Tottenham's Transformation: From Tears in Sunderland to Confidence in Sydney

There was a point last season when Roberto de Zerbi looked around the Tottenham dressing room at Sunderland and asked his players a question that cut through the silence.

"Did we pass away?"

Spurs had just lost 1-0 at the Stadium of Light in his first game in charge. Bodies were sprawled across the floor. Some players were in tears. The club, once obsessed with style and status, suddenly looked like it was staring at the trapdoor.

It was the first of seven games to save their Premier League status. Survival came on the final day. Barely. But it came.

Four months on, the scene could not be more different.

From tears in Sunderland to coffee in Sydney

In Sydney, on a private floor of the team hotel, the same squad that lay broken in April is now laughing over flat whites made by a club barista. The Harbour Bridge and Opera House sit in the background; inside, the atmosphere feels just as symbolic.

There is music, table tennis, and the slightly chaotic energy of a squad that suddenly believes in itself again. A squad now stitched together by a club-record £237m of new signings and a manager who behaves like the club’s most demanding scout, negotiator and therapist rolled into one.

• Sandro Tonali, the £100m centrepiece from Newcastle.
• Mateus Fernandes, prised from West Ham for £85m.
• Jan Paul van Hecke, Andrew Robertson, Martin Dubravka. All have featured on this pre-season tour.
• Only Marcos Senesi, fresh from a World Cup final with Argentina, has yet to play. His extended leave is over; he has now reported for duty at Hotspur Way.

"I deserve to want the top players, because now Tottenham deserves to build up a top team," De Zerbi says. It doesn’t sound like a boast. It sounds like a mission statement.

Two plans, one survival

Last spring, Tottenham lived in an unusual reality: two transfer blueprints on the table. One if they stayed up. One if they didn’t.

De Zerbi insists he would have stayed even in the Championship. He is relieved, of course, to be operating off Plan A – the one that involves Champions League-level midfielders rather than second-tier rebuilds – but he never hides the ruthlessness that underpinned those final weeks.

"At the beginning of my time in April I had one million individual meetings," he jokes. Players told him whether they wanted to stay or go. His response was blunt.

Yes, he would help them leave. But only if they helped him keep the club up.

"'If you don't help me to stay up, you stay underwater with me.'"

This is not a manager happy to work at arm’s length from the dressing room or the boardroom. Spurs have changed around him. He has made sure of it.

A new regime, and a shark in the market

Over the past year, the club has been reshaped at the top. Vinai Venkatesham now runs the operation on behalf of the Lewis Family Trust. Johan Lange, the lone survivor from the previous regime, continues as technical director. Rafi Moersen, director of football operations, and performance director Dan Lewindon have both arrived from City Football Group.

Lewindon’s task is clear: fix Spurs’ chronic injury issues.

De Zerbi’s task? Everything else.

He jokes, but only half-jokes, that "in the transfer market, when I want one player, I become like a shark. No chance to say no."

The evidence backs him up. Spurs outmuscled West Ham and Newcastle to land Fernandes and Tonali in record deals. They beat off Chelsea’s interest to land Van Hecke, having already seen off Manchester United and Manchester City in the race for their two new midfield generals.

"I love working in the transfer market. It's not a pressure, it's one of the nicest parts in my work," he says. The joy, he explains, lies in the responsibility. When the coach calls, the connection starts immediately.

With Fernandes, that connection went deep. De Zerbi spoke not only to the player, but to his parents. He told Fernandes’ father he would be his son’s "second dad" in England.

The personal touch extends to the smallest details. After Georginio Rutter’s 95th-minute equaliser for Brighton in April – a goal assisted by Van Hecke that threatened to drag Spurs down – De Zerbi fired off a message.

"You wanted to push down Tottenham for Brighton when you made the assist to Rutter, now you have to come to me, you have no choice," he later revealed.

Tonali’s recruitment followed a similar pattern. The day after Spurs secured survival with a final-day win over Everton, De Zerbi sent him a text. He then flew to Brescia for a face-to-face meeting that proved decisive. Club staff took over from there and closed the deal.

Now, he is promising one last attacking "bomba" – two forwards to round off the rebuild, one of them expected to be Manchester City’s Savinho.

Spending big, thinking long

The numbers are eye-catching. So is the timing. The Lewis family injected £100m into the club in June. De Zerbi insists he is under "no pressure" to justify the outlay, stressing that Tottenham are simply following a path already walked by Chelsea, Arsenal and Liverpool.

He pushes back at the idea this is reckless spending. For every marquee arrival, there is a calculated departure. Luka Vuskovic’s £45m move to Brighton brought in a substantial fee. The futures of Lucas Bergvall and Djed Spence remain uncertain.

"We assessed the request of Vuskovic [to join Brighton], with Vinai, with Johan together, because I consider Tottenham's money my money," De Zerbi says.

"It's like the owner is my father, I think you don't want to ask your father to lose money."

That line is not a soundbite. It underpins his view of the project. Tottenham, he argues, must act like a big club: sell high, buy smart, think in five-year cycles, not five-week panics.

"Like all the big clubs, we have to sell a player at as big of a price as possible and we have to bring a player with a small price, we are starting for a plan of five seasons because we are building."

That thinking also led to restraint. Spurs chose not to turn Joao Palhinha’s loan from Bayern Munich into a permanent deal. Not because the midfielder lacked quality, but because the overall financial package did not fit the model.

Cleaning the air after Sunderland

The transformation has not been limited to signings and balance sheets. After that bleak afternoon in Sunderland, the gloom spread to the training ground.

"The day after I organised a meeting without players and I said, 'The first one I see say something negative, I send you home immediately'," De Zerbi recalls.

Negativity, he decided, was no longer an option.

He inherited a squad that had finished 17th the previous season under Ange Postecoglou but still managed to win the Europa League. The following campaign brought another 17th-place finish, this time with genuine relegation fear and none of the European gloss.

Changing the "behaviour, attitude and spirit" of that group has become as important as any signing.

So he took them out. One big dinner in Mayfair. With alcohol. A night to stop being a damaged squad and start being a team again.

He still believes they were unfortunate in their final matches and could have secured survival earlier. What concerned him more was what the players thought of themselves.

"I think they considered themselves in that moment worse than the people thought," he admits.

The healing process, he says, is still ongoing. He wants the next team dinner, the next night out, to be their idea, not his.

"With love, friendship and care, you become top, top, top."

From the tears in Sunderland to the coffee and table tennis in Sydney, Tottenham have moved quickly. The question now is not whether they have survived, but what exactly they are building – and how high this new, sharper version of Spurs can climb.