THE BREAK
Three weeks to fix a season: the international break is the best thing on our fixture list
Tottenham do not play again until Manchester United away on Saturday 10 October. That is twenty-one days without a match, the longest gap of the season, and it lands on a squad that its own manager says is short of physical condition. Everyone else is treating this fortnight as dead air, which suits them, because dead air is where this club is usually worked over. I think it is the most useful thing that has happened to us since August, and I think a lot of people would rather we did not use it.
Let me say the honest part first, because I always do. An international break is not a training camp. Around thirty of our players, senior and academy, have gone off to airports this week, some of them to play four matches in twelve days, and a manager who wants to rebuild a side's conditioning does not get to do that with people who are in Belgrade, Cairo and Ljubljana. Anyone selling you the idea that De Zerbi has three clear weeks with his squad is selling you something.
And nobody pays us a penny for any of it. Thirty players, three weeks, four matches each, every one of them insured against a risk that lands on Tottenham Hotspur and nobody else. The associations get their gate receipts, the confederations get their television money, and if a hamstring goes in Belgrade it is our problem in October. That arrangement was not designed by us and it has never once been designed for us.
Fine. Now the other half, which nobody is writing.
He does have three clear weeks with the exact players who need them. He said so himself, before any of this, and he named them. And the schedule this autumn is not the usual ten-day nuisance. It is a different animal entirely, and I do not think most supporters have noticed.
Why is this international break three weeks long?
Because the Premier League changed the shape of the autumn. The two September and October windows have been consolidated into one. The club's own list of key dates for 2026/27, published back in May, sets out "a two-weekend international break" starting on 26 September, with nations playing up to four matches each before domestic football resumes on the weekend of 10 October. The next break after this one is a single weekend, on 14 November.
So this is not the ordinary version. Two league weekends disappear at once. For a side sitting twentieth, that is three weeks of being talked about by people who will not have to watch a single minute of football to do it. We lost 2-3 to Aston Villa on Saturday, had a goal taken off us and went bottom, and the phone-ins have had a fortnight handed to them with no results to interrupt the story. Expect the sack talk by the weekend. It is already written; it is just waiting on a slow Tuesday.
I read the same three weeks the other way. If there was ever a season that needed the clock stopped while somebody did the actual work, it is this one, and for once the calendar has stopped it for us instead of against us. That is such an unusual sentence to type about this football club that I have checked the fixture list twice.
Who has gone away and who has stayed?
The club published the full list on Monday, and the sheer length of it is the story. "An extended international break is now upon us," it opens, "with many of our men's players heading off to represent their countries over the next three weeks."
Micky van de Ven and Jan Paul van Hecke are with the Netherlands, starting against Germany on Thursday. Sandro Tonali and Guglielmo Vicario are with Italy. Andy Robertson is with Scotland, Ben Davies with Wales, Kevin Danso with Austria, Radu Dragusin with Romania, Martin Dubravka with Slovakia, Antonin Kinsky with the Czech Republic, Jamie Donley with Northern Ireland, Rodrigo Bentancur with Uruguay in Japan and South Korea. Omar Marmoush is with Egypt for Africa Cup of Nations qualifiers against Angola and South Sudan, and Pape Matar Sarr is with Senegal for the same competition. Lucas Bergvall is with Sweden.
Here is a detail I enjoyed. Bergvall's Sweden play Romania on 25 September, and Dragusin's Romania play Sweden again on 5 October. Two of our players, in the same group, twice, in a fortnight, kicking each other for somebody else's qualification table. That is the kind of thing that happens to this club and to nobody else, and it will be filed as a coincidence, the same as all of it.
The younger end is just as busy. Archie Gray is with England Under-21s. Mikey Moore is with England Under-20s. Mathys Tel is with France Under-21s and Mateus Fernandes with Portugal Under-21s. Malachi Hardy and Luca Williams-Barnett are with England Under-19s, which is worth pausing on, because those are the two names De Zerbi brought up unprompted in his press conference on 18 September. "He is a potential top player," he said of Williams-Barnett. "I didn't forget about Luca, like Malachi, but we have to find the right moment." Phoenix Offiah and Oscar Sandiford are with England Under-18s, four more are with the Under-17s, and Yang Min-hyeok is at the Asian Games with South Korea Under-23s. I have said before that the academy is the only trophy cabinet that never lies. Count those names again and tell me it is lying now.
And then there is the list that matters most, which is the one that did not go anywhere.
What is De Zerbi actually going to do with the players who stayed?
He named them on Saturday night, in the post-match press conference, when he was asked about the weeks ahead. "The other players, Maddison Gallagher, Solanke, Tosin, Senesi, Savio, for sure we have to work more, because also the physical condition, I didn't like even this game."
Read that last clause twice. He did not like the physical condition of his team in a game they were the better side in for an hour. That is a manager who is not being fooled by his own good spells, and it tells you exactly what he thinks the problem is. Not talent. Not shape. Legs.
He had already explained what he intended to do about it. Asked on 18 September whether the break was a crucial period for James Maddison, Dominic Solanke, Destiny Udogie and Dejan Kulusevski, he gave the fullest answer he has given on anything all month, and it is in the club's own transcript:
We have prepared the plan for the individual training, because when the group comes back to us, we have to start immediately.
The full answer goes further. "We started in the pre-season without a great physical condition," he said, "and the players, they have to understand the intensity of the Premier League, in Europe it's very high intensity, and the holidays, everything, but they can't lose all their physical condition."
That is a manager telling you, on the record, about a squad he says came back from the summer undercooked, that he has a written plan for the next three weeks and that it starts with conditioning. It is not a soundbite. It is a diagnosis and a treatment in the same breath, and he handed it over for nothing to a room full of people who walked out of it and wrote that he had run out of ideas. They had the plan in their notebooks. They printed the opposite. At some point you have to stop calling that incompetence.
Is Kulusevski really going to be like a new signing?
His words, not mine. And they came with a date attached.
Dejan Kulusevski has not played for this club since he was forced off against Crystal Palace in May 2025. He had surgery on his right patella, and it has taken him out of an entire season and then some. He is back in training. He was not fit for Villa. Asked how he handles a player in that position, De Zerbi said this:
"We have to manage Deki in the best way we can, with the medical staff, physical staff. But it's a great thing for us because he's a good player, he's a good guy. He deserves to play again. We have to work day by day. Also, for Deki, it's important the international break, because when he will be at the top of condition and pass over the injury, I think it's a great signing, a new signing for us, another new signing."
Another new signing. Free. Already at the club. And the manager has just told you that the three weeks with no fixtures are precisely the window in which that happens. I flagged this on Saturday morning and I will say it again now that we have the transcript in full: the single most valuable thing that could happen to this team between now and Christmas is Kulusevski becoming a footballer again, and the calendar has just handed us the time to do it.
He said something else about him that I keep coming back to. "He doesn't need my encouragement, because he's strong, he has a great character, and he's an example for everyone." Sixteen months out. Still described by his manager as the example for the dressing room. That is not a man who has been sitting around feeling sorry for himself.
Does Maddison being left behind actually help him?
Yes, and I would go further. It might be the best thing on this whole list.
I wrote last week that Maddison is worth waiting for, and I based it on what De Zerbi had said about him: that the quality of his passes is different from the others, but that "even if he's a technical player, he needs to be fit." He came on for the last fifteen minutes at Anfield. He came on for the last twenty-five against Villa and hit a free-kick that Zion Suzuki had to save.
What he has not had is a block of uninterrupted training. That is what fifteen and twenty-five minute cameos cannot buy you, and it is what the next three weeks are made of. When we walk out at Old Trafford on 10 October, Maddison should be the fittest he has been since he came back, and the same is true of Solanke, who has been running into centre-halves on his own for a month.
There is a risk on the other side of this and I am not going to hide it, because hiding it is their job, not mine. Van de Ven took a whack to the head on Saturday and is in a Netherlands squad with four matches in it. Tonali has already missed a game with a knock this month. Marmoush, who I said in August was a genuinely ambitious piece of business, is flying to Egypt and then to South Sudan and back. Robertson, who chose this club in the summer, has four Scotland games. Not one of those bodies is under our control for a fortnight, and not one of those associations will be sending a cheque if one of them comes back broken.
Pedro Porro is the warning and it is five days old. His manager said out loud, in advance, that the management of that player had to be different after a World Cup summer. It was not. He lasted nineteen minutes. Everybody in the game knew what that schedule was doing to players and the schedule did not move an inch, because the schedule is never built around what happens to us. It is built around what sells, and we are not what sells.
What is waiting on the other side?
Four games in twenty-two days, and the Premier League has put every single one of them on television. The club confirmed the October broadcast selections back in August: Manchester United away on Saturday 10 October at 17:30, Coventry City at home on Monday 19 October at 20:00, Chelsea away on Saturday 24 October at 17:30, and Crystal Palace at home on Saturday 31 October at 17:30. All four moved. All four on Sky.
A Monday night at home and three 17:30 Saturdays in a row. Read that again. Not one of the four left where the league first put it. I have been counting our kickoff times for a fortnight and I am going to keep counting, because the answer is always the same and it is never in our favour: the awkward slot, the short turnaround, the Monday that ruins a week. You will be told that is what happens to a big club in a television deal. It is not what happens to all of them, and I have the fixture lists.
But look past the slots at the actual run, because this is the part nobody has pointed out to you. Manchester United were 12th when the break started. Coventry are 18th. Chelsea are 10th. Crystal Palace are 15th. There is not one of the current top four in the whole month. If this side is going to climb out of the bottom three, October is when it starts, and for once the fixture computer has failed to protect everybody else from us.
Which is precisely why the first one is at Old Trafford, in the marquee Saturday slot, with a fortnight of sack talk behind it. They could not have built a better stage for a story they have already half written. I have read that story. I know the two endings it is allowed to have: Spurs in crisis, or United turn a corner. There is no version of that broadcast in which we simply win a football match and it means what it means.
So what am I expecting?
Not miracles. I have never once promised anybody a miracle on this blog. What I expect, because the manager has told us it is the plan, is a team that comes back fitter than it went away, with Kulusevski closer than he has been in sixteen months, with Maddison having had a proper fortnight on the grass rather than twenty minutes at a time, and with a manager who has finally had more than three days between matches to coach the thing he says is wrong.
I also expect to be told, on 10 October, that whatever happens at Old Trafford proves something eternal and slightly humiliating about this football club. It will not. It will prove something about ninety minutes. But eternal is the only setting they have for us, and it has been the setting since long before this manager arrived, because a Tottenham that stays exactly where it is keeps a lot of people comfortable. I have spent this month arguing that De Zerbi is doing more with less than anybody is prepared to say, and in three weeks he will have slightly more and slightly less excuse. That suits me. That is how you find out.
Twenty-one days. No games, no screen taking goals away from us, no referee to survive. Just work, which is the one thing in this sport that nobody at the Premier League, at Sky, at the FA or in any rival boardroom has ever found a way to take off us. I have waited longer than three weeks for a position to come good, and the ones that did always looked exactly like this first, right down to the people telling me I was imagining the pattern.