DAILY GRIND
De Zerbi Has Not Lost the Dressing Room Yet
Every time we go three games without a win somebody gets on a laptop and decides the headline is that De Zerbi has lost the dressing room, and every time I read it I want to throw my phone into the Thames. We are not doing this again. We are not running another manager out of N17 because a couple of well connected ex staff members fancy a return to the comfortable old days. I have watched every minute of this season, I have read every line of his programme notes, and I am telling you, with my hand on my heart, that Roberto De Zerbi has not lost the dressing room. Not yet. Not close. The dressing room is the only honest thing we have left.
The leak is the story, not the manager
Let us start with the leak, because the leak is the only reason we are even having this conversation. On Friday morning, a national newspaper carried a piece suggesting that certain senior players were 'unconvinced' by De Zerbi's methods and that there was 'frustration' with his rotation policy. None of those players were named. None of those conversations were sourced. It was the kind of story that exists to be quoted by other outlets, the kind of story that lives for one news cycle and a slow Tuesday, and the kind of story that I have seen about every single Tottenham manager since Mauricio Pochettino started winning away at Real Madrid.
What the story did not say, what no story like this ever says, is who briefed it. Because somebody did. Somebody sat down, or somebody picked up a phone, and decided that the most efficient way to undermine an Italian head coach in his first real wobble was to go to a friendly journalist and float the word 'lost.' I have been around long enough to know that the dressing room does not talk to national newspapers. The dressing room talks to its captain. The captain talks to the coach. What leaks is not the dressing room. What leaks is the old staff, the old agent network, the old ghosts that we have not yet had the courage to evict from the building.
And yes, I include some of our own fan channels in that. The 'multiple sources at Hotspur Way' line has become a tic. It used to mean something. Now it means somebody knows somebody whose cousin works in the laundry. If you are going to tell me De Zerbi has lost the dressing room, I want a name, a quote, and a date. I want the recording. Until then, I am treating the story the way I treat every VAR review that goes against us, which is to say I am treating it as a stitch up until proven otherwise.
Look at how he actually trains, not how the agenda wants you to see it
I was at the training ground on Thursday, as I am most Thursdays when the gates are open to the programme, and I want to give you what I saw with my own eyes rather than what somebody wants you to read in a column. De Zerbi had us doing a 20 minute rondo variation that I have never seen at this club before, with two neutral players in the middle and a strict rule that the ball had to be played to a player who had not touched it in the previous two passes. It looked chaotic. It was obviously designed to break the habit of going back to the obvious option, which is the habit that has cost us goals in three of our last four matches.
What I also saw, and this is the bit the national newspaper could not be bothered to print, is the reaction when someone gave the ball away. He did not scream. He did not stop the drill. He clapped. He pointed to the player who won it back and said, in Italian, something like 'this, this is what I want.' When the session ended he stayed on the pitch for ten minutes with Djed Spence working on the inside channel, the same channel that the press decided last week Spence 'cannot defend,' which is the same channel that Spence has been blocking for England with absolute ease. There is a manager in there. There is a plan. There is a method. None of it looks like a man who has lost a room.
Compare that to what we had before. The previous regime did not leak stories about itself because it did not need to. It had compliant access, sympathetic podcasts, and a captain who has since moved on. De Zerbi has none of that. He arrived with a backroom team of four Italians, a translator, and an absolute refusal to be friendly to broadcasters. Of course he is being got at. Of course the briefing is happening. It happened to Conte, it happened to Mourinho, it happened to Nuno, and it will keep happening until we accept that the easiest way to destabilise a head coach at this club is to write a front page that says he is destabilised, and then watch the fans do the rest.
Three games without a win is not a crisis, it is October
Let us also get the table in proportion. We are sixth. We have lost twice, both times to teams in the current top four, both times by a single goal, both times with a debatable refereeing decision in the build up. We have scored in every league match since the opening weekend. We have the third highest expected goals in the division. We have a positive xG differential, which we did not have at this stage last season, and we have done it while integrating four new first team players and blooding two academy graduates in the same match.
Three games without a win in October is what the league looks like. It is what the league has looked like for the last four seasons. It is what the league will keep looking like until we stop treating every result like a referendum on the manager's job. Liverpool drew at home to Brentford. Arsenal lost to Bournemouth. Manchester City, the all conquering, charges proven, every referee in their pocket Manchester City, dropped points at home to a team we beat in August. None of those clubs are running a 'has the manager lost the dressing room' piece. We are, because we always are, because it is easier to print than to think.
The rotation is the point, not the problem
Part of the supposed 'frustration' is the rotation. I want to address this directly, because I think it is the most easily dismissed part of the briefing and the most revealing. De Zerbi has rotated more in eight games than Thomas Frank rotated in the last three months of his tenure. He has used 22 players in the league. He has started three different centre back pairings. He has dropped a club captain for a 19 year old and brought the captain back the following week without either of them sulking publicly.
This is the rotation that we asked for, by the way. We begged for it. For two seasons we screamed that the squad was being run into the ground, that the same eleven was being asked to play Thursday Sunday Thursday Sunday, that Pedro Porro looked like he was being asked to play two positions at once and to be the only creative outlet on the right. Now we have a coach who actually uses the squad, who trusts the depth, who picks a team for the opponent rather than the other way around, and the response from certain quarters is that the players are 'unconvinced.'
What the players are is professional. What the players are is being asked to compete for places for the first time in two years, and a small number of them are not used to it. There is a difference between a player being unconvinced and a player being uncomfortable. Unconvinced means he has stopped listening. Uncomfortable means he has stopped being able to coast. I know which one I think it is, and I know which one I want it to be, and I also know that the dressing room at Hotspur Way in October 2026 is not the place where a senior professional has stopped listening to a head coach who has just been named in the shortlist for the league manager of the month.
The ex staff problem is the real story
If you want a real story, here is one. There are still at this football club people in administrative, recruitment, and communications roles who were appointed by the previous regime. Some of them wanted De Zerbi. Some of them did not. Some of them have been briefing against him since his first press conference, when he said, calmly and accurately, that this squad needed to learn to suffer without the ball. That sentence has been twisted into 'he has lost the players' in three separate podcasts that I will not name, because naming them would only give them the traffic they want.
These people have agents. These people have old player relationships. These people have a direct line to journalists who will print whatever they are given as long as it is wrapped in a Tottenham source. They are the dressing room leak, in the same way that the VAR bunker is the reason we are not winning, in the same way that the fixture computer at the league is the reason we always seem to play on the Monday night after a Sunday game. It is the convenient explanation. It is the explanation that lets the people actually doing the briefing carry on doing the briefing.
Until the club identifies who is leaking, names it, and removes them, this is going to keep happening. Every time we go a game without a goal, every time we drop points, every time De Zerbi makes a change that someone disagrees with, there will be a line in a newspaper. The only way to end it is to treat the leak as the disciplinary matter it is, and to remember that the previous manager did not have this problem because the previous manager did not have people who wanted him gone. The previous manager had people who wanted him comfortable. Comfortable is what we are trying to leave behind.
We are the ones who decide whether he stays
I want to say something to the people reading this who have already made up their mind, who have already put the 'De Zerbi out' banner into a folder, who are waiting for the first defeat to start the next petition. I have been there. I am not going to pretend I have not. I was ready to turn on Conte after the Sheffield United game. I was ready to turn on Nuno after Wolves. I was ready to turn on Mourinho after every defeat and most of the draws. I have signed the petitions, I have written the tweets, I have been part of the cycle that this club has been trapped in for a decade.
What I have learned is that the cycle is the point. The cycle is what certain people want. Every three years, get a new manager, brief against him when it goes wrong, brief against him when it goes right, replace him, repeat. It is a machine. It generates content, it generates column inches, it generates transfer windows, and it keeps the club exactly where it has been for the last twenty years, which is the fifth richest club in the league with nothing to show for it. The only way to break the machine is to refuse to feed it.
De Zerbi has not lost the dressing room. He has unsettled the people who used to run the dressing room without the head coach knowing, and that is a different thing. He has unsettled the comfortable. He has unsettled the agents. He has unsettled the ex staff. He has unsettled the people who think that a manager's job is to be friendly to broadcasters and to not rotate the captain. I am on his side. I am on his side until I have a reason not to be, and right now my reason not to be is a column written by a man who has not been to the training ground in two years and who has never spoken to a player in his life. That is not a reason. That is a brief. We are better than briefs.
What the rest of October actually requires
So what do we want to see in the next four games? Not miracles. Not a new manager. Not a return to the comfortable cycle. We want to see the team that finished the Villa match, the one with Spence at left back and the two academy boys in the centre of midfield, the one that played the second half on the front foot and that should have been awarded a penalty that we are still waiting for PGMOL to acknowledge, three weeks after the fact. We want to see the team that De Zerbi has been building, not the team that the briefing wants you to imagine.
We want a goal from Marmoush, because he is going to score soon and it is going to be glorious. We want a clean sheet from Romero and whoever plays next to him, because we have the joint best defensive record in the division in the last six games and that is not nothing. We want Spence to keep his England place and to bring that confidence back into the league. We want the kids to keep their nerve. We want De Zerbi to keep his press conference schedule, his rotation, his refusal to be liked by people who do not matter.
And we want the people who are leaking to know that we can see them. We can see the briefing. We can see the pattern. We can see that the story is the same every October, every February, every time a manager tries to change something at this club. We are not falling for it. Not this time. Not with him. The dressing room is fine. The dressing room is more than fine. The dressing room is the only part of this club that has not been briefed against, and that is because the dressing room does not talk to anyone except the manager, and the manager is the one person that the briefers are desperate to get rid of. That tells you everything. That tells you who is afraid. It is not us. It is them.