When Georginio Rutter buried his 95th-minute equaliser to silence the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium two weeks ago, it felt to many people like the knockout blow.
To have come that close to a first league win of 2026, to have worked so hard, to have ridden the emotional wave of Xavi Simons’ goal, only to throw it all away at the end, it could barely have been more painful. The Spurs players looked utterly devastated, collapsed on the ground, struggling to get back onto their feet. The whole stadium felt as if someone had pressed the mute button.
But while most fans sank into a very understandable fatalism, there was one man who refused. And that was Roberto De Zerbi. This was only his second game in charge of Spurs, but he already knew what Spurs needed if they were to have any chance of staying in the Premier League. He knew he had to get Spurs back off the mat.
So De Zerbi walked into his post-match press conference and immediately talked up his broken players. “This team is able to win five games in a row”, he said about a team that had not won a league game since December, had not won two in a row since August, had not won three in a row since February 2025, had not won four in a row since October 2023 and had not won five in a row since December 2018.
“Now it is difficult to hear my words,” he admitted, “but if you watch the players, if you analyse the level of the players, I think we can win five games in a row.”
It felt vaguely fantastical at the time, but the thinking was clear. Someone at Tottenham Hotspur had to be ambitious, had to be positive, had to talk up the players and the club. And who better to do it than their new head coach?
Ever since De Zerbi arrived just over one month ago, he has profoundly grasped the psychological aspect of his job. He knows that he has to be the one who sets the tone for the dressing room, for the football club, and for the whole fanbase. No one else is going to do that for him. And so it carried real weight when De Zerbi insisted that anyone who showed up to training on Monday without a smile would be sent home, and that he had “no time to see negative people”, whether players or coaches. “I don’t like people who cry, who think in a negative way.”
Two weeks on and De Zerbi’s Spurs have two wins from their last two with three games left. They have responded to the Brighton game with two consecutive away wins at Wolverhampton Wanderers and Aston Villa. Sunday night was their best league performance since the early months of Ange Postecoglou’s time at the club. Given the dizzyingly high stakes, and Spurs’ injury crisis, it may be even more valuable than that.
What especially stood out on Sunday was the total conviction and confidence of the Tottenham players. Not since Postecoglou have they gone into a game looking like they had a religious belief in what the manager has asked them to do. Given that De Zerbi only took his first training session on 3 April, that is testament to the buy-in he has already generated from the group.
Everything that De Zerbi has said and done since his arrival has shown that he knows that Tottenham’s fundamental problem is psychological, which means that the solution must be psychological too. How else to diagnose the collapse of a big team into the relegation zone?
After months of negativity, De Zerbi has talked up his players at every opportunity. After his first game, De Zerbi spoke about the players needing him to be a “brother or father” rather than a coach. What he needed to do, more than anything else, was to get inside the players’ heads. Even if clearing out that mental block was an act of Herculean plumbing.
Last week, for example, De Zerbi detailed his motivational work with Randal Kolo Muani, a player who had not always looked fully motivated, and who many fans had given up on. But that work was justified by Kolo Muani’s far-improved performance on Sunday. It was his best for the club. He was a constant nuisance to opponents, winning 50-50s all over the pitch. Suddenly, good players are playing at their level again. Suddenly, Spurs, for the first time in a long time, look like a team.
That, more than a complicated playing style, has been the essence of De Zerbi’s work so far. Spurs pressed Villa brilliantly on Sunday, their best performance without the ball for years. But the point is that De Zerbi is giving his players clear, simple instructions — and that the players believe that those instructions are the gospel truth. Just look at Conor Gallagher’s post-match interview on Sunday night, when he spoke about how De Zerbi makes the players feel, and how much they trust him. The fact that he continued to believe in them and talk them up even when things looked lost will mean the world to the players
There was a strange feeling watching the scenes at the final whistle on Sunday. This season at Spurs has been dominated by discord and rancour, by players, managers and fans being at each other’s throats. Far too many games have ended in toxicity. The fans and players were talked down far too often, when in fact what they needed was a shared enterprise, a shared belief. This club only works when everyone pulls together. On Sunday night, you could sense the first glimmer of unity Spurs have experienced since Bilbao almost one year ago.
You could even sense the first glimmer of momentum, or at least positive momentum, after these two away wins in a row. Of course, Tottenham are still in a perilous position, a position that should still keep people awake at night. If West Ham get a result against Arsenal on Sunday, then Spurs will be back in the relegation zone with all the pressure returned to them.
The challenge for De Zerbi will be to maintain that new psychological dynamic he has found. It has released Spurs players to be themselves again, to perform as they used to, to make Tottenham look like Tottenham again.
He has already got into the players’ heads, cleaned out the mental block and got them playing again. Now they have to go and do it again against Leeds.