From Sunderland's Silence to Tottenham's Ambition

Roberto De Zerbi remembers the silence first.

Not the roar of Sunderland’s crowd after the final whistle, not even the long walk down the tunnel. The silence in the away dressing room at the Stadium of Light. Players on their backs. Some in tears. A 1-0 defeat, six games left, and a club staring into the abyss.

“Did we pass away?” he asked his Tottenham squad that night.

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

From Sunderland’s shadows to Sydney’s sunshine

In Sydney, on a private floor of the team hotel a short walk from the Harbour Bridge and Opera House, the mood has flipped. Laughter ricochets off the walls. Players lean over coffee cups poured by their own barista. Competitive table tennis matches break out between training sessions. The same group that looked broken in April now looks like it actually enjoys being Tottenham players.

They have help. A club-record £237m worth of it.

Sandro Tonali, the £100m headline act from Newcastle. Mateus Fernandes, an £85m raid on West Ham. Jan Paul van Hecke, Andrew Robertson and Martin Dubravka all in the mix on this pre-season tour of Australia and New Zealand. Marcos Senesi, fresh from a World Cup final with Argentina, has joined later at Hotspur Way after extended leave.

For a manager who walked into a club braced for relegation, this is another world.

“I deserve to want the top players, because now Tottenham deserves to build up a top team,” De Zerbi says. There’s no apology in the line. Just intent.

Plan A, not Plan B

When he arrived in April, Tottenham had drawn up two transfer strategies: one for the Premier League, one for the Championship. Both were real. Both were serious. The club did not dress it up.

De Zerbi insists he would have stayed even if the trapdoor had opened. Survival, though, changed everything. It meant Plan A. It meant the kind of market aggression Spurs have rarely shown.

It also meant hard conversations.

“At the beginning of my time in April I had one million individual meetings,” he says with a grin. Cristian Romero, Guglielmo Vicario, others with big decisions to make. “They told me if they didn’t want to be here. I said: ‘Yes, help me to stay up, and then I help you to leave. If you don’t help me to stay up, you stay underwater with me’.”

Some wanted out. Some stayed. All were told the terms in blunt Italian clarity.

Behind him, the club has changed shape. New chief executive Vinai Venkatesham now fronts the organisation on behalf of the Lewis Family Trust. Technical director Johan Lange is the lone survivor from the previous hierarchy, working alongside director of football operations Rafi Moersen and performance director Dan Lewindon, both recruited from City Football Group.

Lewindon’s brief is simple: fix the injury record. De Zerbi’s is broader. He wants a say in everything.

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

The shark in the market

That mindset underpins those record-breaking deals. Fernandes for £85m. Tonali for £100m. Spurs did not just pay; they hunted.

“I love working in the transfer market. It’s not a pressure, it’s one of the nicest parts in my work, in my job,” De Zerbi explains. He likes the responsibility. He likes the connection.

“I don’t know, maybe because when you take the decision, you take the responsibility. If the coach calls the player, you can build a special connection at the beginning. With Mateus Fernandes, I spoke with the mum, with the father.”

He went further with Fernandes’ family, telling the midfielder’s father he would be his “second dad” in England.

It’s personal. Always personal.

Spurs beat Manchester United and Manchester City to Fernandes and Tonali. They moved for Van Hecke despite Chelsea interest. Those inside the club describe a transfer window played like a high-stakes game of poker: move early, move hard, and let De Zerbi close the deal.

He did not forget, either.

After a 2-2 draw with Brighton in April, when Georginio Rutter’s 95th-minute equaliser left Spurs’ survival hanging by a thread, De Zerbi remembered exactly who delivered the assist. Van Hecke.

“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,” he messaged the defender.

Tonali required another kind of courtship. The day after Spurs secured safety with a final-day win at Everton, De Zerbi texted him. Then he flew to Brescia to sit in the midfielder’s home. That meeting proved decisive. Club staff handled the paperwork; the relationship had already been built.

Now De Zerbi teases one more flourish – an attacking “bomba”, as he calls it – with two forwards targeted, including Manchester City’s Savinho.

Spending big, thinking long

The numbers are eye-catching. So are the accusations that Spurs are throwing money around. De Zerbi rejects that.

He points to the £100m injection from the Lewis family in June as necessity, not indulgence, and notes that Chelsea, Arsenal and Liverpool have all done similar. Tottenham, he argues, are simply catching up.

They are also selling. Luka Vuskovic has gone to Brighton for £45m. The futures of Lucas Bergvall and Djed Spence remain uncertain, but the principle is clear: buy smart, sell high.

“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.

“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.”

That thinking also led to a firm “no” on Joao Palhinha. Not on ability – De Zerbi rates him – but on the overall financial package to sign him permanently from Bayern Munich. The numbers did not fit the project.

Healing a bruised club

The transfers are the visible part. The deeper work lies elsewhere.

After that bleak night in Sunderland, the gloom did not stay in the dressing room. It seeped into the training ground. Staff walked around with the same hollow look as the players.

“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’,” De Zerbi recalls.

He wanted to rip out the fatalism. Spurs had finished 17th the season before as well, but Ange Postecoglou still delivered a Europa League triumph and the spectre of relegation never truly took hold. Last season was different. This was trauma.

So he changed the script. He took his players for “one big dinner in Mayfair, with alcohol”. No team-building slogans. Just food, drink and a reminder that footballers are human beings before they are assets.

He believes they were unlucky in their final matches and could have stayed up earlier. The players, he says, saw themselves as worse than anyone on the outside did.

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

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

From survival to ambition

This, then, is the new Tottenham: a club that flirted with disaster, survived on the final day, and has now doubled down on a manager who wants to be involved in everything from recruitment to the mood in the canteen.

De Zerbi talks about behaviour, attitude, spirit. He talks about a five-year plan. He talks like a man who believes the club has finally stopped staring at the floor.

The dressing room where players lay on their backs in Sunderland feels a long way away. The question now is not whether Tottenham can stay up.

It’s whether this rebuilt, recalibrated version can climb back to where De Zerbi insists they belong – and how quickly they can prove it.