THE PIPELINE
Three of our young players captained their countries on the same day, and all anyone wants to talk about is the table
On Friday 25 September, three Tottenham players wore the captain's armband for their countries: Mikey Moore for England Under-20s, Mathys Tel for France Under-21s and Mateus Fernandes for Portugal Under-21s. Moore and Tel both scored. The senior side is bottom of the league, so that is the only story you will be allowed to hear this week, but the club that is supposedly falling apart is the one producing the leaders.
Let me say the honest part first, because I always do. We are 20th in the Premier League. We have two points from five games and two goals. No number of armbands on a Friday night in Reykjavik or Alicante changes that, and I am not going to pretend a good day for the youth teams puts a single point on the board at Old Trafford on 10 October. The table is the table.
But the table is not the club. It is one measure of one squad over five games, and it is the only measure anyone in this country has been allowed to talk about since Saturday. Here is another one. On one day, in three different countries, three of our players were handed the armband by their national associations. Two of them scored. One of them did it on his debut for that age group.
If that had happened at any of the clubs above us, you would have seen it on every back page on Saturday morning, with a headline about a golden generation. It happened at ours, so it got a round-up on the club website and silence everywhere else. I have been keeping count of silences like that for a month now. This is another one.
Who captained their country on Friday?
The club put it all in one piece on Saturday morning, under the headline "A day for young leaders", and for once the club's own headline undersells it.
Start with Mathys Tel. He started as the central striker for France Under-21s against Iceland in Reykjavik, and he wore the armband. France drew 1-1, and the goal was his: an effort was cleared off the line, and Tel was where a centre-forward is supposed to be, between the posts, to fire in from close range. He played 87 minutes. France go to Estonia on Tuesday.
Then Mikey Moore. He is on loan at FC Koln this season, and on Friday he made his debut for England Under-20s in Alicante. Not just a debut. He was the captain, on his first night in that shirt, in Darren Moore's first game in charge as England's Elite League coach. England beat Italy 3-1. Jesse Derry opened the scoring before half-time, and just after the restart our number 47 fired in a cutback to make it two. Shea Lacey got the third. Moore played all ninety minutes. France are next for him, on Tuesday.
Then Mateus Fernandes, our number 18, who kept the armband for Portugal Under-21s in Bulgaria. That one went wrong: Portugal led from the 50th minute and then conceded twice in five minutes to lose 2-1. He played the full ninety. Portugal play Gibraltar at home on Wednesday.
Three captains. Three different national federations, each of which picked a Tottenham player to lead its side. Say it slowly, because nobody else is going to say it at all.
Why does an armband at youth level matter?
Because nobody hands it out by accident. A national youth coach has a whole country's worth of players to choose from, most of them at clubs with bigger budgets, better league positions and much friendlier coverage than ours. When three separate coaches, working for three separate federations, look at their squads and pick a Spurs player as the one the others should follow, that is a judgement on the player. It is also a judgement on the place that shaped him.
It is the part of a young footballer that no scouting report can fake. Scoring can be a hot streak. Captaincy is what the staff see every day in training: who talks, who organises, who the other lads look at when it goes wrong. The club's own words about Fernandes were that he retained the armband. Retained. That tells you it was not a one-off gesture.
Three federations looked at a whole country's worth of young players on the same day, and all three handed the armband to one of ours.
And these are not players on the fringe of our story. Fernandes started against Villa last Saturday. Tel was the man De Zerbi left in the stand that afternoon, and I wrote in my piece on the Villa game that the manager explained that call honestly, saying Maddison and Kudus had more chance to change the game. Six days later Tel is leading the line for France, wearing the armband and scoring. That is a manager's plan working, not a player being wasted, and the only people who will tell you otherwise are the ones who were desperate to tell you all week that he had been frozen out.
What else did our players do on Friday?
More than you have been told. Archie Gray started for England Under-21s in a 4-2 win over Kazakhstan at Molineux and played the first 68 minutes, with the club describing the side as edging closer to qualification for the European Championships. That is the same Archie Gray who came on for Pedro Porro after nineteen minutes against Villa and forced a save out of Zion Suzuki. Slovakia at home is next, on Friday.
Yang Min-hyeok, who is on loan at KVC Westerlo, started for South Korea's Under-23s as they beat Vietnam 4-0 to reach the semi-finals of the Asian Games in Japan. He played the first half. The semi-final is on Wednesday. The last time a Tottenham player helped Korea to that trophy was Heung-Min Son, who won gold in 2018. I will leave you to decide what it means that a Spurs player is two wins from doing it again.
And at senior level, Lucas Bergvall played the full ninety as Sweden beat Romania 2-1 in Stockholm, with Radu Dragusin playing all ninety on the other side. Jamie Donley started and played 73 minutes as Northern Ireland won in Georgia with a 99th-minute winner, which the club says was Northern Ireland's first ever away win in the Nations League. Sandro Tonali played ninety minutes in Rome as Italy lost 2-0 to Belgium. That is a busy Friday for a squad that the radio phone-ins have spent a week describing as short of quality.
Put that together with Thursday, when Bentancur captained Uruguay and Ben Davies captained Wales, and you have five Tottenham players wearing an armband for a national side in the space of two days. Five. Two seniors, three youngsters. Name me the other club in the bottom half that can say that. Name me most of the top half.
Is the academy actually producing anything right now?
Yes, and it is top of its league while the first team is bottom of ours.
Our Under-21s beat Manchester City 4-2 at Stevenage on 19 September and moved to the top of Premier League 2. Luca Williams-Barnett equalised two minutes after City went ahead, Miracle Adewole put us in front on 41 minutes, and Callum Olusesi scored twice, one of them after beating three players in the box. The Under-21s coach, Wayne Burnett, said afterwards that the side had come through its block of games "still unbeaten in the league". The same afternoon, the first team lost 3-2 to Villa, and I know which result got written about.
On Friday the club confirmed that Tyrese Hall has been shortlisted for Premier League 2 Player of the Month for September. He scored once and made two in the 3-1 win at Derby on 11 September, and he scored in each of our first three league games of the season. The winner is picked by the Premier League's Football Development Panel. Three of the eight names on that shortlist play for Chelsea, and one of them used to play for us. I would not dream of guessing how that vote goes. I will just say that I have seen this film before.
And the manager has not forgotten them. Before the Villa game, De Zerbi was asked about Williams-Barnett, and in the club's full transcript he called him "a potential top player", adding: "I didn't forget about Luca, like Malachi, but we have to find the right moment." Malachi Hardy started at the back in that win over City. Both of them are away with England Under-19s this month. A head coach fighting at the bottom of the league, taking the time in a pre-match press conference to name two teenagers, is a head coach who knows exactly where this club's future is sitting.
I said in my piece on the academy earlier this month that the pipeline does not care what the table says. Friday proved it. The table said 20th. The pipeline said three captains, two goals and an Asian Games semi-final.
So why is nobody talking about it?
Because it ruins the story, and the story has been decided.
Think about what the coverage needs for the next fortnight. It is an international break, three weeks long, with no Premier League football until 10 October. The broadcasters have hours to fill and nothing live to fill them with. The easiest thing in the world is a club in crisis: pictures of the table, a pundit asking whether De Zerbi has lost the dressing room, a phone-in asking whether we are going down. That content writes itself, and it costs nothing.
A club with three national captains coming through, an Under-21 side top of its league and a player shortlisted for an award is not a club in crisis. It is a club in transition with a good future, and that is a story nobody is paid to tell. It does not sell a relegation battle. It does not help the rivals who would quite like the country to believe we are finished, because a club that believes it is finished stops attracting the next Mikey Moore. And it does not help a league that likes its pecking order exactly where it is.
So ask who benefits from the silence. Every other academy in the country, whose recruiters can walk into a family's front room this month and point at the table. Every rival whose supporters have spent a week laughing at us and would rather not hear that our kids are leading their countries. Every studio that needs a crisis more than it needs the truth. Nobody will ever convince me that five armbands in two days going almost unmentioned is an oversight. You cannot overlook something that big by accident. You have to decide to.
I have watched them decide it all month. They decided it when De Zerbi was doing more with less and it was called failure. They decided it when the screen took goals off us and it was called marginal. They are deciding it again now.
What does this mean for Old Trafford?
Directly, not much, and I will not pretend otherwise. Moore is at Koln, Yang is at Westerlo, and the Under-21s are not playing at Old Trafford. Tel, Fernandes and Gray should all be back with the squad before then, and available to a manager who, as I wrote when the break began, has three weeks to fix a season with the players who stayed behind.
But indirectly it means everything. A dressing room is not just the eleven who start. It is the young players who come back from international duty having captained their country, and who walk into training at Hotspur Way carrying that. Tel comes back as the man who led France's line and scored. Fernandes comes back as a captain who will want to put Bulgaria right. Gray comes back from Molineux with a win. None of them come back thinking they are at a club in freefall, because they have just spent a fortnight being told by their countries that they are exactly the players who should be followed.
That is what I will be watching for at Old Trafford. Not just the result, but whether the young players look like the leaders their countries already think they are. I suspect they will, and I suspect that if they do, it will be described as United having an off day.
They can keep the table on the screen all fortnight. I will keep the armbands. Three on Friday, two on Thursday, a league leader in the Under-21s, and a manager who knows the names of every one of them. They will never put that in a graphic, and I will never stop pointing out that they chose not to.