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Well, okay. It turned out that Charlton Athletic’s B team wasn’t the best gauge of what progress Roberto De Zerbi might be making with Tottenham Hotspur. If we’ve learnt anything from the 2-0 home defeat to Newcastle United on Saturday, it’s that progress may be gradual, does not necessarily result in winning, or even scoring. Part of the problem here is that the 38-game Premier League season is tight. There’s little margin for error. In last season’s final table, six points could have been the difference between 6th and 12th. The best teams in the Premier League so far this season have been those that have hit the ground running. The worst has been the team that has been playing as though they haven’t done any pre-season training and have just been introduced to each other an hour before kick-off. To be absolutely clear, Newcastle were very good. Yoane Wissa is developing into a whole other order of mischief. And Spurs did play okay in patches. If you’re a glass half-full type, you can see the foundations of something starting to take place. The problem with this is that these sort of kinks should be ironed out at the beginning of August, not the end. It might take time, and there will be points at which it’ll be ugly. Some of those extremely expensive signings will not work out. That’s just the way these things go. But the fact remains that so much work had to be done because so little had in previous years. The club has seldom given much indication of having a firmly laid down, in the past. Why would things be different this year? It’s not a matter of ‘fault’. I fundamentally continue to find fault an institutional issue, like damp rot. A bad manager can make it worse - hi, Igor Tudor - but statistics tend to show that changing them tends not to make a great deal of difference to team’s fortunes. But spending hundreds of millions of pounds on players is one way in which a football club can force something in the direction of institutional change, or render it an irrelevance. It can alter that dynamic. But it’s not guaranteed, and it’s unlikely to be overnight. And their late transfer window activities have been… eccentric. They’ve signed Tosin Adarabioyo from Chelsea, another central defender and presumably a replacement for the departing Kevin Danso. By all accounts, Danso wants regular first-team football, and he’s unlikely to get that at Spurs. Still, at least he signed off with an excellent goal against Charlton. Meanwhile, Mykhailo Mudryk hasn’t played a league game since November 2024 but Spurs have, by the looks of things, agreed to do the rehabilitation work on the player for Chelsea since his four-year doping ban was lifted, and neither Ndiaye nor Gakpo happened. Mikey Moore has gone to Germany on loan with 1FC Koln, while Pape Sarr has gone to Juventus. Still, at least rumours of a move for Robert Sanchez turned out to be so much hot air. The biggest loss would have been Richarlison, who gave it everything but didn’t have the attributes that Spurs seemed to be looking for from him. He had his moments, and he was the top goalscorer in the Premier League last season, with 11. The transfer had been in the pipeline for a while, but he is exactly the sort of player that fans are likely to connect with. He stays for now. It’s also the case that Spurs have Brennan Johnson, Heung Min Son and Harry Kane in the last three years. And they wonder why they struggle for goals. And critically, absolutely no-one is in the mood for this bullshit among the club’s support, which isn’t helping. The atmosphere around the club became pretty noxious throughout the back end of last season, and surviving relegation at the end of it all was a cause for relief rather than celebration. The upshot of this is that the mood amongst the support is febrile, and clearly not inclined towards being patient at the moment, which is a shame, since it feels as though that’s the one character trait that Spurs fans are most likely to need for the next few weeks, at least. And the upshot of all this is that we head into September not really knowing where we all quite stand. Those who run the club would like us to be believe that there’s a revolution in the air, that this time dropping hundreds of millions of pounds on players is going to make all the difference. The problem is that there hasn’t been much actual evidence of this yet. The team has been malfunctioning in much the same way that it did last season and the season before, while the club has sold off a lot of players and brought in replacements, none of who particularly set the pulse racing. And that’s as much of a problem as it ever was, especially when so many of them seem to be Chelsea cast-offs, where signing the players felt like doing them a favour. It’s impossible to say whether this team is stronger. The only actual evidence that we really have is the two League matches that have already been played, and that was not very convincing evidence at all. And the big issue here is faith. Supporting a football club is in some respects an act of faith, in that you have be able to trust those running it to make the right decisions, and that they (should) know more about all of this than we do. But repeatedly, going back essentially as far as you’d like to go back, the entire club itself has simply felt as though it’s not very good at this sort of thing, and if they’re asking us to simply believe that this time everything is going to work out okay, well, they’re going to find that this time we’re going to need to see that evidence.