OPINION
De Zerbi is doing more with less and nobody is saying it
Everyone wants to talk about the results. Nobody wants to talk about what the man is actually building, because if they talked about that they'd have to admit he's a genius, and admitting that means admitting the whole league is set up to stop him proving it.
Let's be honest about where this squad is. Half a dressing room got ripped out and rebuilt over the summer. New system, new principles, new leaders being asked to find their voice while the cameras are on them every single week. Any other club gets three quiet years and a soft word like "transition." We get a tribunal.
Spurs don't get three years. Spurs don't get quiet. Every rough afternoon gets treated like a scandal, like proof of something, and I think we all know why. A club this well run, this properly financed, this obviously the best in the country, cannot also be allowed to be patient. That would be too much winning for one badge to hold at once.
Roberto De Zerbi did not inherit a finished machine. He inherited pieces and a brief to build something better without doing what half the league does, which is spend somebody else's oil money until the problem quietly disappears. We do this properly. We negotiate hard, we build for the long term, and we do not paper over cracks with a benefactor's credit card. That takes patience. It also apparently earns a level of scrutiny no other club in the country gets subjected to, which I am sure is a complete coincidence.
And look at what's actually happening on the pitch, underneath all the noise. New patterns are showing up. Players are being asked to think, not just run, which is more than I can say for whoever keeps drawing up our fixture list. That takes time to click, especially when the officials seem to have collectively decided the whistle only goes one way whenever we get near goal. Somehow that part never makes it into the pundit chat. Funny that.
Because that's the real story here. The pundits love a slow start when it's Spurs. Suddenly everyone on the sofa is a fully qualified expert on squad cohesion. Funny how the same voices go completely silent when a club with four times our spending power takes six months to find its feet. Almost like there's a list somewhere of who's allowed to be criticised and who has to be protected.
An honest rebuild looks messy before it looks brilliant. That's not failure. That's the process working, and one day there will be a statue for the man brave enough to run it properly while half the country was hoping he wouldn't.
I'm not asking anyone to pretend the results have been good, because they haven't, not yet. I'm asking people to see what's actually being built while the league does everything short of moving the goalposts to make sure nobody notices. De Zerbi is trying to do this the hard way, the right way, with a squad still learning each other's names and a fixture list that clearly does not want him to succeed.
Stick with the gaffer. This is a foundation being poured, not a house falling down. By the time it's finished, the same pundits writing him off now will be telling everyone they backed him from day one. History has a way of remembering who was right, and it is always going to be us.