You could write a long list of the important things missing at Tottenham Hotspur this season. Wins, goals, fun, entertainment, enjoyment, unity, stability, strategy, optimism, progress, respite, comfort, satisfaction, hope… we could all keep reeling them off all day.
But there is one more ingredient, something that has perhaps been buried underneath everything else in the sorry mess of their 2025-26 campaign.
And that is an idea.
Every good football team needs an idea to unify them, to define them, for the players to rally around. Without an idea that the players all buy into, no team can ever be more than the sum of its parts.
Watching Tottenham this season has been a lesson in many things, but above all it has shown what happens if a team has no shared idea to believe in. When Thomas Frank arrived from Brentford last summer as the new head coach, he came with lorry-loads of best practice, clever methods on set pieces and behavioural standards that had worked well at his previous club.
But it always felt, watching Spurs play, as if there was nothing to bind it all together.
The players never looked as if they were fully bought into what they were being asked to do. That lack of conviction and intensity, more than anything else, explains why Tottenham were so poor under Frank. Every time a game was in the balance, their opponents looked more committed to their own plan.
When Igor Tudor succeeded the Dane in February, nobody expected him to come in and reinvent the wheel. He was at Spurs to make a short-term impact, to get them fit and organised and moving back up the table. This was never about style of play. And of course it did not work, Tottenham took one point from five games and he too was sacked.
Which leads us to the appointment of Roberto De Zerbi.
The one thing that defines the new Spurs head coach more than anything, even more than his passion and his intensity, is his idea. He has his own concept of positional football and his own vision about how to execute it — provoking the opposition press to find the space. The hardest thing to be in football is original, but that is exactly what De Zerbi has succeeded in being.
The last time Tottenham were animated by an original idea was when Ange Postecoglou arrived in the summer of 2023 with his own distinct twist on attacking, possession football. It feels like ancient history now, but that style was a sensation for the start of Postecoglou’s first season. The players were transformed by the power of having an idea they could all commit to. Almost overnight, they went from being a collection of individuals into a unit, trying to make Postecoglou’s dream real.
Now we all know what happened next, and how he ended up winning the Europa League in his second and final season with a very different style of football. But there is still no denying how thrilling that start was. And no denying that at the heart of it was the manager’s idea, and the players’ belief in it. Without that, it was nothing.
An awful lot has happened between now and then, on and off the pitch. Spurs are in a league position nobody would ever have expected.
But if you want to make an optimistic case for De Zerbi and for the difference he can make at the club, then here it is: Tottenham finally have an idea back. For the first time since Postecoglou, there is an original, specific ambitious vision of the game at the heart of what they want to be.
Can De Zerbi provide the vision to inspire Spurs’ players? (Michael Steele/Getty Images)
Now, people might say at this point that they have never seen an idea score a goal. Which is true, in a strictly literal sense. But what ideas can do, especially when delivered by the right manager, is motivate the players. Give them something to believe in. Something to work towards. Something that makes sense of what happens on the pitch. And this is exactly what Tottenham have lacked.
Spurs have some very good players who have never looked like themselves this year, senior pros who joined the club to compete for trophies and play in the Champions League, not scrap along with Nottingham Forest and West Ham United at the wrong end of the table. There is a theory that they need to feel like they are playing elite football, dominant football, and that if they can just be inspired, then they will raise their levels again.
The central challenge of the past few months at Tottenham has been to get into the heads of the players and have them recommit to something. This is what Tudor was clearly unable to do. And this plan, as unlikely as it feels, has as realistic a prospect of doing that as anything else.
Of course, in an ideal world, the players might be able to find their own motivation anyway. Or rather, the badge, the pride of the fans, the perilous position of the team, their own considerable salaries might motivate them enough. But the reality of football is that players do often need the sense of purpose that comes from playing for a coach with a vision. Which is why such coaches tend to be the most successful.
This is to say nothing at all about whether or not this will work.
The task of teaching this football to these players in such a short span of time is a huge one. We do not know yet whether De Zerbi will arrive with the full version of his game model, or a diluted one to get through the season’s final seven games.
It might prove to be too much to take on board — too confusing, too different from what Spurs have tried to do previously under Frank and Tudor. It does not take a huge imaginative leap to picture the goalkeeper, whether Antonin Kinsky or Guglielmo Vicario, standing with his foot on the ball, waiting to be pressed, hoping that there will be a spare man to pass to, panicking when there is not, coughing up possession and an easy goal.
And if it fails, and Spurs are relegated for the first time since the 1970s, then this whole argument will look ridiculous. Because why would anyone cling to something as ephemeral as an idea when what they really needed was a common-sense method to win football matches?
But this is the bet that Tottenham have taken. They have invested everything in the hope that De Zerbi’s originality and conviction are what is needed to unlock the minds of these players. If he can convince them all to commit to this, they could start, finally, to turn back into the players they were meant to be, and from individuals back into a team.
If he can do that in the short time available, then Spurs will stay up this season and have a bright future. If he cannot, then this will be one of the most expensive mistakes in modern football history.
It is a high-stakes gamble, an all-in wager on the idea of having an idea.