Tottenham’s £185m Midfield Rebuild Leaves De Zerbi With a Captaincy Puzzle Too

Tottenham finished pre-season unbeaten, closing out their preparations with a 3-0 win over Hoffenheim on Saturday. Roberto De Zerbi’s first summer at the club has brought six new arrivals, a club-record midfield pairing worth £185m, and one open question that money alone cannot answer: who wears the captain’s armband once the Premier League season kicks off?

Breaking the Bank for Two Midfielders

De Zerbi’s own arrival at Tottenham came from a position of urgency rather than ambition. He was appointed on a five-year deal to replace Igor Tudor with the club fighting to stay clear of relegation trouble, taking on a rebuild project after spells at Sassuolo, Shakhtar Donetsk, Brighton and Marseille. His season at Marseille ended with a second-placed Ligue 1 finish before he left the French club by mutual consent in February, and it did not take long after that for Tottenham to move.

Spurs made two statement signings this window and broke their own transfer record twice doing it. Sandro Tonali arrived from Newcastle in a £100m deal, with Tottenham paying £92.5m up front plus £7.5m in achievable add-ons for the Italy international, who has said De Zerbi played a direct role in convincing him to make the move south. Mateus Fernandes followed from West Ham for £85m, another club-record fee, giving Spurs a midfield pairing that cost a combined £185m on its own.

That outlay has pushed Tottenham’s total summer spending to £237m, overtaking the £225m they spent in the summer of 2023 to become the club’s biggest transfer window on record. Newcastle, who paid AC Milan £55m for Tonali in January 2023, banked a profit of roughly £45m on the sale, with the midfielder understood to be earning more than £275,000 a week under his new Spurs contract. Both new midfielders have scored in pre-season, giving early signs that the fee tags will not weigh them down once competitive football starts.

Tonali had interest from elsewhere in the league before choosing Spurs, but it was a personal call from De Zerbi that swung the decision. “De Zerbi played a huge role in this decision,” Tonali said. “I don’t give him all the credit, but he deserves a lot.” He also pointed to a change in circumstances away from the pitch after three years on Tyneside. “We had been in Newcastle for three years and last year our lives changed. Our son was born, so we decided to completely change our lives.”

De Zerbi, speaking to Sky Sport Italia, described the pitch he made to a fellow Brescia native as an honest one rather than a sales job. “I told him the truth, because I always tell players what I really think. I believe he is a player who has always been a leader in every squad he played, so here with a team that is in the process of reconstruction, he can have an important role.”

Fernandes brings a very different story to the same midfield. The 21 year old Portuguese international only joined West Ham from Southampton last August, and lasted just one season at the London Stadium before Spurs made him their next record purchase. A product of the Sporting Lisbon academy, he had already built a reputation for combining defensive work with creative range in his time at Southampton, and Tottenham fans got an early look at what that can produce when he scored what he called the favorite goal of his career on his debut for the club.

A New Look at the Back Too

The rebuild has not stopped in midfield. New defenders Marcos Senesi and Jan Paul van Hecke lined up as a centre-back pairing in Saturday’s clean-sheet win over Hoffenheim, and the pairing looked solid enough to suggest De Zerbi has found a settled option there early. New left-back Andy Robertson also impressed in that same match, and with Micky van de Ven not playing a single minute of pre-season, the former Liverpool captain looks likely to start the opening weekend fixture at Brentford instead.

Van de Ven is not the only key absentee from pre-season. Pedro Porro, Mohammed Kudus and Destiny Udogie also failed to feature at all across the summer program. In Porro’s case, that has an obvious explanation: the Spanish right-back was part of the squad that beat Argentina 1-0 in the World Cup final at MetLife Stadium in July, with Porro himself setting up the buildup to Ferran Torres’ extra-time winner. His involvement in Spain’s run to the trophy meant a delayed return to Tottenham, with Porro telling reporters after the final that he could barely process what his side had just achieved.

Gray’s Chance to Make the Case

Porro’s absence has created an opening at right-back that 20 year old Archie Gray has taken with both hands. Gray started every pre-season match in that position and also carried the captain’s armband throughout the summer program, the responsibility falling to him following Cristian Romero’s exit.

Romero left Tottenham for Atletico Madrid this month in a deal worth an initial £34.2m, signing a contract in Madrid that runs to 2031. He leaves after five seasons and 156 competitive appearances in a Spurs shirt, a run that included lifting the Europa League in 2025 as club captain. Replacing that kind of leadership inside the dressing room is rarely as simple as handing the armband to the next senior player, and Gray’s rise from pre-season deputy at right-back to captain in all but official confirmation says plenty about how De Zerbi rates him, even at such a young age.

Whether Gray keeps the armband once Porro, Udogie and the rest of the squad are back to full fitness is a separate question from whether he starts. Spurs have options across the pitch now that the transfer business is largely done, and De Zerbi will have selection headaches most Premier League managers would take without hesitation.

An Unbeaten Summer, an Undefined Best XI

Going through an entire pre-season without a defeat says something about the depth De Zerbi now has to work with, even allowing for the level of opposition Spurs faced along the way. The Hoffenheim result on Saturday, coming off the back of new signings scoring and a settled-looking back four, gave supporters plenty to be encouraged about heading into the opening weekend.

What it has not done is settle De Zerbi’s best available team. Kudus, Udogie and Porro are all expected to return to full training in the coming days, each of them capable of forcing their way straight back into a starting XI that performed well without them. Combined with a front line still shaping up around Tonali and Fernandes, Tottenham’s head coach has a properly difficult job picking his strongest side, a problem born entirely out of the depth this summer’s rebuild has created.

What Comes Next

Spurs open their season away at Brentford, live on Sky Sports, before a run of fixtures that will test how quickly De Zerbi’s new-look squad can gel under competitive pressure rather than the low stakes of pre-season friendlies. The captaincy decision could remain unresolved by kickoff, and De Zerbi could choose to keep Gray in the role for the opener regardless of who else is fit to play.

It is a very different opening fixture to the one that greeted De Zerbi’s predecessor last year. Tudor’s Tottenham spent long spells looking over their shoulder at the bottom of the table, and the appointment of a coach with a clear attacking style, backed with a five-year contract, was as much a statement of intent from the club’s hierarchy as any single transfer. Judged purely on results, an unbeaten pre-season and £237m of fresh investment represent as strong a starting position as Tottenham have had heading into a Premier League campaign in some time.

Brentford themselves head into the weekend on the back of their own busy summer, having broken their transfer record to sign Mali international Mamadou Sangare from Lens and adding proven Premier League options in Callum Wilson and Jaidon Anthony. Keith Andrews’ side thrashed Eintracht Frankfurt 7-0 in their final pre-season outing, a result that will have caught De Zerbi’s attention as he finalizes his lineup for the trip. Whoever starts in defense, midfield or at right-back, Tottenham’s head coach will want his first competitive selection to reflect the depth this transfer window has given him rather than settle for whichever names happen to be fittest on the day.

What is clear after a summer of record spending and an unbeaten warm-up campaign is that Tottenham go into the new season with more competition for places than they have had in years, and a young player at the center of it who has grown into a leadership role nobody expected him to hold this soon.

For a club that spent much of last season looking anxiously at the table below them, that kind of depth is a change worth noting on its own. The real test starts once the points are on the line, but for now De Zerbi has built exactly the problem every head coach wants: too many good options and not enough shirts to hand out.