Tottenham's Transformation: From Tears to Trophies

There is a line Roberto De Zerbi used in the depths of last season that still hangs in the air at Tottenham.

“Did we pass away?”

He asked it in the dressing room at the Stadium of Light, after his first game in charge ended in a bleak 1-0 defeat at Sunderland. Players lay on their backs. Some cried. The new manager looked around at a squad staring down the barrel of relegation and saw a team that felt half‑alive.

It was the first of seven matches he had to navigate simply to keep Spurs in the Premier League. Survival arrived only on the final day. Barely.

Four months on, the scene could not be more different.

From tears in Sunderland to coffee in Sydney

The same group – heavily rebuilt, emotionally rewired – now occupies a private floor of a plush Sydney hotel, a short walk from the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House. There is laughter. There is noise. There is a club barista pulling espressos for players who, not long ago, were lying broken in a northern dressing room.

Competitive table tennis games rattle away in a corner. New faces drift between tables, coffees in hand, folding themselves into a squad that suddenly dares to talk about trophies again. A club‑record £237m has been poured into signings, and it shows.

Sandro Tonali, the headline £100m arrival from Newcastle, is here. So is £85m midfielder Mateus Fernandes from West Ham. Jan Paul van Hecke, Andrew Robertson and Martin Dubravka have all pulled on a Spurs shirt on this pre-season tour of Australia and New Zealand.

Only Marcos Senesi, fresh from Argentina’s World Cup final exploits, has not featured on tour, granted extended leave before beginning work at Hotspur Way. He is on the grass now, another piece in a jigsaw De Zerbi is intent on finishing.

“I deserve to want the top players, because now Tottenham deserves to build up a top team,” he says, without blinking.

Two plans, one escape

Tottenham reached April with two transfer strategies drawn up: one for relegation, one for survival. It was an unusual reality for a club that still sees itself as part of England’s elite, but that was the calculation.

De Zerbi insists he would have stayed even if they had gone down. He does not have to prove that now. He is working from Plan A – the Premier League version – and that includes “respecting the will” of players such as captain Cristian Romero and goalkeeper Guglielmo Vicario, whose futures remain uncertain.

“At the beginning of my time in April I had one million individual meetings,” he jokes. The message in those conversations, though, was ruthless.

If they wanted out, they could go. But only after they helped him keep the club up.

“Yes, help me to stay up, and then I help you to leave,” he told them. “If you don’t help me to stay up, you stay underwater with me.”

The underwater line was not a throwaway threat. It was a statement of how far Spurs had sunk.

A new regime, a new edge

The club around him has changed just as dramatically. Fan anger over the chaos of the 2025-26 campaign forced a reset at the top. Vinai Venkatesham now runs the organisation on behalf of the Lewis Family Trust. He and technical director Johan Lange – the only senior survivor of the previous regime – front negotiations.

They are flanked by director of football operations Rafi Moersen and performance director Dan Lewindon, both recruited from City Football Group. Lewindon’s brief is blunt: fix Tottenham’s chronic injury problems.

De Zerbi, though, does not confine himself to the training pitch.

“In the transfer market, when I want one player, I become like a shark,” he says. “No chance to say no.”

That predator’s instinct has already delivered two record-breaking deals in Fernandes and Tonali, and a defensive reinforcement in Van Hecke despite interest from Chelsea. Spurs also beat Manchester United and Manchester City to their two new midfield centrepieces. That does not happen by accident.

“I love working in the transfer market. It’s not a pressure, it’s one of the nicest parts in my work,” he explains.

Why? He links it to responsibility. When he calls a player personally, he owns the decision – and the relationship.

“With Mateus Fernandes, I spoke with the mum, with the father.” He told Fernandes’ father he would be his “second dad” in England. It is recruitment as human connection, not just as data and fees.

Texts, grudges and a decisive trip to Brescia

Transfers are a game of timing and leverage. Spurs knew they had to be aggressive and quick, both with money and with De Zerbi’s personal touch. That was the internal calculation.

After a 2-2 draw with Brighton in April, when Georginio Rutter’s 95th-minute equaliser hammered Spurs’ survival hopes, De Zerbi quietly filed away a memory. Van Hecke had provided the assist.

Later, he messaged the defender.

“You wanted to push down Tottenham for Brighton when you made the assist to Rutter, now you have to come to me, you have no choice,” De Zerbi recalls.

Tonali’s courtship was just as direct. The day after Spurs secured safety with a final-day win over Everton, De Zerbi texted him. Soon after, he flew to the midfielder’s home in Brescia. That meeting proved decisive. Club staff then wrapped up the deal across several further discussions.

The work is not done. De Zerbi is already teasing what he calls a final attacking “bomba”, with two forwards expected, including a move for Manchester City’s Savinho.

Spending big, thinking long

Tottenham’s outlay will provoke scrutiny. De Zerbi rejects the idea that Spurs are throwing money around recklessly. The Lewis family injected £100m in June, but he insists he is under “no pressure” from that, arguing that Chelsea, Arsenal and Liverpool have all operated in similar fashion in recent years.

There has been money coming in as well. Luka Vuskovic’s £45m move to Brighton brought a significant fee. Uncertainty lingers over Lucas Bergvall and Djed Spence, whose futures are still to be resolved.

“We assessed the request of Vuskovic [to join Brighton], with Vinai, with Johan together, because I consider Tottenham’s money my money,” De Zerbi says. “It’s like the owner is my father, I think you don’t want to ask your father to lose money.”

That line reveals the plan as much as any spreadsheet. Spurs want to sell high and buy smart, and they are doing it with a five-year horizon in mind.

“Like all the big clubs, we have to sell a player at as big of a price as possible and we have to bring a player with a small price, we are starting for a plan of five seasons because we are building.”

There has been restraint too. Tottenham chose not to turn Joao Palhinha’s loan from Bayern Munich into a permanent deal. Not because De Zerbi doubted his quality, but because the overall financial package did not fit the model they are trying to build.

Cleaning the air

The trauma of Sunderland and the months that followed did not just scar the players. Staff at the training ground felt it as well. Negativity seeped into conversations, into corridors, into the everyday routine of a club that had finished 17th in back-to-back seasons, even if the first of those came with a Europa League triumph under Ange Postecoglou and without the same suffocating fear of relegation.

De Zerbi moved quickly.

“The day after I organised a meeting without players and I said, ‘The first one I see say something negative, I send you home immediately’,” he recalls.

He wants to change “behaviour, attitude and spirit” as much as tactics. That meant more than meetings. It meant reminding a fragile squad that they were not as bad as the table – or their own doubts – suggested.

He took them for “one big dinner in Mayfair, with alcohol”. A release valve. A signal that they were allowed to breathe again. He still believes they were unlucky in their final matches and could have sealed survival earlier.

“I think they considered themselves in that moment worse than the people thought,” he admits. The healing process, he says, is still underway. “I hope next time they organise [dinner and drinks] for themselves.”

Because that, for him, is the sign of a real team: one that no longer needs the coach to hold its hand.

“With love, friendship and care, you become top, top, top.”

From Sunderland’s tears to Sydney’s table tennis, Tottenham have travelled a long way in four months. The question now is not whether they passed away last season, but whether this rebuilt, re-energised club can finally start to live like a contender again.