£308m and Bottom: Tottenham's Worst Premier League Start

Tottenham went into the September international break with 2 points from 5 games, 20th place and a goal difference of -6: the club's worst start to a Premier League season, worse than their 2008-09 start, when they also had 2 points, but with a -3 goal difference. And it all came after a summer in which Roberto De Zerbi was given more than £300 million to rebuild the squad. The 2-3 home defeat to Aston Villa, on 19 September 2026, closed out round 5 and dropped the team into the relegation zone.

The game against Aston Villa sums up the season. Aston Villa had gone 3-0 up by the 79th minute, through goals from Johan Manzambi (45+4'), Nicolas Jackson (67') and Emi Buendía (79'). Tottenham only pulled goals back late, through Conor Gallagher at 86' and Jan Paul van Hecke, with a header, at 90+8', making it 2-3. De Zerbi was blunt after the match: "We can't lose this game in this way, absolutely. We can't concede the second goal, we can't lose balance just because in the first half we are losing in the beginning of the second half."

Manzambi's goal has a separate detail worth noting. Micky van de Ven had left the pitch for treatment, for a cut under the eye, and the Premier League's new 2026/27 medical rule requires a treated player to stay off the pitch for at least 1 minute after play resumes, up from 30 seconds under the previous rule. Tottenham were still down to 10 men when Villa took the lead.

In the season's first 4 games, Tottenham failed to find the net a single time, an unprecedented negative record in the club's 144-year history: never before had the team gone without scoring in each of the first 4 games of a domestic season. The goal drought passed the 360-minute mark, and was only broken in game 5, against Aston Villa. Before that partial response, the home record was already a concern: Tottenham had won just 5 of their last 36 games at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.

The 5 games, one by one

The first warning sign came on the opening day, on 22 August 2026: Brentford won 3-0, with goals from Keane Lewis-Potter at 12', Vitaly Janelt at 33' and Michael Kayode at 49', and posted 3.96 xG (expected goals), Brentford's highest in a Premier League game since January 2025. In the second game, at home, Newcastle won 2-0, with goals from Anthony Elanga at 62' and Yoane Wissa at 72'. De Zerbi summed up the moment well: "For 60-65 minutes we played better than Newcastle. We had a chance to score but we didn't. We are not a team yet." Then came two straight 0-0 draws, against Nottingham Forest and Everton, which at least stopped the bleeding but kept the team scoreless. The 5th game, against Aston Villa, was the first in which Tottenham found the net, but it was also the most painful.

In the Premier League 2026/27 table, at the end of round 5, on 22 September 2026, Manchester City lead with 15 points, followed by Arsenal, with 12. Tottenham are 13 points behind the leaders and 3 points behind Manchester United, 12th with 5. 19th-placed Fulham have the same 2 points as Tottenham, but a better goal difference, -3 against -6: that detail is what leaves Tottenham isolated in last place.

The spending that hasn't paid off

The summer 2026 transfer window closed with 9 confirmed signings and 10 sales for Tottenham, a gross spend of £308 million against £132 million raised: a net spend of £176 million, according to PSRwatch's balance sheet. It was the biggest transfer budget in the club's history, more than £300 million, according to Sky Sports. And Tottenham's transfer record changed hands twice in the same summer: first when the club paid £85 million to West Ham for Mateus Fernandes, then when it paid up to £100 million to Newcastle for Sandro Tonali, made up of £92.5 million guaranteed and £7.5 million in add-ons. ESPN captured the sequence when announcing Tonali's arrival: Tottenham had "shattered their transfer record for the second time this summer".

The most painful departure was the captain's: for the first time since the 2020/21 season, Tottenham are without Cristian Romero in the squad, sold to Atlético Madrid. 9 new names came in, 7 of them marquee signings: Tonali and Fernandes in midfield, Van Hecke at centre-back, Sávio, Mudryk and Marmoush up front, and Robertson at left-back, on a free transfer at the end of his Liverpool contract. It is the most expensive rebuild in the club's history, but the result, in the first 5 rounds, is not that of a stronger team: it is that of a squad that hasn't yet found cohesion, with 3 attacking signings, Sávio, Mudryk and Marmoush, competing for the same positions.

De Zerbi: the coach, and why he was hired

Roberto De Zerbi was announced as Tottenham's permanent head coach on 31 March 2026, on a long-term contract. "I am here because I believe in that ambition and have signed a long-term contract to give everything to deliver it," the Italian said, in the club's official statement. He took over from Igor Tudor, who became interim coach 5 days after Thomas Frank's dismissal. Frank lasted less than 8 months in the job and left on 11 February 2026 with a 26.9% Premier League win rate, the worst of any Tottenham manager in the Premier League era. Across all competitions he won 13 of 38 games, and just 2 of the last 17 league matches, with the team 16th, 5 points above the relegation zone, when the club decided to sack him.

The tactical read: the press-baiting the Premier League has already cracked

De Zerbi's style has a name, and it isn't new: press-baiting, the trick of circulating the ball near his own goal to draw the opponent's press, then finding the free man in the space left behind. The concept gained traction at Sassuolo and took off at Brighton, according to The Analyst / Opta: there, De Zerbi had the league's 2nd lowest PPDA (opposition passes allowed per defensive action), 10.5, behind only Liverpool's 9.6. Brighton were one of the teams that lost possession inside their own 40 metres most often, 288 times, a sign of how much risk the team took to build from the back. At Tottenham, football365 described the mechanism in action: the team calmly circulates the ball waiting for the opponent to press, to then find a player who has dropped in between the lines, such as Omar Marmoush, who draws 2 markers and opens space for another teammate, such as Tonali, to break forward at speed.

This is the reading I'll defend as an analyst: Tottenham's problem isn't the game model, it's executing it under the real pressure of the Premier League. The team went 4 straight games without scoring, exactly the kind of drought a poorly-bedded-in attacking rebuild tends to produce, and football365 noted the antidote opponents have already found: push a defender up to follow the man dropping deep, cutting off the turn and winning the ball back before the line-breaking pass goes out. A squad with 3 attacking signings still competing for position, as Tottenham have, takes time to learn the movements that would make that antidote fail, and it's in that lag that the gap lives between the Brighton that suffocated opponents with possession and the Tottenham that, in the first 5 rounds, has conceded 8 goals trying the same path.

De Zerbi's ledger covers all 12 games under his charge, the end of 2025/26 plus the start of 2026/27, not just this season's 5 rounds: 3 wins, 4 draws and 5 losses, 13 points, an average of 1.08 points per game. That's the 21st-best mark among the club's managers since the Premier League began, behind even Thomas Frank (1.12, 20th), the predecessor he came in to replace, and ahead of only the 2 interim coaches who held the job between one appointment and the next: Cristian Stellini (1.00, 22nd) and Igor Tudor (0.20, 23rd). It's a small sample, 12 games, for a definitive verdict on a manager, but it's the sample that exists.

Two straight 17th-place finishes: the crisis didn't start now

2 straight 17th-place finishes already weighed on Tottenham before this one. In 2024/25 it was 38 points (11 wins, 5 draws, 22 losses), the club's worst campaign in 48 years and the lowest points total of its Premier League era, a 33.3% points ratio. In 2025/26, little improvement: 17th again, with 41 points (10-11-17), a 36.0% ratio, while Arsenal were champions with 85. The strangest contrast is dated: on 21 May 2025, in the middle of that same 2024/25 season, Tottenham beat Manchester United 1-0 in the Europa League final and won their first major trophy in 17 years. It is a rare contrast: a continental title in the same season as the club's worst domestic campaign in decades.

What Opta projected before the season

The gap between projection and reality is the crisis in statistical summary. Before the season began, Opta's supercomputer put 7th place as Tottenham's most likely final position, with a 23.7% chance of a Champions League spot, from 1st to 5th place, and just a 9.1% chance of relegation, striking what the site itself called a degree of caution because of the 2 previous disastrous seasons. 5 rounds in, on 22 September 2026, the team Opta saw fighting for a top-5 finish, and rated as the 8th favourite for the title, was 7 points outside that zone and 13 behind the leaders. It isn't a completely unexpected crisis, the pre-season numbers themselves already carried a caveat, but it is a bigger crisis than any scenario the model calculated.

The schedule after the break

The Premier League paused for the FIFA international window after round 5 and returns on 10 October 2026, when Tottenham travel to Manchester United, at 17:30 UK time. It's the first test after the worst start in the club's history, but no projection number, not Opta's or anyone else's, replaces what only the pitch can show. What the numbers from 22 September 2026 confirm is this: 2 points, 20th place, £308 million spent, 4 games without scoring, and a game model that the Premier League is reading better than Tottenham can execute, for now.