Tottenham should sack Roberto De Zerbi now. Not after another five league games, not at Christmas and certainly not when another relegation battle has already swallowed the season. Spurs have seen this movie before. They know how it ends.
This is not a hysterical reaction to one bad Saturday. Tottenham are bottom of the Premier League, winless after five matches and sitting on two points despite one of the most aggressive transfer windows in the club’s history. This is supposed to be the beginning of a rebuild. Instead it already looks disturbingly similar to the chaos they were supposedly rebuilding from.
The great mistake would be telling supporters that De Zerbi simply needs time. Tottenham spent most of last season doing exactly that with Thomas Frank. They waited while poor results became a crisis, confidence disappeared and relegation went from an embarrassing possibility to a genuine danger.
Frank was eventually dismissed in February with Spurs 16th, five points above the relegation zone, after winning just two of his previous 17 league matches. By then the damage was enormous. Tottenham changed manager, changed again, and eventually required De Zerbi to rescue a season that finished with another miserable 17th-place league position.
De Zerbi deserves credit for that survival. He inherited a frightened team and did the immediate job required of him. But survival last season cannot become permanent immunity this season.
The terms have changed completely. Tottenham did not spend the summer asking De Zerbi to scrape together another 40 points with the same broken squad. They invested enormously. Sandro Tonali arrived in a statement deal. Savio and Mateus Fernandes were among other expensive additions. This was supposed to become De Zerbi’s team.
More than £380million of summer spending later, Tottenham have two points from five Premier League matches.
Two.
They have also scored only twice in the league. For a coach whose reputation is built around sophisticated attacking football, brave possession and progressive tactical ideas, that is particularly damning. Tottenham did not hire a supposed football revolutionary to become bottom of the table after being handed one of Europe’s most expensive summer rebuilds.
Yes, the injuries are brutal. Xavi Simons and Wilson Odobert have suffered ACL injuries, while Pedro Porro, Jan Paul van Hecke and others have had fitness problems. Micky van de Ven has now added another scare. No manager would choose to work through that.
But injuries are mitigation, not an identity. Tottenham’s biggest danger now is confusing legitimate excuses for individual results with evidence that the underlying project is working. It isn’t. Spurs are bottom. They are not scoring. Confidence is disappearing again. Waiting simply because changing managers feels embarrassing would be far more embarrassing.
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De Zerbi’s reputation has become bigger than his results
There has been a strange mythology around Roberto De Zerbi for years.
Mention his name and discussions quickly turn towards build-up structures, positional rotations, numerical advantages and his supposed status as one of football’s great tactical thinkers.
Fine.
Eventually, though, football matches have scores.
And league tables have numbers.
Tottenham are bottom.
There is nothing intellectually sophisticated about two points from five matches after hundreds of millions of pounds have been committed to reshaping the squad.
De Zerbi’s admirers will point to Brighton, where his football could be exhilarating, and Marseille, where he finished second. Tottenham themselves described him as one of football’s most creative and forward-thinking coaches when appointing him.
But Spurs do not need another interesting coach.
They need a successful one.
Tottenham have spent too many years confusing an attractive managerial idea with a functioning football team.
De Zerbi also has a reputation for intensity and uncompromising conviction. Those qualities can be strengths when results reinforce them. When results collapse, stubbornness starts looking less like principle and more like an inability to adapt.
Tottenham cannot afford another ideological experiment while sitting 20th.
£380m should buy more than excuses
The spending changes the entire conversation.
Had De Zerbi been handed a depleted squad and told simply to survive another season, patience would be reasonable.
He wasn’t.
Tottenham invested more than £380m during the summer. That does not mean every signing should instantly succeed or that a heavily changed team should immediately play perfect football.
It does mean bottom place is unacceptable.
There is always another excuse available for an underperforming manager. New players need time. Injuries have hurt continuity. Confidence is low. The fixtures have been awkward. The tactical ideas have not yet become automatic.
At some stage, a club has to stop analysing why it is losing and notice that it keeps losing.
Tottenham learned that lesson painfully with Frank.
They waited.
Then waited some more.
Then discovered that a team supposedly too talented to be relegated had drifted dangerously close to exactly that.
The lesson from last season should not be that Spurs eventually escaped. It should be that they were absurd to let the situation deteriorate that far in the first place.
Pochettino should be the first call
There is an obvious candidate.
Mauricio Pochettino.
No, this would not be an easy appointment. Pochettino signed a new contract with the United States in August running through 2030 after guiding them through a successful home World Cup. He is not sitting unemployed waiting for Daniel Levy’s phone call.
Tottenham should make the call anyway.
Find out the compensation. Find out Pochettino’s position. Find out whether the emotional connection to Spurs, the Premier League and unfinished business in north London is strong enough to reopen a chapter that should arguably never have ended as abruptly as it did.
Elite clubs do not abandon their preferred target because acquiring him is complicated.
They try.
Pochettino knows Tottenham. More importantly, Tottenham supporters know Pochettino.
He inherited a club that had become accustomed to looking up at the elite and turned it into a side capable of challenging for the Premier League and reaching a Champions League final. He developed players, created an aggressive identity and built one of the strongest emotional connections between team and support base Spurs have experienced in the modern era.
That matters at a club desperately lacking stability.
This is not nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. Pochettino has accumulated experience at Paris Saint-Germain, Chelsea and now internationally with the United States since leaving Tottenham. The coach who returned would not be identical to the one who departed in 2019.
And unlike another fashionable tactical appointment, he already understands the peculiar pressures of Tottenham.
“Never go back” is lazy football thinking
The predictable response is that Tottenham should not return to the past.
Why not?
Football clubs happily re-sign players, executives and managers when circumstances make sense. Real Madrid brought Carlo Ancelotti back and won more European Cups. Chelsea returned to José Mourinho and won another Premier League title.
The relevant question is not whether somebody has worked there before.
It is whether he is better suited to the job than the man currently doing it.
Right now, I would trust Pochettino with this Tottenham squad far more than De Zerbi.
Pochettino understands that attractive football requires intensity without becoming a tactical vanity project. His best Spurs side pressed aggressively, played vertically and had a clarity that made players better rather than drowning them in complexity.
Tottenham desperately need clarity again.
Injuries do not justify paralysis
The best argument for keeping De Zerbi is unquestionably the injury situation.
It is significant.
A coach trying to build automatisms while losing key players is being asked to solve a moving puzzle. Sacking him five league games into a campaign can also look like the behaviour of a club without conviction.
But there is a difference between stability and paralysis.
Spurs have already given De Zerbi more than these five matches. He arrived in March. He worked with the squad through the end of last season. He had the summer. The club then backed the rebuild with extraordinary money.
This is not a manager who walked through the door three weeks ago.
And Tottenham are not judging him because fifth place is insufficient.
They are twentieth.
That changes the threshold.
Old Trafford should not become another stay of execution
Tottenham travel to Manchester United next.
The temptation will be to treat it as another examination: beat United and De Zerbi earns breathing room; lose and the pressure increases.
That is precisely how clubs drift.
One match should not decide whether you believe in a manager.
If the board genuinely believes De Zerbi remains the right coach for the next three years, it should say so and accept the consequences.
But if doubts already exist — and bottom place after this level of investment should create plenty — waiting for one more defeat serves no strategic purpose.
Manchester United are struggling too. Spurs may win at Old Trafford. They may produce an excellent afternoon.
Would that suddenly make two points from the first five matches disappear?
Would it prove the £380m rebuild is functioning?
Would it guarantee that De Zerbi’s football has finally clicked?
Of course not.
Tottenham need to judge the direction of the project, not the mood created by the most recent 90 minutes.
Spurs cannot waste another season learning a lesson they already learned
Tottenham have finished 17th in consecutive Premier League seasons.
Read that again.
This is a club with one of Europe’s great stadiums, enormous revenues, Champions League ambitions and a squad rebuilt at staggering expense.
Seventeenth.
Seventeenth.
And now twentieth.
At some point, patience stops being a virtue.
It becomes negligence.
De Zerbi may eventually succeed somewhere else. He may even leave Spurs and produce superb football at his next club. None of that matters.
The question is whether Tottenham should gamble a third consecutive Premier League campaign on discovering whether his ideas eventually work in north London.
They should not.
Make Pochettino the priority. Test the USA contract. Put real money behind the attempt. Sell him the new Tottenham: a heavily invested squad, serious ambition and the opportunity to finish what he started.
If Pochettino categorically refuses, move immediately to the next elite candidate.
But do not sit around waiting for February simply because sacking another manager in October would expose how badly Tottenham’s decision-making has gone.
The club should be more frightened of finishing 17th again than of admitting another appointment has failed.
Tottenham waited for the crisis last season and nearly paid for it with their Premier League status. This time they can see the crisis coming. Sack De Zerbi before history repeats itself — and bring Mauricio Pochettino home.
This article is an opinion and analysis piece. The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views or official position of BettingTips4You.com or BSpin Limited.
