ARMOUR
Five captains is not a leadership plan
Tottenham have named Micky van de Ven captain, Pedro Porro vice captain, Ben Davies third captain, James Maddison fourth captain and Archie Gray fifth captain, all in one window, and the dressing room reads as nothing if we let it.
What the five actually says
Let me write the honest part first, because that is the rule on this site. Tottenham have named five captains in one squad in one window. Micky van de Ven is the captain. Pedro Porro is the vice captain. Ben Davies is the third captain. James Maddison is the fourth captain. Archie Gray, who has not yet played a hundred senior matches, is the fifth captain. Five. In writing. Five captains in a squad that is 20th in the Premier League, on a date when the club sits on the wrong side of the table and the only number we all remember from last season is the one we lost by.
I do not know who in the room thought this looked like leadership. I would like to. I would like the explanation, on the record, because right now the only explanation on the table is that we have five captains because we could not pick one.
A captain is meant to be the voice when the referee is loudest. A vice captain is the person who does it when the captain cannot. A third captain is the third person who can do it when the first two cannot. By the time you reach fifth captain you have explained, in writing, that none of the other four is trusted to be on the pitch at the same time as the ball. That is not depth. That is a confession that the dressing room does not yet have a first choice, and the club decided to write that confession in armband form.
I am happy to be told I am wrong. I would love to be told I am wrong. But the answer should not be that every top club has five captains. I have checked. Most have one captain, one vice, and the rest of the leadership group is not titled. We have five titled captains in writing.
Why Romero leaving is the point
Cristian Romero left for Atletico Madrid in the summer. That is the first season without him since 2020-21. He was our captain. He was the leader of the back four, the voice in the dressing room, the one who stood in front of the press and took the question everyone else ducked. The club has replaced him with five captains, of whom exactly zero have the same number of caps, the same number of nights in the dressing room, or the same number of matches playing through a knock he should have come off at.
I am not asking for Romero back. I am asking the question that any fan in any stand would ask, which is: if you have lost the one leader, and you have answered that by giving five other people the same title, have you actually found a leader, or have you just distributed the absence across more shoulders.
What this looks like is not the point
Some of you will say, fairly, that De Zerbi is the leader. The manager is the leader. The captaincy is symbolic. Fine. I accept the argument. I accept that in modern football the manager runs the dressing room and the captain runs the coin toss. But then why is the club publishing five armbands on its own communications. If it is symbolic, why five. Why not one. The act of naming five to do a job that one person has done since the 1880s is, on its own, a story about leadership, even if the story is that we have decided to abandon the old way of telling it.
A captaincy plan that names five people is a captaincy plan that has not picked one.
What I want instead
Pick one. Pick van de Ven, or pick Porro, or pick Davies, or pick Maddison. Pick whoever is going to be the one who stands in front of the press, takes the question, takes the dressing room by the throat when we are 2-0 down at Old Trafford on 10 October. Pick the one. Then write the other four as a leadership group, which is what the other clubs do, and stop publishing a captaincy list that reads like a five-a-side squad sheet.
Until then, I will keep treating five captains as the question I have been asking, which is the same question I have been writing about since August. We are 20th. We are without a single first-choice leader. We have replaced one captain with five armbands and a leadership group in name. I have written before that De Zerbi is doing more with less. I will keep writing it until the dressing room matches the comms.