In September, Tottenham were bottom of the Premier League. Two points from their first five games, no wins, and just two league goals, both scored in stoppage time of a defeat. Roberto De Zerbi, hired in the summer to rebuild the squad after a club record spending spree, looked like a manager running out of road before his first season had properly begun.
On Saturday, that same Tottenham side beat ten man Crystal Palace 2-0 at home, their third straight Premier League win and their best run of form in the league since February 2025. Archie Gray headed them in front in the 25th minute, Jan Paul van Hecke added a second in the second half, and Spurs finished the game with 34 shots, their highest total in a Premier League match since February 2016. They have climbed to eighth in the table. The question now is not whether De Zerbi can survive the season, but whether Tottenham can keep this up.
How the mood changed so quickly
The turnaround has been sudden enough that even De Zerbi has been careful not to get carried away with it. Speaking to BBC’s Match of the Day after the Palace win, he described a dressing room that feels like a different place to the one that limped into the international break. “I think nothing has changed, but the mood, spirit, the relationship with the players are totally different,” he said. He credited honest conversations within the squad after that break for resetting the tone, saying the players had been “mature and focused” in turning things around.
Some of that reset came in an unlikely setting. De Zerbi took his squad to Marbella for a short trip after a draw at Manchester United, a decision that was mocked in some quarters at the time given the results Tottenham were getting. It has not looked like a mistake since. Spurs have taken ten points from a possible twelve since the league resumed after the international break, a run that includes the draw at Old Trafford and three straight wins, the last of them delivered in some style against Palace.
Sandro Tonali, one of the marquee summer signings brought in as part of De Zerbi’s rebuild, was singled out for particular praise after the Palace game. The Italian midfielder, signed for a fee in the region of £100 million, has taken time to adapt to the Premier League, but De Zerbi described his performance against Palace as “unbelievable.” Jan Paul van Hecke, scorer of the second goal, spoke afterwards of the manager’s influence on the squad and said there is “a lot more to come” from this Tottenham side.
A warning note in the celebrations
What stands out most about De Zerbi’s response to three wins in a row is how little satisfaction there has been in it. “Three games in a row is not enough, we have to keep this behaviour, this spirit,” he said, a reminder that this is a team still working its way up from the bottom of the table rather than one that has arrived anywhere yet. “Listen, we are Tottenham, so we can’t forget to be ambitious,” he added, framing the recent results as a floor to build from rather than a peak to enjoy.
It is the sort of message that makes sense given how this season started. A squad assembled with well over £200 million of gross summer spending, including Tonali, Savio and Mateus Fernandes all costing in the region of £85 million or more, was never going to be judged on a slow start alone. The pressure on De Zerbi earlier this season was real, and plenty of pundits and former players had already written his Tottenham tenure off as a matter of weeks rather than months. Three wins in a row does not erase that scrutiny. It simply buys time, and De Zerbi appears to understand that better than anyone currently debating his future from the outside.
Palace pay the price on the other side of the result
If Tottenham’s story on Saturday was about momentum building, Crystal Palace’s was about it draining away. Jean-Philippe Mateta was sent off in the 13th minute for a late, studs up challenge on Micky van de Ven, initially shown only a yellow card before referee Michael Oliver upgraded it to red following a VAR review. Palace were already down to ten men before Gray’s opening goal arrived twelve minutes later, and they never recovered. Sky Sports’ report of the game had Palace finishing with just 20.6% possession, the lowest figure recorded by any side in a Premier League match.
It was Palace’s third straight league defeat without scoring in any of them, a slide that has dropped Pierre Sage’s side into the relegation zone. Sage did not hide from the situation afterwards. “I am not comfortable with the situation on the table,” he said, while insisting “I will never give up” and taking personal responsibility for the result. Mateta will now miss Palace’s next three league games, against Liverpool, Coventry and Hull, games that will do plenty to determine whether Sage’s early optimism survives much longer.
What happens next
Tottenham’s next test comes away at Leeds United, a fixture that will tell us plenty about whether this is the start of something sustained or simply a good fortnight against opponents in worse form. De Zerbi has been here before in his career, at Brighton, turning criticism into momentum once his ideas started to click with a group of players. Whether Tottenham’s version of that story has a happy ending is still to be written, but for the first time this season, there is a story worth following rather than a crisis to explain.
Few managers in the Premier League have had a more dramatic month than the one just gone at Tottenham. If you want the context behind results like this one, rather than just the final score, that is exactly what It Was Always… Football is here for. Subscribe and follow along for more.