Betting the house on De Zerbi has left Spurs a panicked, ...

Tottenham have a tell. Well, really it’s a Tel. If Mathys Tel is starting, something has either gone wrong, or is about to. Since winning his first two matches, Tel has started 25 matches for Spurs and won four, two against teams subsequently relegated, and that scrabbling, screeching dive for survival against Everton.

And yes, he’s 21. He’s started fewer than 100 professional matches. God love him, he tries. His ill-suitedness and incapability is not his fault (maybe it’s a little bit his fault). At a football club able to develop rather than traumatise him, he could be very good at this. But at Tottenham, that great air fryer for brains, Tel seems destined to rot and ruin. Under September sun at the City Ground he delivered some truly atrocious ­corners, unless he was aiming for the first man’s groin, dutifully ran the road to nowhere, produced no shots and nothing remotely memorable or impactful.

And so Spurs failed to score in three consecutive league games for the first time in just shy of five years. After last season’s final-day reprieve, Roberto De Zerbi spoke of creating “the team I have in my dream in my head”. Just shy of £400 million later, here it is, neither daring nor doing, as empty and blurred as a dream but otherwise still damningly, dangerously real.

This might be their first point of 2026-27 but they should not even have earned that. Neco Williams’s goal was disallowed for handball, yet his hands were only in front of his face to stop Sandro Tonali’s laces ­rearranging his cheekbones. Jan Paul van Hecke and Tonali had both dutifully rushed to clear Morgan Gibbs-White’s chip off the line, only to clear it back into themselves and goalwards once more, symptomatic of a wider desperation carved into everything Spurs do, intense yet disorganised, passionate without much semblance of a plan.

Triggering this panicked frenzy was De Zerbi’s masterplan to keep them up across a six-game stretch. It could be how he gets them relegated across a whole season.

Here it was in Omar Marmoush firing balls everywhere but on ­target, in Tel’s corners, Tonali’s passes to no one and the general idea of Conor Gallagher. The £85m Mateus Fernandes was benched for the ­second of three league games and then booked within a minute of coming on. Late in second-half added time Mohammed Kudus was even pulled up for a foul throw. Worst of all, on 75 minutes Mykhailo Mudryk emerged, hair freshly bleached for the occasion, Tel 2.0, De Zerbi’s “I can fix him” project.

Had Williams’s goal stood, there is little doubt Tottenham would not have recovered – they have won zero of their past 44 matches after going behind, a run standing at a year and 10 months. For the third consecutive match they had almost 60% possession at a time most mid-table clubs appear to be fighting to not have the ball, the era of possession for ­possession’s sake largely dead.

In each of Spurs’ Premier League matches this season, you inevitably end up wondering why they didn’t buy any number of opposition ­players. For slightly more than their summer transfer outlay – far less if you consider wages – Tottenham could have signed every Nottingham Forest player, per their Transfermarkt valuations, or bought Brentford in full, taken all their players and coach and started afresh, turned the Gtech into luxury flats.

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Tottenham have not just supported De Zerbi but handed him total control. This is his club now, built in his image, to his specifications and whims. Van Hecke, Mudryk and Tonali are all his players, the product of his conceits, and yet he has taken to playing Tonali on the left of midfield, a role he rarely played for Newcastle and one he looks largely uncomfortable in, not quite understanding the angles or space.

To make the obvious point, punting your club’s future on a man who has spent more than two seasons in the same place only once in the past decade (Sassuolo) is not just inadvisable but deeply irresponsible.

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Unlike the Levy era, they are gambling their future here. They have signed ten players for such ridiculously inflated prices they cannot expect to make profit on any of them, spent the summer with a “mug me” sticker stapled to their foreheads, broken their pre-summer ­transfer record three times. Obliterating their wage structure and still offering long contracts leaves them massively susceptible to anything going wrong, significantly limits their ability to keep tinkering and trying.

What happens if it goes wrong from here? Another reset? Bring in another head coach intent on ­chasing an impossible perfection? It bears saying that in backing De Zerbi so aggressively, Vinai Venkatesham and Johan Lange are also attempting to abdicate responsibility, protecting themselves by saying they gave him what he wanted, ignoring that this isn’t the same as what he needed.

A thought for Barney Ray, who has just been appointed into ­perhaps the most difficult job in sport, Tottenham’s sports psychologist, like becoming Charles Manson’s therapist, or Mr and Mrs Incredible’s childminder. For all £380m committed this summer, perhaps Ray is the key signing, the man who really deserves a protracted bidding war and £250,000 a week.

To end on the positives: this may have been Tottenham’s best performance to date this season (and yet they still failed to even force a save). For the second game Marmoush at least attempted to create something, to do something. They didn’t concede, technically. And hey, at least they might not be so reliant on Tel anymore, even if he is contracted until 2031. They’ve got Mudryk now.

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