.png)
7 hours ago
2
It is ironic that the man who has appointed Roberto De Zerbi to be Tottenham manager, just as the club faces its most critical seven games this century, is also partially responsible for one of the most successful managerial recruitments in Mikel Arteta, albeit for north London rivals, Arsenal. And even that didn’t start well. Vinai Venkatesham was blindsided when photographs of him emerging from Arteta’s house at 1.20am were published in a newspaper at a sensitive stage in negotiations. The man who is now Tottenham’s chief executive only found out he had been rumbled when the pictures went online and was mortified.
Venkatesham was part of a committee that settled on Arteta as a replacement for Unai Emery, and while it was a huge gamble to entrust a novice to a club the size of Arsenal, it was at least inspired, which is more than can be said for his hiring of Igor Tudor, a coach with no Premier League experience, to save Spurs. Now Venkatesham, along with the sporting director, Johan Lange, has settled on De Zerbi, which is similarly high risk.
Spurs can at least point to the fact that De Zerbi has been a highly desirable Premier League target, with Manchester United speaking to him in the summer of 2024 when they eventually decided to stick with Erik ten Hag. Spurs considered him at the time as well and wanted to appoint him when they sacked Thomas Frank in February, but that was the very day De Zerbi had left Marseille and he said he needed time.
Venkatesham and Lange consider him to be the most credible coach on the market and, as their No 1 choice, it was better to appoint for the long term than to try to bodge their way through a run of games which, if it goes badly, could be financially disastrous for Spurs. It means the players know they don’t have another supply teacher for these vital seven matches.
Yet huge doubts remain. “It doesn’t make sense,” said one Premier League executive familiar with hiring and firing coaches. “Brighton shows the importance of De Zerbi, just like Brentford showed the importance of Thomas Frank: minimal. Ultimately, De Zerbi brought some interesting new tactics to Brighton. But they are very extreme tactics that got found out and he wouldn’t change. Like so many coaches, he was a fundamentalist.”
Whether tactical extremity is what is required for a club that has so few games to save itself from financial meltdown is debatable. It is instructive that Lewis Dunk, who grew to admire De Zerbi at Brighton, described the initial fortnight as “horrendous … baffling”. Critics point out that De Zerbi’s style is not only extreme but different to Ange Postecoglou and Frank, and so is likely to require another reboot of the squad, if they stay up.
Should the worst happen and Tottenham were relegated, De Zerbi has insisted he will stay – he has a five-year contract – and it is understood that Spurs’ owners, Vivienne and Charles Lewis, represented in the boardroom by Peter Charrington, will provide funding to give the club the best chance to come straight back up. However, even with Premier League parachute money and looser regulations for relegated clubs, the EFL’s profitability and sustainability rules mean that it is no longer quite the old days of chucking a blank cheque at the Championship.
Tottenham would counter criticisms of De Zerbi’s tactical inflexibility by insisting they are not expecting to bed in his model straight away at Sunderland next weekend. They anticipate some pragmatism to get the immediate job done before a reset in the summer. Appointing him now gives Spurs the advantage of planning for the summer transfer window with the new manager’s input.
Spurs believe they may have captured this generation’s new coaching talent and those that have spent time with him make similar claims based on De Zerbi’s undoubted creative intelligence. “You could defend his appointment by saying it’s the long-term project for the club, whether we go down or not,” said the executive involved in recruitment. “But that’s nonsense because he quit Brighton because he didn’t have control over transfers.”
De Zerbi’s longest time at any club was three seasons at Sassuolo. “He’s gone within 18 months,” added the executive. “That would be my generous half-life for him.”
Marseille players will testify to De Zerbi’s emotional volatility. According to L’Equipe, he was so disgusted with one performance he refused to coach at the next training session; the players responded by refusing to train under his assistants. The video clip of him confronting Ismaël Koné in training, telling him to leave the pitch and “take a shower”, before adding “call your agent to come here” – Koné, humiliated, responded by trying to square up to coaching staff – will doubtless be viewed with interest by the Spurs players. Whether De Zerbi’s tough love is exactly what is required for a team with fragile confidence is debatable.
Given how enriched the Premier League is, it remains bizarre that the club’s frequent hiring and firings of coaches appear so random. Lange was an early adopter of football’s data revolution, visiting Liverpool back in 2014 well before they were being lauded as the industry leaders in that field. However, one leading football executive insists most clubs are still misusing the data when it comes to appointing managers. “We’re not quite there on data on managers,” he said. “It’s descriptive rather than predictive, because managers don’t directly control what happens on the pitch.”
Though there is research to show that managers make negligible difference to performance – the key metrics of success are how much you spend on your players and therefore the quality of your squad – data also has blind spots. The emotional unity of a squad and its alignment with the personality of the manager is vital and can make a significant difference. Yet it is almost impossible to measure and requires a human rather than a data-led judgment to decide whether this manager is the right fit. “Just because you can’t measure it doesn’t mean it isn’t real,” said one football data analyst.
Equally, Tottenham remain in a transitional flux having lost their lodestar in chairman Daniel Levy at the start of the season. “Levy was in some ways a terrible person to work for and a control freak, but he did have a structure and Spurs saw some benefits from that,” said one former Spurs employee.
“All information would go to Levy. He would use it to make a decision but would never share what his process was. You never knew why he was doing what he was doing. The role of Tottenham’s sporting director was never really what the job title said: it was just giving your opinion to Daniel for him to make a decision and then executing what he wanted to do.”
Tottenham, under the Lewis family and without Levy, promised to compete for trophies. That remains their ambition but they now have seven games to save their skin, make it to the summer, and then prove that this time, at least, they have chosen well.
