In an age when fans wants limitless spending on shiny new signings, we ask whether less change can sometimes be more beneficial.
If a cautionary tale was needed for a football club assuming the grass is always greener on the other side, Tottenham Hotspur’s experience so far in 2026-27 may well do the job.
After a dismal 2025-26, in which Spurs escaped relegation by the skin of their teeth, the club dived head first into their hopes for a shiny new era on the back of Roberto De Zerbi’s insistence the squad needed immediate, severe and costly surgery. After De Zerbi saved the club from the drop, he was handed the keys to a weighty war chest, and he spent big.
Upwards of £300 million was dished out and more or less an entire new team was brought in. Spurs signed 10 new players who have all gone into the first team; just five league games into the new season and all nine of the outfield signings have made at least one appearance in the Premier League, while many of them are already key players.
You don’t need a deep data dive to see it hasn’t worked yet. Spurs are bottom of the table without a win five games into 2026-27. It’s their worst start to a Premier League season.
It might all work out in the end. Spurs might become world beaters with this squad. Or even if it doesn’t go quite that well, they could feasibly become a half-decent team very soon indeed. This season obviously isn’t a complete write-off already.
But even if they do turn things around, by making such a poor start, they have given everyone else a head start. Spurs are playing catch-up with every other team, and now face a 33-game run in which they have to make up a deficit if they are to retain their Premier League status. They need to improve drastically to make the season anything like a success.
In fairness to De Zerbi, the evidence of the last two seasons was pretty strong. Spurs had finished 17th twice consecutively, last season playing some utterly miserable football while suffering a string of serious and debilitating injuries, and the squad clearly needed new additions. But has too much been changed too suddenly?
Spurs have become only the 12th team in Premier League history (excluding promoted teams) to hand more than 25 starts in the space of the first five games of a season to players who didn’t play for the club the previous year.
The concern for Spurs is, historically, doing that doesn’t go well. Six of the previous 11 have ended up finishing 17th or lower in the first season after the summer overhaul. Only one has finished higher than ninth.
Many of those teams were arguably always destined to be in a relegation battle and had attempted to avoid as much by making a lot of summer signings, such as QPR in 2012-13 or Portsmouth in 2005-06.
Spurs finished fifth as recently as 2023-24 and would have been hoping to get back into the elite quickly, but they are, whether they like it or not, a relegation-battling side. And the early evidence of this season along with the history of other clubs who have made this much change doesn’t bode well for them.
So, are these numbers and Spurs’ troubles the sign of a wider problem with significant player turnover? Were they wrong to approach the summer with this aggressive approach to the transfer market?
First up, it’s worth noting that there are examples of teams signing lots of players and things working out, if not always immediately, then in the long term. Nottingham Forest broke the record for the most players signed by a Premier League club after winning promotion in the summer of 2022 and have since established themselves as top-flight regulars (although they were later deducted four points for breaching the Premier League’s Profitability and Sustainability Rules). Chelsea transformed their squad and fortunes after Roman Abramovich arrived at the club. Sunderland qualified for Europe last season after a summer of overhaul following their promotion.
But there are many more examples of teams struggling after making a lot of signings, as is the case with many of the sides in the above table who gave lots of starts to new signings early on in the new season.
And this term, too, the teams who have started well are generally those who have not overhauled their squad.
Of the eight teams to give 10 or fewer starts to players who didn’t play for them last season, five are better off than the position in which the Opta supercomputer predicted they would finish before the start of the campaign. In other words, when comparing season-to-season changes in the starting XI with performance relative to (the supercomputer’s) expectations, teams who didn’t make many alterations are doing well.
And it’s the opposite at the other end of the spectrum. Of the eight teams who have given at least 13 starts this season to new players, all but one are currently in a lower position than they were in the Opta supercomputer’s pre-season predictions.
Whether by complete coincidence or not, there appears to be a correlation between the two. A greater number of new players this season has led to underperformance compared to what the supercomputer foresaw for that team.
There are a few obvious outliers. Bournemouth have given fewer starts to new players (five) than any other team in the Premier League this season (though they do have a new manager), but they are currently seven places lower than their predicted position from pre-season.
Meanwhile, Leeds are 10 places higher than they are expected to finish the season despite handing 14 starts to new players already.
It’s not an exact science at all. We’re only five games into the season and every team has played a different set of opponents, while results don’t always tell the true story of a match. And – whisper it – the supercomputer’s predictions might not have been an absolutely perfect reflection of where each team should be expected to finish. Yes, really.
But that said, the correlation is strong enough to take it that there is something meaningful behind the relationship.
So, what can we take away from all of this? The simple fact is that five games into this season, the teams who have made lots of changes to their first team aren’t doing as well as those who have sided more with continuity.
Perhaps that shouldn’t be a surprise. Perhaps it was obvious Spurs were never going to be any good this early on in the season after making so many new signings. For some, the memory of Liverpool’s two most recent title wins, both of which came after summers of minimal – negligible, almost – spending, spring immediately to mind as obvious examples of continuity in squad make-up that has brought success.
At the same time, though, Liverpool’s form nosedived when they tried to defend their crown last season. They made a lot of new signings in the summer before the season started, but perhaps had to because of the inactivity 12 months prior.
And, in 2018, Tottenham became the first Premier League club since the transfer window was created in 2003 not to sign a single player in a summer window, it was the beginning of the end for their most consistently successful period in the modern era. Manager Mauricio Pochettino lasted only another 14 months.
While nowhere near as extreme, Arsenal have built their recent success on gradual recruitment, but keeping key players together has been more important. Even after last summer, when they signed a vast number of players, many of whom played key roles in their title win, the core of their team has remained consistent. It’s noteworthy and telling that none of their summer-of-2025 signings are in their first-choice XI at the start of this season.
Continuity is clearly crucial. It takes players time to gel and significant time together on the pitch builds strong relationships. There’s no replacement for that.
De Zerbi would no doubt argue there wasn’t enough quality in Tottenham’s team to stick by; that better players who he sees as more suited to his football will give him greater chance of success.
But maybe there was a middle ground to be found. Maybe Spurs could have ended up with a team this dramatically different from last season in a year or two. Maybe that would have been a better recipe for success, at least in the first five games of De Zerbi’s first full season in charge.
Time will tell if his overhaul of the Tottenham squad will work out, but if it goes badly, other clubs may consider holding on to some of their cash in future.
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Mass Overhaul or Squad Continuity: What is the Recipe for Premier League Success? Opta Analyst.
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