Spurs are finally going all-in on a manager – but it comes with risk
“I don’t think we are in a position to spend £100million on a player. That is not the case and I don’t think it will ever be the case for the club.”
So claimed former Tottenham Hotspur head coach Ange Postecoglou in October 2024, when pushed on whether Spurs might one day match Arsenal’s £105m outlay on Declan Rice.
Less than two years on, Spurs are about to prove Postecoglou wrong by signing their own £100m midfield general in Sandro Tonali, who is set to complete his move from Newcastle United on Friday.
Tonali will follow the arrival of Mateus Fernandes from West Ham United in an £85m deal to dispel any lingering doubts that Spurs are now an entirely different club to the one Postecoglou knew, far removed from a quarter of a century of financial caution and self-sufficiency under Daniel Levy.
In fairness to Postecoglou, what he probably meant was that Levy would never sanction that kind of spending on a single player, but the Lewis family appear to have upended the former executive chairman’s business model in favour of an ambitious, owner-backed approach since deposing him last September.
Fernandes and Tonali will both smash Tottenham’s previous transfer record — the £65m signing of Dominic Solanke in 2024 — and the club’s willingness to spend big proved too rich for even the market’s traditional heavy-hitters: Manchester United also pursued Fernandes, while Manchester City were interested in Tonali.
Spurs have made signings like Fernandes, 21, before (Michael Carrick, who also joined from relegated West Ham in 2004, was arguably the equivalent at the time) but Tonali is unlike any arrival in the club’s modern history: a world-class player in his prime — the Italian is 26 — who would expect to start in practically any team in the world.
This is a new era at Spurs, who are finally behaving like a ‘big six’, billionaire-backed club.
Levy deserves some credit for putting Spurs in a position to finally spend lavishly after building the stadium and years of balancing the books — including maintaining the Premier League’s lowest wages-to-turnover ratio — but Spurs’ decline since 2019 illustrated the diminishing returns of his strategy.
If his friend Simon Jordan, who paraphrased a message allegedly from the former Spurs chairman on Talksport earlier this month, is to be believed, Levy thinks Spurs had their “pants pulled down” over the £52m signing of Jan Paul van Hecke, who had a year remaining on his Brighton & Hove Albion contract — another telling insight into how dramatically things have changed.
It is natural for some supporters to share these concerns about the huge sums now being spent — Spurs’ record of big-money deals is dreadful and some, such as Tanguy Ndombele, have hamstrung the club for years — but most fans will feel they have earned this splurge after years of watching their rivals demonstrate more ambition in the market.
If there are genuine concerns or downsides to Spurs’ ambition, it comes in the sacrifices the club is also preparing to make this summer.
Brighton are set to send the Van Hecke money straight back to north London with the £50m signing of Spurs’ Luka Vuskovic, who is regarded as one of the best up-and-coming centre-halves in Europe.
The 19-year-old has not kicked a ball competitively for Tottenham and they have moved to insure the sale by including a 20 per cent sell-on clause as well as matching rights for any potential future transfer.
The deal is, on the face of it, a canny piece of business for a player who occasionally looked raw while on loan at Hamburg last season (and in Croatia’s 4-2 defeat to England in their World Cup opener) but it is also a gamble given Vuskovic’s obvious talent and potential.
Perhaps more worryingly for supporters is Lucas Bergvall’s determination to leave the club for a new challenge elsewhere. Bergvall, 20, has informed Spurs of his desire for a change, and will have no shortage of suitors across European football — including Nottingham Forest, who are seeking a replacement for Elliot Anderson after his £116m move to Manchester City.
If you had asked any Spurs fan midway through last season which players they would definitely keep at the club, it would have been a short list — but the chances are Bergvall would have been on it.
Supporters have invested a huge amount of emotional capital in the Sweden international, who has shown enough in two difficult seasons in England to suggest he is on course to fulfilling the massive potential that left Spurs vying with Barcelona for his signature in February 2024.
So too Archie Gray, who has reportedly been the subject of an enquiry from Newcastle this week. Spurs deny that Gray, also 20, is for sale but there is a growing sense that other clubs are eyeing their best prospects with optimism that they can be prised away from north London.
There are good reasons for Spurs apparent willingness to sell their crown jewels — books must be balanced, and the squad desperately needs a rebuild — but it is nonetheless a consequence of their new ambition and apparently willingness to hand control to a head coach like De Zerbi (Spurs insist their transfer business is a collaborative process, rather than led by the Italian).
De Zerbi has never stayed in a job for more than three seasons (Spurs is his ninth managerial post) and, understandably, wants proven players who can hit the ground running next season.
Much better for him to have a readymade Van Hecke than wait two to three years for Vuskovic to come of age. So too Bergvall, who is not yet at the level of Tonali or even Fernandes.
Should Bergvall follow Vuskovic out of the Spurs this summer — which remains a big ‘if’ — there really will be no way of knowing in the short term if Spurs have cannily sold two young players to transform a squad that has finished 17th in consecutive seasons or done the equivalent of Jose Mourinho’s Chelsea allowing Mohamed Salah and Kevin De Bruyne to depart.
Only time will tell if the risk of selling off the future to fund the present will pay off.
Clearly, however, Spurs are less likely to regret selling Vuskovic and possibly Bergvall if they remain ambitious in the market for the long term, and continue to make the kind of signings that Postecoglou and his predecessors believed were impossible.
