Source: magnific.com
Two consecutive 17th-place finishes. That is the baseline from which Tottenham Hotspur enter the new Premier League season, and the contrast with their current summer spending makes the gap almost difficult to process. The club has already confirmed signings worth £85m and £100m before competitive football begins, a level of investment that reframes the entire conversation around what this club is now supposed to be. Whether Roberto De Zerbi can convert that expenditure into genuine title contention is the question that matters most heading into the campaign.
Early Scepticism and the Seven-Match Turn
Roberto De Zerbi arrived at Spurs in March, per FourFourTwo, inheriting a club in freefall. The scepticism was legitimate and grounded. His managerial record before Tottenham — a Ligue 1 runners-up finish with Marseille, a top-six Premier League result with Brighton, and a Ukrainian Super Cup with Shakhtar Donetsk — showed genuine ability, but nothing that announced a future title-winning manager. Questions about temperament, and about whether his high-intensity philosophy could be installed at a club mid-crisis, were not unreasonable.
What happened across the final seven matches of last season gave those doubts a different shape. That run was described as the best Spurs had looked all year, and it delivered Premier League survival. De Zerbi’s own reaction said as much about ambition as it did about relief. He called it the “biggest achievement in my time” at the club, then immediately set a higher bar.
“We are Tottenham, and we can’t suffer like this until the last second of the last game to stay up.”
That language matters. A manager who frames survival as an embarrassment rather than a rescue is telling the dressing room, and the market, what standard he expects next.
How the Spanish-Speaking Market Now Prices Spurs’ Chances
Karla Ruiz, a sports content specialist at Apuestas.Guru who follows how the Spanish-speaking market reads major European competitions, has noted that the distance between those back-to-back survival scraps and the current De Zerbi project is now registering in outright pricing. The consecutive 17th-place finishes defined Spurs as a club fighting relegation; the scale of the summer rebuild has changed the signal those markets receive. ApuestasGuru tracks Premier League title odds that have tightened as the project has taken shape, offering one concrete measure of how contender status is being reassessed from outside the English press.
“You can see [De Zerbi] has brought a lot of passion into our group, a lot in terms of mentality and passion on the pitch. It is something we needed because everybody was a little bit down. He brings a lot of good energy and, from pre-season, we have really had the time to bring his football into the team. That’s really enjoyable.”
Those words come from Micky van de Ven, speaking to The Standard, and they reflect something beyond tactical improvement. The shifted odds and the shifted dressing room atmosphere point in the same direction.
The Summer Rebuild, Its Logic, and Its Gaps
The headline business is hard to argue with on paper. Mateus Fernandes arrived for £85m and Sandro Tonali for £100m, giving De Zerbi the midfield profile his system demands. Defensively, Jan Paul van Hecke was signed for £52m, while Marco Senesi and Andy Robertson added experienced cover on free transfers. The logic across the defensive unit is coherent: depth without wastefulness, with Robertson in particular offering Premier League-proven quality at no initial outlay.
The youth exits were deliberate. Luka Vuskovic, Alfie Devine, and Will Lankshear were all sold for good fees, with the club deciding none were likely to contribute meaningfully to the first team this season. Freeing up those wages and squad positions is pragmatic management, but it means Spurs must be right about what the incoming profile covers.
What it does not yet cover is equally clear. Tottenham are still pursuing a top winger, with Savinho among the names in focus, and a high-level striker remains the most pressing requirement. A squad built to challenge for the title without a reliable goalscorer at its peak is still an incomplete squad, and the season will begin with that gap unresolved.
Van de Ven’s Revival, Kinsky’s Redemption, and the Leicester Precedent
The individual transformations under De Zerbi sharpen the case. Under Thomas Frank, Micky van de Ven had appeared to mentally withdraw from the club’s cause, becoming a liability rather than an asset. The defender described the De Zerbi effect as something the squad needed urgently, and his performances in those final seven matches mirrored that assessment. A player of his quality, re-engaged and leading again, changes what a back line can do.
Antonin Kinsky’s trajectory is equally striking. Substituted at half-time against Atletico Madrid in the Champions League following a pair of costly errors, the goalkeeper looked like a player whose confidence might not recover at the top level. Under De Zerbi, he is now Tottenham’s undisputed first-choice goalkeeper. That is not a cosmetic change. It is what a manager with genuine authority over a dressing room can produce.
The historical parallel that should give Spurs sceptics pause is Leicester City’s 2014/15 season. That side finished with 41 points and a goal difference of minus nine, a points tally and a defensive record that suggested a team fortunate to survive. The following season, they won the Premier League title. The distance between those two data points is the reason consecutive 17th-place finishes do not automatically close the argument about what comes next.
Tottenham need the striker. They need Savinho or someone of that order on the wing. Those are real, unsolved problems. But De Zerbi has shown in seven matches what his presence does to a dressing room, and a summer’s worth of serious investment has given him the players to build on it. The Leicester comparison is not a guarantee. It is a reminder that the gap between survival and contention has been crossed before, by clubs that also looked like they had no business attempting it.
