the best practices that have worked elsewhere?
Too often in the past Tottenham have sacrificed the former in pursuit of the latter. You may date it from the move of stadium, or the decision to replace Mauricio Pochettino with Jose Mourinho seven months later, but it has been the dominant theme at Spurs for years.
Too often after that Tottenham’s starting point was to look at something that worked well somewhere else — in a different club, in a different environment — and try to copy it themselves. Like when they brought in Paratici and paired him with Antonio Conte, hoping to be as competitive as Juventus. Or when they brought in Scott Munn from City Football Group to be their first and only ever Chief Football Officer. Or even last summer when their response to the magic of Bilbao was to become Best Practice FC again, and hope that Thomas Frank could replicate the distinctive culture of Brentford in N17.
Up until recently, the internal messaging at the club was that they should aspire to be the most exciting football club in the world. Which is a nice idea but says nothing at all about Tottenham. That brand advice is now being replaced.
Even in the moments in recent years when Tottenham felt the opposing impulse to be true to themselves, it did not last. In May 2021, Levy, bruised by the sacking of Mourinho, wrote his famous message about Tottenham “DNA” and promised a return to “free-flowing, attacking and entertaining” football. But one month later, he appointed Nuno Espirito Santo. Two years later, Levy appointed Ange Postecoglou and proudly said at a fans’ event, “we’ve got our Tottenham back”. And yet Postecoglou was not fully backed in the market, and after his second season he was gone.
It took the whole club — after Levy’s departure last September — staring over the precipice of relegation to force yet another change of direction. And of course, over the last seven games of the season, De Zerbi kept them up.
It would be a generous stretch to read too much long-term strategy into the decisions of last season. The only thing that mattered was staying up, rather than any long-term football vision. And yet the end result of all this, the lucky place that Tottenham have stumbled into, is starting this season with perhaps the perfect manager to build a team that looks like Spurs.
The two best and most successful Spurs managers of recent years, Pochettino and Postecoglou, both arrived with distinctive original conceptions of the attacking football that they wanted to play. And with the strength of personality to deliver them, convincing the players and fans that their way is right.
De Zerbi seems to have both of those things. He also has more backing in the market behind him than any Tottenham manager before. The pieces are there for him to build a team that the fans will recognise as their own, with its own innovative style. Something that Spurs have not had since those opening months of Postecoglou, three years ago.
No one is expecting miracles this season, even with hundreds of millions of pounds worth of new players in the team. But Pochettino and Postecoglou each finished fifth in their first season at the club, and given all the investment, that ought to be a reasonable target. Especially if that sense of unity and alignment that marked the final weeks of last season is maintained through this one.
This particular relaunch, this reconnection with the values of the club, needs to stick.