Roberto De Zerbi on what lies ahead for Tottenham.
Roberto De Zerbi sat down with SPURSPLAY presenter Ben Haines after the Everton victory and delivered an interview that deserves reading in full (by Tottenham fans at least) rather than being extracted in bullet points. The man had just spent 56 days underwater. RDZ had only managed eight competitive matches but with the highest stakes ever.
He had kept a historically underperforming club in the Premier League on goal difference. He could, not unreasonably, have asked for a few days to breathe. Instead he talked about next season.
Spoke of closing one page and opening another page. The framing is characteristically Italian in its directness: acknowledge the achievement, close the file, and move forward. There is no dwelling on the magnitude of what was accomplished or what was avoided. The season is finished. The window is open. The work, the real work, begins now.
Now, the work starts!
The most revealing passage concerns his philosophy for the coming season and how it differs from the survival operation he has just concluded. He was asked directly whether he had held back on implementing his ideas during the final eight matches. His answer was precise.
“I was not so strong because I thought maybe to go too strong is like losing energy because you can win with the style, but first of all, you need the spirit, the attitude, the behaviour. The next season, I’m ready to go stronger.”
That sentence contains everything a Tottenham supporter needs to understand about what the last 56 days were and were not. They were not De Zerbi’s football. They were De Zerbi’s crisis management. The tactical improvements were genuine, the defensive solidity was real, the improvement in shots on target conceded from 4.35 to 2.0 per game was not accidental.
But the framework that produced those improvements was a compressed, simplified version of what he actually wants to build. What comes next, with a full pre-season, with the squad’s full complement of players, with the time to properly embed the details he was not able to force upon exhausted players in a survival battle, is categorically different.
A man who has managed in Italy, the Premier League, and France’s top division says that keeping Tottenham in the Premier League on goal difference was the best day of his professional life. This is what 56 days of sustained existential pressure produces when it resolves in survival rather than catastrophe. It is also, perhaps, the most Tottenham thing that anyone has said about this football club all season. Now the job starts.