Four Games Without a Goal: Tottenham, De Zerbi and the Test at Villa Park

At Anfield on Tuesday night, when the final whistle blew, Roberto De Zerbi did not look up at the stands. He looked down at his shoes. A small detail — and for someone who has sat through enough press conferences to know that an image sometimes speaks ahead of the data, it was the sign of a man asking himself whether he had played the right card. His Tottenham Hotspur had just gone four Premier League games without scoring a single goal. Seventeenth. And in the 0-0 draw with Everton, six of the starting eleven had never scored a Premier League goal for the club.

That is the number that made me pause longer than any league table. A team can play well and still not win, but a team with six starters who have never scored for it is telling you something about how the squad was built, not just about a temporary dip in form.

Last summer, Tottenham spent a club-record sum. The stadium and the Hotspur Way training ground remain among the elite in England. But beautiful facilities do not score goals by themselves. Vinai Venkatesham, the club's chief executive, said the first-team area "looks more like a five-star hotel than it does a performance environment." That quote now sits inside the Tottenham story itself, and it deserves to be read more carefully than it usually is.

In the opening four rounds, Tottenham have not scored, have not won at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, and sit seventeenth. Another, older streak is more worrying still: the club has gone 47 consecutive matches without coming from behind to win. The last time they did it was against Aston Villa in November 2026 — the very opponent they now face in what is being framed as the season's inflection point.

De Zerbi insists Tottenham have been unfortunate. He says his side were the better team against Newcastle, Nottingham Forest and Everton, and the numbers largely back that up. On the other hand, he is dealing with a long injury list and problems from the Australia tour, factors that may have impaired tactical cohesion and fitness preparation in pre-season.

When Cong Phuong was at Mito, I learned that silence is also a source. At Tottenham right now, the silence does not come from the players; it comes from the gap in data. There is no specific information on chances created per game, on expected goals, on wage structure or on the bonus clauses in contracts. When that gap exists, people tend to fill it with emotion — and the emotion of Tottenham supporters right now is not comfortable.

I once sat in a livestream with three admins of major fan pages of a Vietnamese club, breaking down the release clauses in a contract. The lesson I carried with me is simple: emotion always runs ahead of data, and the most common mistake in sports journalism is trying to use data to fight emotion instead of walking alongside it.

Two things need separating here. The first is chance creation. The second is the ability to turn chances into goals. If Tottenham create as many or more chances than their opponents yet still fail to score, that is a finishing problem that time and confidence can fix. If they neither create nor score, the problem runs deeper, into how the system operates. On the current data, we cannot say which side Tottenham are on.

The one proven goal threat is Dominic Solanke, the only member of the squad to reach double figures in Premier League goals (12). When you have only one reliable scorer, that player's fitness becomes a single point of dependency — a risk every coaching staff must keep in mind.

The shortfall does not come from one individual. Six of the eleven who started against Everton have never scored for Tottenham in the Premier League. That number reflects both how the squad was assembled and how loosely knit a group that De Zerbi himself calls "relative strangers" still is — to the point that he paid out of his own pocket for a team-bonding trip.

Based on my experience watching matches, a team on a winless run usually looks worse than it is over the first three or four games, then suddenly looks better after a lucky goal. The problem is that Tottenham have had no lucky goal to hold on to. And at the top level, confidence is not something you can wait for indefinitely.

Behind every contract is a person, not just a number. A record summer spend without immediate on-pitch results increases pressure on the recruitment strategy. With the Premier League's Profit and Sustainability Rules looming as a permanent shadow, a big-spending summer with no goals narrows the margin for financial error. There is no specific data on wage structure, on how transfer fees are amortised across contract lengths, or on revenue, so no verdict on compliance is possible. But the principle is clear: spending big without results narrows the window for correction later.

This is where the blind spot appears. The story has been framed around the question "Are Spurs bad, or just unlucky?" — but framing it that way channels all attention toward De Zerbi's tactics and the finishing of the forwards. Meanwhile, another story is running in parallel and may matter more: Tottenham's problem may not be the system but the way the club evaluates and accumulates human resources.

Four games is too small a sample to conclude anything. But six starters who have never scored for the club, alongside just one player in double figures, points to a structural problem that was built, not a temporary issue of a few weeks.

In the summer of Russia, Neymar never broke his foot, but the rumour broke the entire commentary box. Tottenham are now in a similar cycle: the "style over substance" narrative is reshaping everything else, from how players are judged to how the club sees itself. That label, once attached, is hard to remove — and it can affect both January recruitment and contract renewals for key players.

Insiders never say everything, but they leave fingerprints on every negotiation. Venkatesham's "five-star hotel" comment and the club's decision to make parts of the first-team area more spartan could be a move toward a performance culture, or a sign of a deeper internal review. Reading those fingerprints matters more than guessing whether De Zerbi will be sacked.

At my age, I no longer hunt for news; I hunt for the truth at the bottom of the rumours. And the truth beneath the Tottenham story right now is not "De Zerbi is about to be sacked" or "Solanke is playing badly." The truth is that a club built to compete for European places sits seventeenth, with one reliable scorer, a 47-match streak without a comeback, and a system that still needs time to click.

The Aston Villa match, then, is not just the fifth game of the season. Unai Emery's side are also winless after a summer of churn. For Tottenham, it is a chance to break two barriers at once: the first goal and the psychology of the comeback. If they score first and hold their shape, the "unlucky" story gains evidence. If they concede first, the scar of those 47 matches will resurface in the players' heads.

What matters over the coming weeks is not just the results but the quality of the chances Tottenham create, Dominic Solanke's fitness, and what the board lets slip in its public comments. One goal can change the story very quickly. But a more fundamental question remains, and it will outlast any goal: is Tottenham building a team for the future with the resources of a club that wants results right now?