Exactly how the Igor Tudor era is remembered depends entirely on what happens next.
But reports that Roberto de Zerbi is about to sweep in on a mega-contract to lurch the club in a whole new direction suggests that, this summer, Tudor’s failures will be pored over in gruesome detail as Tottenham Hotspur prepare for the Sky Bet Championship.
The news of Tudor’s departure has rightly been met with a muted solemnity having tragically intertwined with the death of his father last week, although Tottenham supporters’ anger was always going to be aimed more at the board than the man who found himself helplessly in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Tudor has mostly been spared the ignominy of gleefully-written details of every low point of his tenure. But that won’t last if Spurs go down, because if they do there will be no denying that Tudor’s six weeks in the job had a crucial impact – probably the biggest - on a catastrophic campaign.
In the end he lasted 44 days, long enough to squeeze beyond Ange Postecoglou at Nottingham Forest (40 days) and Les Reed (41 days) to avoid the ignominy of having the shortest unplanned stint in Premier League history.
The brutal reality is that Tudor would have taken that record, imprinting himself forever in Premier League history, if Spurs had not trod lightly over the last week, for which – amid all the dreadful failures – they deserve to be commended.
For now, nobody is dwelling for long on what has happened since February. There will be plenty of time for that over the summer. Instead focus is on how to lift an injury-stricken, confidence-stricken squad off the floor and use the final seven games to avoid Tottenham’s certain fate.
Enter De Zerbi: an idealist and tactical maverick, a manager with unique and uniquely complex ideas who demands extremely high fitness levels and who in his only previous mid-season arrival started very slowly.
The most rational response to which is rising panic.
De Zerbi was the perfect manager to take over from Ange Postecoglou last summer.
He is widely considered to be one of the smartest young minds in the game, arguably the father of a new anti-positional style of football that will become the next great wave in tactical history, moving aside Pep Guardiola and breaking open the dogged man-to-man defending that has the Premier League stuck in its current set-piece-laden predicament.
He has all the wild and wonderful ideas of Postecoglou, believing in attacking football and embodying Spurs’ ‘to dare is to do’ motto just as thoroughly, only with two solid years at Brighton under his belt to suggest he is a safer bet than Ange.
De Zerbi, if available, would have been the ideal evolution candidate.
Instead Spurs went for revolution under Thomas Frank, then revolution again under Tudor, and now revolution for a third time in eight months with De Zerbi.
Everybody knows that the pace of tactical change at Tottenham has contributed to their disorientation, to the dazed funk that has settled over the squad. De Zerbi can only add to the confusion.
Of course, there is a pathway to success: keep Spurs just about above the dotted line and a cultural reset this summer can lead to De Zerbi emerging, as so many have predicted, as the next Mauricio Pochettino.
But that is not the most likely outcome, because De Zerbi’s career so far has been about as erratic and unwieldy as you might expect from a coach with idiosyncratic ideas about how the game should be played.
De Zerbi’s genius has always been theoretical. His time at Sassuolo was successful and a good start at Shakhtar Donetsk was cut short by the war in Ukraine, but since then De Zerbi has had an explosively good debut year immediately followed by a poor one, first at Brighton and then at Marseille.
Noting too worrying there – until you remember how it started at the Amex.
Premier League relegation odds (via Sky Bet)
- West Ham - 1/1
- Tottenham - 13/8
- Nottingham Forest - 13/2
- Leeds - 15/2
Odds correct at 13:05 BST (30/03/26)
A tactical mind like De Zerbi’s needs a full summer of preparatory work, which explains why his only previous mid-season appointment began very slowly.
Brighton had won four of their first six league games of the season before Graham Potter was poached by Chelsea in September 2022, yet despite the club’s strong position upon his arrival De Zerbi won precisely zero of his first five Premier League games in charge, winning two points.
Zero wins, three defeats, two draws. Replicated at Tottenham, that will end in relegation.
“I have my vision,” De Zerbi told reporters back in late October 2022 after a 0-0 draw with Nottingham Forest. “If we want to speak about the quality of the game, I’m happy. I’m very happy. It’s difficult for you [the media] when a coach says he is happy with the game when I didn’t win, but it’s like this.”
It takes time and patience to implement new ideas and De Zerbi was confident that performances would eventually translate into results, which they did, to an extent (Brighton finished sixth, but eighth on form since De Zerbi’s appointment, having come 9th the year before).
That is not an option this time.
This time he needs to hit the ground running, he needs to get the confidence-stricken Spurs players to run through brick walls and to forget everything they were taught by Tudor, by Frank, by Postecoglou.
And all of this comes against the backdrop of statements from three Spurs fan groups – Women of the Lane, Proud Lilywhites, and Spurs Reach – urging the club not to hire a manager who has publically defended Mason Greenwood, whom he once referred to as a “good guy”.
“It saddens me what happened in his life,” De Zerbi has said, “because I know a totally different person than the one who was described in England.”
We cannot predict how the majority of Tottenham supporters, or the players, will feel about what De Zerbi has said, nor can we, for legal reasons, comment much upon his sentiments towards a player who denied all charges against him, charges which were subsequently dropped by the Crown Prosecution Service following “the withdrawal of key witnesses and new material that came to light”.
But what we can say is that friction like that at the outset could be explosive down the line. De Zerbi would be just as big a gamble as Tudor was. Their methods are completely different but the stakes are the same, only this time there are even fewer games to play and an even smaller margin for error.
Tottenham’s chances of relegation have gone up again.
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