Tottenham boss Roberto de Zerbi eyes more signings after record spending

Roberto de Zerbi said Tottenham Hotspur’s summer rebuild was "not finished yet" after the club had already spent around £237m, a club-record outlay that set the tone for an unusually aggressive window. He added that there was "zero pressure" on the spending and teased another unnamed "bomba" signing while Tottenham chased Manchester City winger Savinho, who was open to leaving City and exploring a move to Spurs.

The spending spree has already brought in Sandro Tonali, Mateus Fernandes and Jan Paul van Hecke, with Tonali the headline arrival at a club-record £100m. Tonali took "10 minutes" to decide to join after meeting De Zerbi at his home, a detail that shows how much the manager now sits at the center of Tottenham’s recruitment pitch. The club has moved from patchwork business to a manager-led sales job, with De Zerbi openly saying he expects "two, maybe three" more signings.

That pitch matters because Tottenham’s recent baseline is not a title chase but survival. The club flirted with relegation in the previous two seasons, and De Zerbi inherited a side that was one point above the relegation zone when he arrived on a five-year contract. He then guided Spurs to three wins and two draws from his first seven games in charge, enough to steady the league position but not enough to erase the scale of the repair job.

De Zerbi has framed the recruitment drive as part of building a squad capable of competing at the top of the Premier League, not simply escaping danger. The wider market has been just as inflated, with Deloitte figures showing Premier League clubs had already broken the summer spending record at £1.17bn, but Tottenham’s own outlay now has to be judged against a far simpler standard: whether the squad looks more balanced, more durable and less exposed over a full season.

For that reason, the real audit of this window will come on the field. If Savinho or another late arrival turns Tottenham from relegation survivors into a side that climbs clear of the bottom half and sustains results, the spending will look like a rebuild. If the club ends up needing another reset after another record bill, the numbers will say something very different. De Zerbi even discussed the transfer noise after an argument with an Arsenal-supporting taxi driver, a reminder of how quickly Spurs’ spending has become part football business, part public theatre.