OCTOBER WINDOW
DE ZERBI QUIETLY BOUGHT THE OCTOBER WINDOW WE WERE OWED
We have spent years writing the same column about Tottenham and the international break: it arrives, nothing happens, the manager complains, the window closes, the players fly back tired, and we are left to read a recruitment update written by someone who thinks "versatile" is a position. This October, for the first time in living memory, the opposite happened. De Zerbi did not complain. De Zerbi did not wait. De Zerbi quietly bought the October window we were owed, and most of the media are going to miss it because they were busy writing another think-piece about a refereeing decision in a match we won. I have the receipts. I have the minutes. I have the slightly aggrieved tone this site was built on.
The bit everyone missed while the fixtures were being rearranged
There is a trick this club has been doing for a decade, and only the people who actually pay attention have noticed. When Tottenham are not in a European competition, the October international break is a nothing. The senior players fly off, the kids stay behind, the under-21 coach runs a series of three-touch rondos, and the manager does a press conference in which he says the word "focus" eleven times and is then asked about transfers by a journalist who has clearly not watched a Spurs match in three years. We get two weeks of oxygen and we hand it straight back.
De Zerbi did not do that. I want to be careful here because I do not want to overclaim, but I also do not want to underclaim, because the pattern is right in front of us. He used those two weeks to do three things at once, and each of them was small, and each of them was deliberate, and each of them points to a manager who has finally understood that at this club you do not get the luxury of working on one problem at a time.
First, he named a captaincy hierarchy out loud. Not a press conference line. Not a "we will see" line. A genuine, on-the-pitch, on-the-training-pitch line. That is not nothing. We have spent years watching this club's leadership question drift from senior pro to senior pro like a slow boat across the Channel. De Zerbi put a stop to it in October and most of the press box thought he was just being Italian.
Second, he used the two friendlies behind closed doors to bed in the shape that did not get a fair run in the league. You remember the shape. We all remember the shape. It is the one where we look like a proper football team and not a group of individuals trying to remember who is supposed to press the right-sided number eight. He has spent four international breaks testing variations of it and he has now picked one. He has not said which one out loud, because that is how he works, but if you watched the second of the two closed-door matches and the way the front three interchanged when the ball was turned over, you have the answer.
Third, and this is the one I want to dwell on, he got the board to publicly attach itself to the next two windows. Not with a fanciful quote about "ambition" in a programme. With a sentence. In October. A month in which the most famous thing the club usually does is rotate a left-back and lose to a team in the bottom three. We have never had a board that talks like that in October. The previous board talked in May when it was too late. The board before that did not talk at all and shipped a winger in January because the agent asked nicely.
So yes, the bit everyone missed while Sky were rearranging the kickoffs and the BBC were rearranging the pundits is that the manager was rearranging the spine of the club. I am not going to pretend it was dramatic. It was not dramatic. That is the point. We have had dramatic. Dramatic is what we get when the dressing room is not in order. Quiet is what we get when the dressing room is in order and the manager is finally being allowed to do his job.
Why the October window is the one nobody in the league knows how to use
I have been writing this blog long enough now to have an actual view on this. Every league has a different rhythm and ours has one great, beautiful, infuriating rhythm, which is that October is the month the squad reveals itself. Not December, when the fixtures thicken. Not February, when the panic window opens. October. Because the international break is the first time the entire squad is in the same building, on the same grass, working on the same plan for two unbroken weeks, and the manager can do in those two weeks what he cannot do in two months of a Premier League schedule.
Look at the way the clubs above us use it. City use it to bed in a new signing who needs six weeks of tactical coaching to understand what "half-space" means. Liverpool use it to give the kids a tour. Arsenal use it to lose one player to a hamstring strain and pretend it is a strategic load-management decision. We have, historically, used it to give the kids a tour and to lose one player to a hamstring strain and pretend it is a strategic load-management decision. That is the bit that has changed.
De Zerbi arrived from Brighton, and for those of you who did not watch Brighton under him, the thing to understand is that he is the rare modern manager whose actual football work happens in the international breaks. The matches are the bit he has to get through. The work is what happens when the cameras are off, when the press is writing about somebody else, and when he has a full week of the squad to himself. He used to complain about the international breaks at Brighton. I remember the quotes. He used to say the players came back "tired in the head". He used to say the breaks broke his rhythm. Then he figured out that the breaks were his rhythm, and he started using them, and Brighton became a top-eight side for three seasons on the bounce.
That is what we are now seeing at Spurs, and it is why I am slightly furious at the coverage. We have a manager who has publicly, repeatedly, in three different press conferences over the last six weeks, said that the international break is the most important two weeks of his season, and the response from the English football press has been to write a think-piece about whether the break is "too long" for the players. Imagine writing that about a coach who is telling you, in plain English, that the length is the point. Imagine being that wrong, that confidently, in print.
What he did in those two weeks was simple. He ran four days of double sessions, two days of tactical work, a closed-door friendly, a second closed-door friendly, and then he sat the squad down in the canteen on the Friday and played them the full back catalogue of video from the last six matches. I know this because three of the players mentioned the canteen session in their own social media the following day, and one of them, a young centre-back we have not yet been allowed to name, posted a still from the video that shows the half-space line being drawn in chalk on the dressing-room whiteboard. A whiteboard. In 2026. By a manager who has been caricatured in the press as a man who would prefer to work on a whiteboard than talk to a journalist. Yes. That is exactly the point. Thank you for the clue.
The captaincy decision and why nobody is making a big enough fuss about it
Let us talk about the captaincy, because I have been saving it and because it is the headline of the piece. De Zerbi named his captain. He did it the way he does everything, which is to say without a press conference and without an announcement, by simply starting the same player with the armband in the first match back and then starting him with the armband in the second match back and then starting him with the armband in the third match back. The English football press, who are still largely incapable of noticing anything that is not announced by a club statement or a tweet from an agent, have barely mentioned it.
It is the right call. I do not want to overstate this. I want to be careful. But it is the right call for a very specific reason, which is that the player he has chosen is the only player in the squad who has been here long enough, played enough positions, come back from enough different disappointments, and spoken to the media in enough different tones to know what the armband actually weighs at this club. We have had a decade in which the armband has been given out like a participation certificate. We have had a decade in which the captain has been the player who happened to be on the pitch at the time, or the player the previous manager preferred, or the player the marketing team thought photographed best at the Community Shield. We have had a decade in which the captaincy has been a question the club has refused to answer because answering it would have forced the club to admit that it does not know who it is.
De Zerbi has answered the question. I will not name the player, partly out of superstition, partly because I do not want to jinx it, and partly because if you have watched the last three matches back you already know. The interesting thing is not the name. The interesting thing is what the player did in the first match back, which is that he spent the first ten minutes not on the ball. He spent the first ten minutes pointing. He spent the first ten minutes gesturing at the full-backs. He spent the first ten minutes having a quiet word with the goalkeeper about the angle of the restarts. He spent the first ten minutes doing the job the armband is actually for. The rest of the squad noticed. The opposition noticed. The fourth official, who is in the official's ear for a living, definitely noticed.
This is the first October in a long time in which the captaincy question has been settled on the pitch rather than in a press release. The previous board would have turned this into a six-week story about "leadership groups" and "vice-captains" and "cascading responsibilities". De Zerbi has not done any of that. He has put the armband on, and he has moved on, and the squad has moved on with him. It is the most competent thing the club has done in October since I started writing about the club.
The board finally said a sentence out loud, in October, and I am clinging to it
The third thing, and I promise this is the last thing, is that the board said something. Not a lot. Not a paragraph. A sentence. The chairman, in a brief interview that I am not going to link because I want to keep my blood pressure down, said that the club's sporting plan for the next two transfer windows is "cohesive, deliberate, and supported by the head coach". Three adjectives. One sentence. October. I have to admit I read it three times. I had to check the date because I assumed it was a misprint from a 2019 interview that had been cached in a search engine.
Why does this matter? Because we have had a board for most of the last decade that has run the club on vibes. Vibes and stadium naming rights and the occasional glossy brochure. The board would say the word "ambition" in May and then do nothing in January. The board would say the word "long-term" and then ship a 28-year-old on a free in the summer. The board would say the word "aligned" and then sign a player the manager had not asked for, on a wage the manager had not sanctioned, in a position the manager did not have a place for. That is how we have ended up with two dressing rooms' worth of "versatile" attacking midfielders and three senior centre-backs in a system that wants one.
The fact that the board has, in October, three months before the January window opens, said the words "cohesive, deliberate, and supported by the head coach" out loud, in public, in a way that can be held against them, is the most encouraging thing the board has done since the new stadium opened. It is also, I should note, an incredibly low bar. We are not talking about a transfer policy. We are not talking about a contract for the head coach. We are talking about a sentence. But in this club, in October, a sentence is a revolution.
I am going to cling to the sentence. I am going to cling to it the way I clung to the third kit when it finally made it onto the pitch. I am going to cling to it the way I cling to the idea that the captaincy has been settled on a football pitch rather than in a boardroom. I am going to cling to it the way this blog clings to every small sign that the people running the club have finally realised that running the club is a job, not a vibe. I will be told I am over-reading. I have been over-reading about Spurs for years. It is the only way I know how to read about Spurs.
What this means for the run-in, and what I am asking you to do about it
So what does it mean? I am going to resist the temptation to make three predictions, because predictions on this site are how we end up writing a column in March about why we were wrong. I am going to say three things instead, and you can take them as read.
One: this is the first October in a long time in which the manager has left the international break with more clarity than he went in with, and the squad has left the international break with more clarity than it went in with. The signal is in the first ten minutes of the last three matches, and the signal is in the body language of the captain, and the signal is in the shape of the second-half press in the second match back. We are a different team than we were in September. We are not a finished team. We are a different team.
Two: the board has put itself on record. That sentence is going to be quoted back at the board in January. It is going to be quoted back at the board in the summer. It is going to be quoted back at the board in every press conference in which the head coach is asked a transfer question. I am going to quote it back at the board on this site. I have already saved the link in three different places. The board is now committed to a plan. The plan can still be a bad plan. But the plan is now on the record, and that is not nothing.
Three: this is the bit where I have to ask you for something. I have been writing this blog for a long time now, and the thing that keeps it alive is not the algorithm, it is not the affiliate links, it is the people who read it, share it, and tell me when I am right and when I am being slightly ridiculous. If you think this column is right, send it to a mate who has been threatening to give up on Spurs in October. If you think this column is wrong, send it to a mate who has been threatening to give up on Spurs in October, with the word "wrong" in the subject line. Either way, send it. The October window is the one nobody in the league knows how to use, and we have just used it, and we should be shouting about it from a slightly aggrieved rooftop.
I will see you for the next match. I will be the one in the third kit.