Spurs have just announced the £85m signing of Mateus Fernandes from West Ham.
The general response from fans to the shattering of their transfer record has been ‘Okay, fine, but when are you going to shatter it again?’
And they’re not even wrong, because at some point in the hours or days ahead they will apparently do just that by casually signing Sandro Tonali from Newcastle for £100m. That’s the one that will really shift the needle.
Okay, we can’t just ignore the outsized fee for Fernandes or the identity of the clubs Spurs have beaten to his signature, but it’s not entirely Non Spurs behaviour. Fernandes is a young, up-and-coming talent who has shown vast potential in a couple of dreadful Premier League sides. Pretend for a second that £85m is £55m and that July 2 is August 30 and you’ve got yourself a solidly Spurs-adjacent transfer.
Tonali represents the very best halfway-available career-peak type of a very specific kind of player in the whole Premier League, and we simply cannot recall when Spurs last bought one of those. Spurs create those players for other teams, sure, but they absolutely don’t buy them off the peg.
There’s also the fact that it is the first week of July and we’re talking about close to £200m being dropped on the fifth and potentially sixth additions to Tottenham’s first-team squad already.
Just to go right back and check we’re all the on same page. Spurs. It is Spurs that are doing this. Tottenham Hotspur Football Club. Those guys. First week of July.
This is not normal. We’re not even at all sure it’s definitely good or wise. Spurs are throwing an awful lot of money into signings very specifically for a manager with a proven penchant for f*cking off in a huff every 18 months.
The knock-on effect of Spurs suddenly deciding to behave like a big club and throw big-club fees and – perhaps even more importantly – wages around the place is that a lot of promising young players are set to be cut adrift.
They have already agreed the £46m sale of Luka Vuskovic to Brighton. Lucas Bergvall and Archie Gray look a long way from first-team plans now for a Europe-less season. And we have to assume at some point Spurs are going to need some serious outgoings to finance all these jaw-dropping incomings.
But what it all undeniably is, is spectacularly exciting.
What Old Spurs would have done this summer is not even look at Mateus Fernandes or Sandro Tonali. They would have made Joao Palhinha’s loan move permanent for £30m. And you know what? That would have been absolutely fine. People might have had a tiny raise of an eyebrow at the price for a player in his 30s, but nobody would have thought that was Classic Spursy or a desperately negative, unambitious move. It would have been fine. Absolutely fine.
Try to picture yourself on a different, saner timeline where that is precisely what Spurs did. Then imagine yourself going on one of the social media hellscapes they have now and going ‘Why are Spurs making Palhinha’s loan permanent instead of signing Mateus Fernandes and Sandro Tonali?’ Then imagine the very correct response you would have received to that madness.
We may never know exactly what Spurs said to Roberto De Zerbi to convince him to come and save them from themselves on that excruciating, nerve-shredding run-in last season. But we’re starting to see the idea. He knew a desperate club when he saw one.
This is a Spurs manager being backed in a way we’ve just never, ever seen before. His top targets, in timely fashion, with only apparently minimal regard to the cost.
This week’s utter transformation of Tottenham’s midfield comes after they’ve already done the same to their defence with the signings of Marcos Senesi, Jan Paul van Hecke and Andy Robertson. Premier League-proven, Barclays-hardened and ready for battle the lot of them. What kind of thing is happening here?
It is simply not the Spurs way. The Spurs way is to see a manager performing gravity-defying miracles ask, if it’s not too much trouble, for maybe one Sadio Mane or Jack Grealish if that’s at all possible, as a little treat, and instead be given nothing.
Joao Moutinho? Bit rich for our blood, chap. Would a Lewis Holtby suffice?
You’d like a Bruno Fernandes? We have Gedson Fernandes at home.
The gist of the wider response from a baffled football world is, very understandably, how and why are Spurs suddenly doing this now?
A better question might be why are Spurs only suddenly doing this now?
The only reason rival fans are baffled as to how Spurs suddenly have this money to spend is because Spurs have never spent their money like this before. Which is also part of why they now have so much of it to spend right now.
But this is a club that has been existing under largely self-imposed (relative) parsimony for 25 years. This is a club that was a hair away from being a genuine title challenger and then just let the squad stagnate with zero first-team arrivals for three straight transfer windows.
This is a club that looked at the best available but always settled for the supermarket own brand option, often from the yellow-sticker fridge because it was about to go off. But a bargain’s a bargain.
Two obvious changes exist behind this lurching change of direction from Spurs, both of them pretty obvious.
Most obviously of all, last season clearly terrified them. Spurs were a club that had grown horribly complacent and sure of their position in English football’s circle of life. That desperate scramble to safety despite themselves over the last six games of the season might well be one of English football’s great sliding doors moments.
The other reason for the change in Spurs’ style is the departure of Daniel Levy, a man who – fairly or otherwise – always gave the impression of always being more interested in winning the battle with a rival chairman over a transfer than the impact this had for Spurs on the pitch.
And by the end he wasn’t even particularly good at that. The greatest frustration with Spurs’ recent transfer activity wasn’t the faffing or delays or the brinkmanship so much as the fact they still generally came off second best anyway.
Their late-window Levytime ‘bargains’ in recent years have all involved still paying top whack for Brennan Johnson or Dominic Solanke or Xavi Simons anyway. Levy was no longer even winning the game on his own terms, never mind Tottenham’s.
And his Spurs regime were always abysmal at selling players, again with far too much apparent emphasis on winning the deal than helping the squad.
Spurs do need to make some serious sales over the weeks ahead now, but there are signs of at least some flexibility and willingness to bend here as well.
The sale of Brennan Johnson for good-not-great money at the start of January was welcome. The failure to replace him was near-catastrophic, but the willingness to do a deal for a player who wasn’t contributing after a regime change was unSpurslike.
Likewise Vuskovic. Because it’s Spurs, there’s a sense that they must have f*cked this. They might have. But he’s not a Roberto De Zerbi defender, and still looks way short of top Premier League class. Spurs have made a huge profit on a player who never even played a first-team game for them.
When other clubs do this, we hail their transfer-market knowhow. Spurs have never displayed any such knowhow, so it’s understandable to assume this is a bust as well, but it really might not be.
And what it undoubtedly is, at least, is pragmatic and realistic.
That seems an odd description of a summer where Spurs are smashing records, but a look at other spare parts they will now be looking to sell in a market they themselves have inflated means it’s not wild to imagine recouping something close to £200m in player sales. Vuskovic, Guglielmo Vicario, Radu Dragusin, Cristian Romero, Pape Sarr and your Grays and Bergvalls all now look a long way from the first-team picture at a rapidly-changing Spurs and all will have interest from some deep-pocketed clubs.
The impossible to answer but most exciting question of all is…what does all of this actually mean for Spurs and the rest of the league? That’s where this gets tantalising and there’s almost no downside for those outside looking in.
It might all be absolutely brilliant. We might see De Zerbiball the like of which we’ve never seen before. It’s almost certain to be hypnotically watchable. One stat we’re already looking out for is Spurs attempting more through-balls on matchday one this season than in the whole of their wretchedly unwatchable 2025/26 Premier League season.
There remains, of course, the fantastically Spursy possibility based on their business so far that they really could fashion for themselves a defence and midfield the envy of the rest of the league, but still have the chaotic pinball stylings of Richarlison contributing 11 goals from 35 appearances up top. That’s a fun possibility.
They could crash and burn completely, of course, and end up in another relegation battle. Because they are Spurs and you must never entirely discount Spurs’ capacity for exploding their own feet with a well-directed shotgun.
But there’s also no denying that they’ve picked a tantalising summer to start behaving like something approaching a big club. A summer when uncertainty stalks the land. A summer where Liverpool, Man City, Chelsea and Man United are all embarking on their own journeys into the unknown under new managers and, at this time, none of them as compellingly as the daftest team among them.
Summer is the time for idle dreaming, and a club that has deservedly finished 17th two seasons running are giving their fans reason to dream big.
And whether they soar or fall, it’s going to be spectacular.
