SUNDERLAND, England — Relegation has never felt more real for Tottenham. The mood shift is brutal: one minute there’s the glow of a new appointment and a coach with a reputation for making teams play with belief, and the next you’re staring at the bottom three with the calendar running out.
Sunday’s 1-0 defeat at Sunderland means Spurs will end the weekend in the relegation zone for the first time this season with just six matches to play. It’s also the first time they’ve been in the bottom three this late in the season in Premier League history. The scenes after the final whistle didn’t help—Cristian Romero, their captain, left the field in tears, and several players looked stunned. Welcome to Spurs, Roberto.
Misryoum newsroom reported that the postmatch talk from Roberto De Zerbi was confident, almost stubborn in its tone. “I think so,” he said when asked whether fear is the problem. “If you ask me, I am 46 years old. I have much [more] experience than the players, and I am positive absolutely because I know them as guys and players and for that I am positive, not because we are Tottenham or because I have to do positive [things].” He added that the immediate target is simple: win one game. “Because if we win a game, we can see everything in a different way.”
But winning one game has been easier to say than to do. Spurs have now gone 105 days without winning a league game. Fourteen matches without victory is their longest such run since 1935, and that’s the part that really lands—back then, they went down too. Only three teams have had longer winless starts to a calendar year than Tottenham this season, and all of them were relegated. It’s grim math, and it stacks up fast.
De Zerbi isn’t a magician, obviously. He talked before the game about hoping Spurs could summon the attacking, dynamic spirit associated with Ange Postecoglou. On the one hand, it makes sense—try to pull energy from what they’ve shown they can be. On the other, it also hints at the trap Spurs are living inside right now: reaching back to a style that built results, while the league table punishes every lapse.
There’s a tactical thread to the night, too, even if the scoreboard is the loudest story. Randal Kolo Muani, Dominic Solanke and Richarlison started together for the first time in a Spurs game. Misryoum editorial team stated that where Igor Tudor went for pragmatism, De Zerbi wanted bravery, starting with line-up choices that mirrored what he believes worked in the best version of Spurs football. He named Pedro Porro and Destiny Udogie when referencing Postecoglou’s style, and Spurs’ fullbacks often inverted and pushed forward in that familiar “Angeball” rhythm.
The defining moment, though, came in the 61st minute from Nordi Mukiele. His left-footed strike took a huge deflection off Micky van de Ven to beat goalkeeper Antonín Kinsky. It’s the kind of luck—“the sort of luck you get at the wrong end of the table,” as the old cliché goes—that can feel personal when you’re already bleeding points. Mukiele drifted infield under almost no pressure to get into a shooting position. That’s the problem in a sentence: slack defending that turns desperation into repeatable danger.
Actually, one small detail I can’t shake is the silence when the delay happened later—Kinsky’s clash with Romero lasted long enough that you could almost hear the crowd recalibrating. Sunderland’s Brian Brobbey pushed Romero, and their knee collision with Kinsky’s face forced time to stand still. Romero walked off inconsolable, but De Zerbi expressed hope it wasn’t serious and said the Argentina international is a “big personality” and they need him to finish the season.
De Zerbi also sounded like he knows what this moment demands: no magic, no radical rewrite mid-crisis. “We are inside a difficult moment,” he said. “My job is not now to change the style of play.” He shifted the emphasis to mentality, again and again—transfer confidence, stay positive, do things on the mental side that allow training-week clarity to survive contact with the game. The table, unfortunately, doesn’t care about intentions.
Spurs have now failed to win any of their last 33 league games when conceding first. So when De Zerbi says the work is about building heads that stay clean, it lands as hope plus urgency at the same time. He’s only just started, but the table tells us time is already running out to get that work right. And if Spurs can’t find a way to win soon, the fear stops being a feeling and becomes a destination—probably not the one anyone wanted, especially not this early, and not like this.
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