Football
Pep Guardiola calls him one of the best coaches of the past 20 years, but Italian only has seven games to save Spurs
Run the numbers, consider the circumstances, and it becomes apparent that Tottenham hiring Roberto De Zerbi is just about the riskiest managerial appointment in the history of the Premier League.
Sure, his esteemed reputation makes him better-equipped to succeed than many before him, but what matters is not whether he could succeed. It’s whether he will.
Igor Tudor is consigned to history after trying and failing miserably at an easier gig. He took charge as interim head coach when Spurs were 16th in the table, five points above the relegation zone, still in the Champions League knockout stages, and with 12 Premier League games with which to mastermind safety.
For De Zerbi, those numbers read 17th in the table, a single point above the drop, wounds still fresh from being booted out of Europe by Atlético Madrid, and with just seven games left to save themselves.
De Zerbi has been appointed on a five-year contract
Tottenham Hotspur
Oh, and De Zerbi has signed a five-year contract with no relegation clause. Here to stay.
They tried to convince him through the door when they got Tudor, yet the higher the risk, the higher the potential reward. Now the job is even less appealing than it was, it appeals. And so here is the highest-stakes managerial appointment since the top-flight’s reformation in 1992, De Zerbi tasked with saving the Europa League holders from the same division as Lincoln City.
The appointment is a coup for under-pressure chief executive Vinai Venkatesham and sporting director Johan Lange but will be judged on these next seven games.
Confidence-shot Spurs need saving from the unimaginable. That’s the brief.
Tactical approach
“I have a big responsibility,” the new head coach accepts. This is not - and cannot afford to be - chiefly about his career or strengthening his CV.
To that end, safer jobs were out there or certainly would have been this summer. At its core, the remit stapled to De Zerbi’s desk is to be the someone the Spurs players are panging to believe in.
Following the Thomas Frank and Tudor disasters, even from the outset, he appears the sort of head coach a group of rough diamonds might place full faith in.
Players will have taken his declaration that he “will be the coach of Tottenham next season, no matter what” as a therapeutic first step.
It will all boil down to extracting as much as possible from seven football matches, so the approach is crucial.
De Zerbi does not have a relegation clause that would allow him to walk away if Spurs go down
Getty Images
His almighty success at Brighton, a new-age club, will have contributed hugely to De Zerbi’s reputation in English football, and after his May 2024 exit he told friends in Italy of his belief that his reputation on these shores as a football philosopher allergic to pragmatism is a mischaracterisation.
If his team are winning 1-0 with 10 minutes to go, he’d throw on a defender, shut up shop. He is no rebel, he insists.
“It’s not the right moment to speak about my philosophy of football,” he said last weekend.
Principles and healthy habits are the currency between now and that final game against Everton on May 24; time is against Tottenham.
He cannot simply copy and paste what worked for him at Sassuolo or Shakhtar Donetsk or Brighton or Marseille - there isn’t the time to instil it - but people don’t change overnight.
A 4-2-3-1 formation with forwards interchanging swiftly in fluid attacks can be expected.
If he feels he can trust the players in the centre of the pitch, the 46-year-old will look to deploy the De Zerbian “S”.
A pattern of build-up play that involves a passing sequence often plotting out the shape of a letter “S”, it starts with the centre-backs waiting patiently, passing between themselves, baiting the press, then pouncing when the time is right with a slipped pass into midfield, and progressing up the pitch, the opposition team always a pass behind, chasing shadows as De Zerbi’s side manoeuvre the ball forward.
Sure enough, he could be heard shouting “keep the ball, attract the pressure” at his players at Hotspur Way on Friday, on his first day taking training.
Carlo Ancelotti, then of Real Madrid, beat De Zerbi’s Shakhtar 5-0 in 2021 and had warned his players beforehand: “If you press, they will pass the ball around you. Don’t press, and they will give you the ball.”
Tudor’s back-three, long-ball was an eyesore; De Zerbi’s style has worked wherever he’s been. Spurs fans will know possession dominance is not their side’s forte but will keep faith. Risk. Reward.
Players left training on Friday and gave rave reviews to family members and their agents about his first session.
Tottenham are 17th in the Premier League, just one point outside of the relegation zone
Getty Images
“Roberto is one of the most influential managers in the last 20 years,” Pep Guardiola insisted in 2023 after a sixth-place finish in his first season delivered European football, a first in Brighton’s 122-year history. “There’s no team playing the way they play — it’s unique. I had the feeling when he arrived the impact he would have in the Premier League would be great. I didn’t expect him to do it this [quickly].”
If he is to turn Tottenham’s fortunes around even more rapidly, which is his task, you sense it will stem from playing players in their best positions and building from there.
Tudor arrived and neglected to do so. De Zerbi will not look on the Croat’s body of work from an interim reign shorter than Liz Truss’s premiership and decide to follow suit.
Power of personality
Even after accounting for Tottenham’s youth and inexperience, senior players have shirked individual responsibility for too long.
The Spurs hierarchy believe the demanding De Zerbi, his aura and reputation, should remedy that once and for all.
“I think we have to remember who we are, and who the players are,” he said in his first club interview. “They have to show what they are.”
Yes, the squad he inherits lacks players with the prestige of Harry Kane, Son Heung-min, Toby Alderweireld and Hugo Lloris, but it is without doubt a group of more talented footballers than Leeds, Nottingham Forest and West Ham, the teams in and around them, can call on.
While guarding against complacency - you’d imagine there’s not much of that flying around in N17 - once they believe they are too good to go down, that’s half the battle. Self-belief is vital. Then deliver.
At Brighton, De Zerbi had no choice but to develop and engender experience and maturity from within.
Should Spurs fail to beat the drop, it would go down as one of the Premier League's most remarkable relegations
Tottenham Hotspur / X
The next transfer window opens only after Tottenham’s fate is sealed one way or the other, so he faces the same challenge. He must develop a battle-hardened squad, while collecting enough points along the way.
An unprecedented injury crisis is beginning to ease, though reports claim Mohammed Kudus could be out for the season with a fresh injury.
When his team have bypassed the press and a frantic attack is in flight, De Zerbi will be emotional and expressive in his technical area, kicking every ball.
Medhi Benatia, the Marseille sporting director, would stay up until 2am on long video calls with De Zerbi, whose tactical obsession is “stimulating” and whose “passion is overflowing”.
It did not end well at Brighton or Marseille, where he fell out with the board, yet Spurs have bigger worries right now.
Most important to this particular chapter is that it has a strong start. The 10-day lead-in before Sunderland on Sunday in his first game in charge helps.
Up for the fight
De Zerbi has succeeded at all of his past four clubs, yet his brand of football means results can be erratic.
The disillusionment within the fanbase is intense and the expectation levels are as low as they have ever been. The last Premier League win came 102 days ago.
No wonder De Zerbi deems this “the most important challenge in my career”. He wouldn’t admit that - wouldn’t take the job - if he didn’t feel up to it.
In the throes of a campaign that delivered 22 league defeats, Ange Postecoglou admitted: “Every time I’ve seen the light at the end of the tunnel, it’s been an oncoming train.” Fourteen months and three head-coach sackings later, the first stop for De Zerbi: the Stadium of Light.
MORE ABOUT
