Spurs have spent £229.5m but still need to upgrade on Richarlison, surely? | OneFootball

Astonishingly, given it is still only the middle of July, the question for Spurs is not – for really the first time in living memory – ‘who do they need to sign?’ but ‘who do they still need to sign?’

A perfect storm of circumstance has terrified Spurs into action. The end of the Daniel Levy era is an obvious factor here. Spurs spent a long time nudging him towards the exit, one by one removing his allies and confidantes from positions of power before he too finally made way.

It is the single biggest factor in the entirely new way Spurs are doing things. He hasn’t changed, either. His very clever decision to tell his friend Simon Jordan what he thought of the Jan Paul van Hecke deal knowing Jordan would instantly leak them on talkSPORT was a total backfire. It revealed everything Spurs fans suspected to be true was in fact true.

This was a man more interested in ‘winning’ transfer deals against other chairmen than winning on the pitch. A man so good at bigger-picture stuff with the club and its infrastructure more generally, but utterly incapable of doing so in the frenzied and undeniably batsh*t world of transfers.

There are two other significant factors, though, related to that ridiculously terrible 25/26 season. First, it clearly terrified the new (or more accurately rebranded) Lewis Family leadership. They sat on their hands for far, far too long in the mistaken belief that Spurs’ sheer heft insulated them from the very worst consequences. They know now it doesn’t, and do seem to have learned some lessons there.

The other related factor there is that when they did finally understand the gravity of the situation, they had to pretty much beg Roberto De Zerbi to come and save them from themselves. Rarely before has a manager held as many cards as De Zerbi when laying out his demands for coming in immediately rather than wait for the summer.

We’d wondered what, precisely, he might have asked for if he kept Spurs up. We didn’t have to wait long to find out.

Spurs have completely destroyed the Levy model under which they so carefully operated for two decades. They have detonated their wage structure and started paying big-boy fees. They are the summer’s biggest spenders so far.

But they’ve also been canny. Where Levy was so wrong about Van Hecke, for instance, was in viewing it separate from everything else. Yes, Spurs did pay over his market value. But as part of an overall defensive restructuring, that was worthwhile to get him through the door.

North of £50m for a player with one year left on his contract is a lot. But it got him through the door in time for pre-season in a summer where that fifty-odd million quid is the sole transfer fee outlay for a spree that has included another of the Premier League’s best centre-backs last season, a back-up left-back who has seen and won it all, and a vastly experienced back-up goalkeeper.

That was already surprising work, but it was the sheer speed with which Spurs then moved on to completely revolutionising their midfield that has really caught the eye. Mateus Fernandes and Sandro Tonali were somewhere near the top of the summer shopping list for most of the Premier League’s biggest beasts.

For Spurs to even attempt to properly compete for them was new (and we mean properly compete, not a token offer and them writing a lovely letter in response). For them to capture not one but both was and is ludicrous.

Have they got good value? Does any of it make sense? Don’t know. But should we, or Tottenham fans, really care about that? They are going to be absurdly watchable one way or another this season. If it all works it could be spectacular. If it doesn’t work it will definitely be spectacular.

But for all the extraordinary work that has been done on the defence and midfield, the job is half done.

We were only half-right when we said the question was ‘who do Spurs still need to buy?’

Because there’s another question in all this; who do they still need to sell? They are heading into what is potentially a Man United-style 40-game season. They cannot and will not sustain a competing-on-four-fronts squad.

The departures are starting to come now, and it’s clear some of them are going to be painful. There is much angst about the departure of the extraordinary centre-back prospect Luka Vuskovic. But you do need to step back a bit here.

If one of the Premier League’s well-run smaller clubs whose names begin with B had bought a teenage centre-back for peanuts and turned a £40m profit 18 months later without him ever playing a single game for them or in the Premier League, we’d be rightly praising their adroit and flexible skills at playing this transfer game.

Cristian Romero will go and will be only lightly mourned following a disastrous year as captain in which his disciplinary problems deepened rather than eased with the added responsibility, and his commitment to the cause appeared questionable.

Not for the first time, Spurs fans watching him play a crucial role as a defensive lynchpin in Argentina’s march to yet another major tournament final will wonder who that player with the same face and name as their unreliable skipper might be.

Only when he pops up with dramatic and vital late goals is there a flash of recognition. Oh yeah, that guy. We know him.

The only questions about his departure are where and how much. Other moves will be harder to stomach. At least one of Spurs’ elite midfield prospects Lucas Bergvall and Archie Gray will go. Another likely departure that will sting is Djed Spence.

He’s been a World Cup revelation but all it’s likely to do is ramp up his price rather than change De Zerbi’s mind. He’s now third-choice left-back for Spurs and the man ahead of him at right-back has had an even better World Cup.

But the really big question marks now all exist in the final third for both ins and outs now exist in the final third. Spurs have done the incomings in defence and midfield. They have started on the outgoings.

Nothing much, beyond the departure of Alejo Veliz, has happened in the attacking areas.

There is so much uncertainty here. Will Dejan Kulusevski and Mohammed Kudus ever recover from their injuries? And what will be left of the players they once were if and when they do? Were James Maddison’s desperate cameos in that terrifying fight against relegation really his final acts as a Spurs player, or were they setting up his greatest season yet? What, precisely, is a Mathys Tel?

We’re almost certain Spurs will bring in at least one wide forward and one centre forward. Even if they weren’t this new version of themselves, they’d probably do that.

Ideally they would like both to be a versatile sort who can operate anywhere across a front three. We know they have earmarked Junior Kroupi as a centre-forward target who also offers that cut-in-on-to-his-right threat from the left wing.

He would, obviously, be ideal. But it’s clearly proving a difficult deal to pin down. He has plenty of other suitors and a club with no inclination to sell another major asset to Spurs or anyone else at this time.

So Spurs may have to look elsewhere. A deal for at least one Man City wide player looks likely. Probably Savinho, but possibly Omar Marmoush – perhaps the cleaner fit for Spurs’ requirements – but Savinho is definitely the easier deal to get done after a lot of groundwork was laid last summer.

But there is a big part of us that would quite like Spurs’ overhaul to just end right where it is. Just to see what happens. What happens when you take a terrible 17th-placed team, give it a shiny new defence and midfield full of genuinely brilliant players, but still have Richarlison at the head of it all? You’d watch that series, you know you would.

In a funny way, though, Richarlison’s brand of chaos is, across a full season, kind of predictable. What would he do as the starting striker for Spurs’ new-look squad? He’d barrel around making mischief and nonsense, he would have two or three games where he looks like the best player in the world, half-a-dozen where he looks like the worst, and he would score 11 goals from 35 starts.

The far more interesting question really is what would Dominic Solanke do with the opportunity? Last season was a miserable one for him. Injury-plagued for half of it, and when he did get on the pitch service-starved.

He’s far less chaotic than Richarlison, but it does feel like the range of possibilities is far greater if he plays in a team that puts proper crosses in and where Thomas Frank’s inexplicable ban on through-balls has been lifted.

If Solanke’s still a Spurs player, he’ll be playing in front of a defence and midfield suddenly packed full of progressive passers where none were to be found last year.

That could be great. Or we never get to find out about either of those scenarios because Spurs finally go back to being Spurs and bring in Dusan Vlahovic on a free to finally fulfil his obvious destiny of scoring seven goals in a Premier League season.