Tottenham Hotspur’s alarming slide this season has been put down to a series of costly errors, with newly appointed manager Roberto De Zerbi making it clear that the club cannot hope to compete unless it learns from them. “If this season was like this, it is because we made many mistakes,” De Zerbi said, directly linking the team’s woeful form to repeated failures on and off the pitch. The Italian’s assessment comes after Tottenham narrowly avoided relegation, finishing 17th in the Premier League for the second consecutive campaign — a stark reminder of how far the club has fallen since its days challenging for European places.
“I love smart people, and the smart people learn from their mistakes. Sincerely, from the mistakes, we have to find the reason to improve, to work harder, and to understand the mistakes. Otherwise, we can’t compete,” De Zerbi said. The 46-year-old, appointed as Tottenham’s permanent head coach on 31 March 2026 on a five-year contract after an interim spell under Igor Tudor, has made no secret of the scale of the task ahead. He described steering the club away from relegation as the “biggest achievement” of his career, a remark that underscores the depth of the crisis.
Two seasons of errors and a squad in need of overhaul
The mistakes De Zerbi refers to are not confined to a single match or moment. Tottenham’s back-to-back 17th-place finishes point to systemic problems: poor recruitment, tactical inconsistency, and a failure to maintain a coherent identity. The squad, he believes, has been let down by a series of missteps in the transfer market and on the training ground. De Zerbi has made clear that only “10 to 12 players” from the current group are good enough to remain, and that the club must complete the squad with “first-level players” to have any chance of competing at the top end of the table. His immediate focus has been on identifying targets who can adapt quickly to his demanding style, with several former Brighton players — including Carlos Baleba, Jan Paul van Hecke, and Bart Verbruggen — high on his list. He also views Joao Palhinha, Conor Gallagher, and Rodrigo Bentancur as vital pieces of the rebuild, while stressing the need to retain players of strong character as well as quality.
These specific types of mistakes — buying the wrong players, failing to develop a clear tactical identity, and allowing standards to slip — are exactly what De Zerbi believes have hindered Tottenham’s ability to compete. His own track record at Brighton offers a stark contrast: he led the Seagulls to a club-record sixth-place finish in the 2022-23 Premier League and secured European football for the first time in their history, all through a possession-based philosophy that emphasises building from the goalkeeper, “baiting the press” to create attacking opportunities, and controlling the tempo of matches. Pep Guardiola has called him “one of the most influential managers in 20 years” for his tactical innovations. At Tottenham, De Zerbi is attempting to instil the same principles, but he acknowledges that the squad inherited is not yet capable of executing them. The mistakes of previous seasons — both in recruitment and on the pitch — have left the team ill-equipped to impose itself on games, leading to a defensive fragility and a lack of composure that has cost points throughout the campaign.
De Zerbi’s coaching career began in the lower leagues of Italy before he made a name for himself at Sassuolo, where he guided the club to back-to-back eighth-place finishes in Serie A. He later won the Ukrainian Super Cup with Shakhtar Donetsk before his transformative spell at Brighton. That success earned him links with top European clubs such as Barcelona, Manchester United, Liverpool, and Bayern Munich before he moved to Marseille in June 2024 on a three-year deal, which he left in February 2026. Now at Tottenham, his message is blunt: the club must confront its mistakes head-on. “Stupid people forget the past,” he has said. “Smart people, the people with value, can’t forget and keep in their mind the past, and we have to improve from our mistakes.” The call to action is clear: identify the errors, hold the right players and staff accountable, and rebuild with purpose. For De Zerbi, that process has already begun, with a squad overhaul that he believes is the only way Tottenham can finally move beyond this season’s litany of failures and become a side capable of competing again.
