Tottenham Hotspur have confirmed the appointment of Roberto De Zerbi as their new head coach.
The 46-year-old Italian has signed a “long-term contract” with the north London club and his first match in charge will be the Premier League trip to Sunderland on April 12. Spurs sources say De Zerbi’s terms run for five years.
The Athletic reported on Monday that Tottenham had proposed a significant financial package to De Zerbi, which would make him one of the highest-paid managers in the Premier League. He is tasked in the short-term with saving the club from potential relegation.
The club are 17th in the Premier League, just one point above the relegation zone, and could have slipped into the bottom three by the time De Zerbi is in the dugout for the trip to the Stadium of Light, which follows 18th-placed West Ham United’s home game against Wolverhampton Wanderers, who are at the foot of the table.
The second game in charge for De Zerbi, who departed French club Marseille on February 11, will be against his former club Brighton & Hove Albion on April 18.
“In all my discussions with the club’s leadership, their ambition for the future has been clear — to build a team capable of reaching great achievements, and to do that playing a style of football that excites and inspires our supporters,” De Zerbi said in a release on the club’s website on Tuesday. “I am here because I believe in that ambition and have signed a long-term contract to give everything to deliver it.
“Our short-term priority is to climb the Premier League table, which will be the complete focus until the final whistle of the last game of the season. I’m looking forward to getting out on the training pitch and working with these players to achieve that.”
De Zerbi becomes the third Spurs head coach of the season and succeeds Igor Tudor, who parted ways with the club on Sunday following just one point in the five league matches he oversaw. Tudor had been appointed in February to replace Thomas Frank, who himself had only arrived at the club from Brentford last summer.
In the release, Spurs sporting director Johan Lange said De Zerbi “was our number one target for the summer and we are very pleased to be able to bring him in now”.
De Zerbi has been out of work since departing Marseille in February after less than two years in charge of the Ligue 1 club, whom he guided to this season’s Champions League but they missed out on the top-24 of the league phase. He did, however, leave Marseille with a 57 per cent win percentage, higher than any of his 34 predecessors since the turn of the century.
On Friday, three Spurs fan groups urged the club not to appoint De Zerbi, citing his backing of Mason Greenwood, with whom he worked at Marseille.
Before his spells at Brighton and Marseille, De Zerbi previously coached at Benevento, Sassuolo, Palermo and Shakhtar Donetsk.
A risk worth taking?
Analysis by data and tactics writer Anantaajith Raghuraman
De Zerbi, while an attractive option given his Premier League experience with Brighton, falls squarely in the ‘roll of a dice’ category.
News of Tottenham’s pursuit already seemed to widen the cracks of an already fractured relationship between the club hierarchy and supporters.
There are questions over whether Spurs will be able to play his style of football, too. Brighton notably failed to win any of his first five matches in charge after he arrived midseason in 2022-23, losing to Spurs, Brentford and Manchester City, while drawing 3-3 with Liverpool and 0-0 with Nottingham Forest.
De Zerbi pioneered a build-up system of inviting pressure to the back line with passes before playing over or through that pressure with quick tempo shifts to create chances. As their playstyle map from the 2024-25 season shows, De Zerbi’s Marseille maintained a high line, dominated possession and created chances through central zones. But they also struggled to prevent opponents from carving out goalscoring opportunities.
Marseille adopted an aggressive front-footed approach, but it had structural deficiencies, with large gaps between the lines. This left defenders and midfielders with far too much space to cover when teams played through their press, inevitably resulting in mistakes.
Marseille’s 45 errors leading to a shot or goal in Ligue 1 during De Zerbi’s reign ranked only behind Nice (54). Their opponents averaged 0.14xG per shot, the worst rate for any defending team in that same period.
De Zerbi said in a June 2025 interview with Italian podcast Supernova that he “lives for the result” and that if he could, he would “put two goalkeepers in to defend”. Spurs might require more of that pragmatism than the expansive style that has become his trademark.