De Zerbi has walked into the most thankless job in English football
Three managers in a single season. Seventeenth in the table. Zero league wins in 2026. Roberto De Zerbi surveyed the wreckage at Tottenham Hotspur and apparently thought, yeah, I can fix this. Whether that makes him brave, deluded or simply desperate for a return to the Premier League depends on how the next seven games play out.
The scale of the mess
Tottenham sit 17th in the Premier League with 30 points from 31 games. They have won just seven league matches all season and lost 15. Their goal difference of minus 10 tells the story of a team that cannot defend and has stopped creating enough at the other end to cover for it. They are one point above the relegation zone with seven games left.
Spurs have not won any of their last 13 league matches, a run stretching back to early January. Under Igor Tudor, who lasted 44 days and seven games with a single win, they played a brand of reactive football that seemed designed to survive rather than compete. It did neither.
A revolving door in the dugout
Ange Postecoglou won the Europa League last season but was sacked in June 2025 after finishing 17th domestically. The club hired Thomas Frank on a three-year deal. He lasted eight months before being dismissed in February with the team 16th. Tudor replaced him and was gone within six weeks.
De Zerbi becomes the fourth manager to occupy the Tottenham dugout since June 2025. His five-year contract runs until 2031, but the immediate priority is brutally simple: keep the club in the top flight. Everything else, the rebuild, the philosophy, the identity, comes after.
Why De Zerbi might be the right man
There is a logic to the appointment beyond the desperation. De Zerbi took Brighton from mid-table solidity to a sixth-place finish and European football in 2022-23, setting club records for goals (72), wins (18) and points (62) along the way. At Marseille, he guided the club to second in Ligue 1 in 2024-25 and posted the highest win percentage of any Marseille manager this century across 69 matches.
He knows the Premier League. He knows how to organise a team quickly. And he knows how to get results from squads that look, on paper, like they should be doing better than they are. Tottenham's squad is underperforming, not talentless. The right voice in the dressing room could spark a late run.
Why it still might not work
Seven games is barely enough time to learn names, let alone install a system. De Zerbi's possession-heavy approach requires time and repetition on the training ground. He is not going to transform Tottenham's playing style between now and the end of May. At best, he can steady the ship, pick a solid shape, and hope the players respond to the novelty of a new voice.
His first match is away at Sunderland on April 12. After that, fixtures against Brighton, Wolves, Aston Villa and Leeds will define whether Spurs go down or scrape clear. Those are all direct rivals in the bottom half, which means there is opportunity, but no margin for error.
The relegation of Tottenham Hotspur would rank among the biggest shocks in Premier League history. De Zerbi has been given the tools and the contract to prevent it. Whether he has been given enough time is the question nobody at the club wants to answer honestly.
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