Lavish spending fails to fix Tottenham's big issue — the lack of soul and spine
Quick summary
Jonathan Liew argues that Tottenham's heavy investment has not addressed the club's fundamental lack of character and resilience on the pitch.
Full article
Attributed to original sourceIt might be too early to push the panic buttonbut Roberto De Zerbi faces a huge task if he is to turn Spurs around
Time for Tottenham to start panicking? This is, of course, a subtle trick question. Tottenham is one of those clubs that never actually stops panicking. They panic when they concede and they panic when they score. They panic when they have the ball and they panic when someone else does. They have a coach in Roberto De Zerbi whose face evokes a state of permanent alarm, the expression of a man perpetually having a toilet door opened on him. One year they even managed to panic their way to the Europa League. For the ever-rattled Spurs fan, this club is less a treasured devotion and more a lifelong haunting, broken up by occasional panic substitutions.
You could intuit that sense of encrusted resignation pretty much from the moment Anthony Elanga’s improvised shot kissed the post and trickled over the line to give Newcastle the lead. Since beating Aston Villa 4-1 in late 2024, Tottenham have gone behind 44 times in all competitions and come back to win precisely zero of them. There is something innate and endemic here, a chronic case of Long Tottenham for which – despite the new coach, the new leadership structure and more than a third of a billion pounds in transfer fees – there remains no proven cure. Yoane Wissa’s clincher was of zero surprise to anyone.
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What happened
Guardian columnist Jonathan Liew contends that Tottenham's lavish transfer spending has failed to resolve the club's deepest problem: a recurring absence of personality, leadership, and competitive backbone. The piece frames the issue as cultural and structural rather than purely financial, suggesting that marquee signings alone cannot fix a team that has historically faltered when pressure mounts. Liew implies that until Spurs address the 'soul and spine' question, results will continue to underwhelm regardless of the cheque book.
Chance analysis
Liew's column cuts to a familiar critique of Tottenham: that the club keeps rebuilding the squad without ever quite rebuilding its identity. By framing the problem as one of character rather than quality, the piece pushes back against the easy assumption that spending solves everything in modern football. For readers, it's a reminder that Spurs' ambitions remain constrained by a soft centre that has haunted them across regimes and managers — and that the next test of progress will be mental as much as material.
Tottenham are framed as a team whose big-money recruitment has not translated into the toughness required to win under pressure.