FORMATION
DE ZERBI HAS A SHAPE THE BOARD CANNOT UNDO
There is a thing that happens at this club roughly every eighteen months. A manager finds a shape, the players start to look like they understand what they are doing, the away end finds a song for the full back, and then somebody in Enfield decides the experiment is over and sends for the man with the clipboard and the soft hands. We have seen it with Pochettino. We have seen it with Conte. We saw the early shape of it with the last man, and God rest his footballing conscience. So when I say that Roberto De Zerbi has built a system at Spurs that the board, the analytics department, the new sporting director and whichever well-dressed cousin is hovering near the dugout this month cannot pry loose, I want you to understand that I am not being poetic. I am being precise. The shape is now structurally his. Removing it would mean removing him, and removing him now would be a confession.
The shape, exactly as it is, on a Tuesday in October
Let me write it down so we are not arguing about vibes. De Zerbi has settled, after the slow, slightly maddening autumn of trial and error, on a 3-4-2-1 that has stopped looking like a suggestion and started looking like a theorem. Vicario behind a back three of Romero, Danso and Dragusin, with the centre backs stepping into the half spaces the way De Zerbi's centre backs always have, from his Sassuolo days to his Brighton days and now, finally, here. Spence and Udogie as the wing-backs, with the deliberate choice that Spence is the right and Udogie the left, not the other way around, and the deliberate choice that Sarr sits at right centre midfield rather than Bissouma, which I will come back to because I have opinions about Bissouma and they are not kind.
Then the two tens. Or the two eights, depending on which Italian phrase you prefer. Maddison and Xavi Simons, the latter finally starting to look like the player we were told we had signed rather than the player we were sure we had not. Kulusevski through the middle. Solanke up top, although Solanke through the middle and Kulusevski off him is a different argument and one I am not having today.
The point of writing the shape down is not the shape. It is that this is the first time in my lifetime as a Spurs fan that I have been able to write the shape down without immediately wanting to argue with myself about it. It does not depend on a single player being fit. It does not depend on a single refereeing decision going our way. It does not depend on whether the new boy from Bruges has had his coffee. It is a system that has internal redundancy, which is consultant-speak for, the lads know what to do if the other lad does not do it.
Why the board cannot pry this one loose
Now the part that has been sitting in my chest since Brentford away. Why this shape, specifically this one, is now politically untouchable inside the building, regardless of what the analytics team slides across the table at 7am on a Monday.
First, because the goals are coming from where the model says they should come from. The xG is not a miracle. The xG is the shape. We are overperforming our expected goals by a small, sane, sustainable amount, and we are underperforming our expected goals against by a similar small sane amount, and that combination is the one that wins you fourth place and sometimes, if the moon is in the right house, third. I do not need anyone at the club to tell me that. I can read a chart. I have been reading charts badly for fifteen years and I can still read this one.
Second, because Spence is England. I have written about this more than is healthy and I make no apology for it. Djed Spence is on nine caps, the FA have stopped pretending, and any board that tries to undo a system in which an English right wing-back is producing both numbers and caps will be asked, very politely, by very serious people in very serious suits, why they are doing that. The system protects Spence, Spence is producing, the FA is pleased, the marketing department is delighted, and the whole thing has the structural weight of something that cannot be lifted.
Third, because Sarr at right centre midfield is the single most quietly important decision De Zerbi has made. Pape Matar Sarr has been, for two seasons now, a player I have wanted to love and have found very difficult to trust. He loses the ball in our half, he makes the pass that opens the game, he loses the ball in our half again. It is exhausting. But De Zerbi has given him a defined role in a defined shape, and Sarr has stopped looking like a highlight reel with a warning label attached. He is now a structured midfielder, and structured midfielders are what Spurs have not had since, I am going to say it, Mousa Dembele.
Fourth, because the new sporting director, whoever he is this week, has not yet found the lever. The lever used to be the formation. A bad result, a panel show appearance by a former midfielder, a tweet that has been screenshotted into a meme, and the formation would change by Saturday. That lever has gone. The shape is not negotiable. It is the only thing the dressing room is willing to defend in public, and it is the only thing the manager has shown he is willing to lose his job over. I have watched managers bluff at this club. De Zerbi is not bluffing.
What the last three results actually told us
Let us not be romantic about this. The shape has also produced, in the last three matches, a sequence that I want to read back to myself so I can believe it. We beat Brighton 2-0 at home, in a match that, under the previous manager, we would have drawn 1-1 in the 88th minute and then conceded from a set piece. We did not. Vicario made one save, Romero made four headed clearances, and Solanke scored a goal that I will describe to my grandchildren in a way that will not match what actually happened. We drew 1-1 at Villa Park, which is the single most Spurs result possible in 2026, except that we were the better team for seventy of the ninety minutes and the goal we conceded was, as it always is against Villa, the kind of goal that only happens to us. We beat West Ham 3-0 on a Sunday, with two goals from Simons and one from Kulusevski that will, in time, become a statue outside the stadium if I have anything to say about it.
Three matches, seven points, two clean sheets, and the xG difference per ninety of plus 1.4. I am not making that up. That is the number. That is the shape, doing the shape, on a Tuesday and a Saturday and a Sunday, against a Brighton side that knows exactly what we are doing and a West Ham side that emphatically did not.
What the last three results actually told us is not that we are good. We have been good before and then we have been very bad again. What the last three results told us is that we are structurally good, and structurally good is a thing Spurs have not been since the year we finished above Arsenal and then did not win the league and then the manager left and then the world ended.
The things I am still worried about, because I am a Spurs fan
I am a Spurs fan, so I will now list, in order, the things I am still worried about, because there is no such thing as a settled shape at this club, only a shape that has not yet been unsettled.
I am worried that the January window will bring in a number ten that none of us have heard of and that De Zerbi will be told, gently, over a plate of poached chicken, that the new boy has to start, and the shape will bend, and the bending will be the beginning of the end. I am worried that Bissouma will start a game, because every time Bissouma starts a game I age a year. I am worried that the away end at the Etihad will be the away end at the Etihad and we will revert, in front of Pep's children, to a shape that looks like a car park. I am worried that Dragusin will pick up the yellow he always picks up, the one that is his own personal loop, the one that arrives in the 67th minute and is always, always, for a tackle that is fine.
I am worried that the next international break will take Spence away and bring him back tired, and that the FA will, in their wisdom, play him at left back, which is a thing they did once and which I have not yet recovered from. I am worried that Romero will be sold to Atletico in a window I have invented in my own head. I am worried that Solanke will be asked to do a job he is not built for, because we always ask our strikers to do jobs they are not built for, and that he will do it gamely and look tired by March.
And I am worried, because this is the real one, the underneath one, the one I cannot shake, that De Zerbi himself will be offered the Italy job in the summer, that he will take it, and that we will spend the next three years writing posts on this blog about how he built a shape we will never see again. I have written that post in my head. I do not want to write it on the page.
Why this is different from every other Spurs shape I have loved and lost
I have loved Spurs shapes before. I loved the 4-2-3-1 of 2016 that got Dele Alli on the ball and let Eriksen float. I loved the 3-4-2-1 of Conte's first six months, when Son was scoring from the left and the away end at the Emirates nearly took the roof off. I loved the early Poch high press that made Wembley feel, for one autumn, like a place we had been before. All of those shapes were, in the end, taken away. Some by results. Some by the manager. Some by the men with the clipboards and the soft hands.
What is different, this time, and I am being careful here because I have been wrong before, is that the shape is not a manager's preference. It is the dressing room's preference. The players have stopped asking De Zerbi what to do and started telling him where they are. Spence is telling Vicario he is overlapping on the right. Sarr is telling Maddison to drop into the pocket. Romero is stepping into midfield with the confidence of a man who has been told, repeatedly and clearly, that this is his job. That is not a shape that can be prised loose by a Monday morning meeting in Enfield. That is a shape that has to be dismantled by being dismantled, and nobody at Spurs has the nerve.
I have been a Spurs fan since the year we beat Leicester to win the league and I was not born yet. I have watched us lose finals, lose semis, lose the first half of a season in September and then spend the second half of the season explaining September. I have written posts on this blog that are essentially long, polite complaints to people who will never read them. I have come to recognise, slowly and with a great deal of evidence, the difference between a shape that is a result and a shape that is a structure. This one is a structure. I can feel it in the same place I feel the goals against. It is in the same place. It is below the ribs. It is the thing that I do not trust, because trusting it has cost me before.
But it is there. And for the first time in a long time, the board cannot pry it loose. COYS.