Scheduling and load
Spurs run of three in eight days
There is a particular kind of week that does not care about your shape, your press or your set piece routine. Three matches in eight days is that week. By the time the third one kicks off, the conversation is no longer about which system you trust. It is about which players you still have, which risks you can carry, and which compromises you have to make in public. I have written before about what October has already cost Spurs, about the injury list, about the question of a set piece coach, about the way transitions still leak. All of those conversations converge here. The fixture pile is where the spreadsheet meets the dressing room. The manager is Roberto De Zerbi, a coach I respect enormously for his in possession ideas, and he is now navigating his first proper English scheduling squeeze with a squad he did not entirely build. This is what I would be watching, and what I would be telling my own staff if we were the ones turning up at Bodø on a Thursday and at the Etihad four days later.
The fixture block, written out plainly
Let me lay the block out the way I would lay it out on a whiteboard in the staff room. There is a Premier League match at the weekend of 3 to 5 October, a UEFA Europa League away trip on Thursday 9 October, and then a Premier League home match on Sunday 12 October. Between the first and the last, you have eight days. Between the second and the third, you have three. Travel matters too. The away match is in the Arctic Circle in late autumn, where daylight is already scarce, where the pitch is artificial, and where the opposition, FK Bodø/Glimt, is organised, brave, and tactically very clear about who they are. Anyone who treats that match as a free hit has not been to Bodø.
You can see the structure I described in my earlier note on the Spurs October injury list and the way rotation actually works. The numbers do not change. A starter playing 90 minutes on the Sunday cannot start on the Thursday, and cannot start again on the Sunday after that. He can come on for 20 to 30 minutes in one of the two, and even that is a calculated risk. A starter playing 60 minutes can start one of the other two, but probably not both. A starter playing 30 can probably start both, but will be carrying heavy legs in the second of those two. The block, in other words, is a closed system. Every minute spent is a minute not available.
Who pays the price, and what we actually see
This is where the public conversation gets shallow and the staff conversation gets serious. The public conversation talks about rotation as if it is a tactic, a way of refreshing legs, a way of involving the squad. The staff conversation treats rotation as triage. Three categories of player go into the block.
Category one is the untouchables. These are the players who play every minute they are physically able to, because the team loses too much quality without them and because their specific role cannot be replicated. Under De Zerbi, that group is narrow. A central defender who can step into midfield and build the first line of pressure, a deep playmaker who can receive between the lines, a press resistant nine. The cost of using them twice is that they will be flat by the third match, and that flatness is not abstract, it shows up as a yard of distance given to the runner, a half second of hesitation on the press trigger, a set piece header lost because the jump was a centimetre short.
Category two is the rotation regulars. These are the players who accept that they will start one and not the other, and whose training week is built around that specific match. For Spurs, the candidates I would put in this group are the wide forwards who can press high, the box to box midfielders who can cover the channels, and the right back who can invert when needed. I wrote in the October run piece that transition is still the leak, and a rotation regular has to be someone who will not be the leak.
Category three is the ones who are not picked at all, and that is the part nobody wants to talk about. A player who is fit, who is available, who trains well all week, and who is told on Friday morning that he is not in the squad. The job of the staff in the block is to keep that player ready, in case the block produces a third category injury in category one or two, and to keep that player honest, in case his head is already on the next transfer window.
Travel, surface, and the question of Bodø
Travel in a block is not a footnote, it is a session. A long flight, a time zone shift, a synthetic pitch, a cold stadium, all of it is part of the training load the players carry even when they are not training. The body does not get a holiday on the plane, it gets dehydrated, it gets stiff, it gets a circadian disruption that takes two to three days to normalise. The squad flies north on the Wednesday, lands late, walks the pitch on Thursday morning as a recovery and inspection, plays at 18:45 local time, flies back overnight, and is in for a light session on the Friday before the Sunday league game. The Premier League does not pause for European travel, and UEFA does not pause for the Premier League, and the player has to live in the middle.
For Spurs, the away match is also a structural test. FK Bodø/Glimt, as the UEFA Europa League draws make clear each season, are not a glamour tie. They are a team that knows exactly how they want to play, and who they want to play against, and they have beaten bigger clubs at home by being patient and direct. The temptation is to treat the Europa League as the third priority, behind the league and the domestic cups, and to rotate heavily. The temptation is wrong. The Europa League is the shortest path to a trophy for a club of Spurs’ current weight, and the points in the league phase matter more in 2026 than they did in earlier formats because the new table rewards consistency and punishes slow starts. I would treat the match as a 60/40 priority, behind the league but ahead of any friendly attitude.
Recovery is training, and training is selection
The most underestimated session in a block like this is the recovery day. Not because recovery is complicated, but because the staff have to be precise about who needs what. A 22 year old winger who played 90 on the Sunday can have a full rest on the Monday and a normal session on the Tuesday. A 30 year old centre forward who played 90 on the Sunday needs a pool session on the Monday, a light pitch session on the Tuesday, and a full session on the Wednesday. The 22 year old winger thinks he is fine. The 30 year old centre forward knows he is not. The staff has to believe the second, not the first, because the second is what the data and the eye test agree on.
Selection flows from there. If a player has only had one full session in the week, he should not start two matches. If a player has had one full session and one modified session, he can probably start one and come on in the other. If a player has had two full sessions, he can start both, and the question is just whether you want to or whether you want to keep the minutes in his legs for the next block. In the October transition piece, I argued that the first transition is the leak, and that the leak is a concentration issue as much as a shape issue. A player who has had two full sessions in the week is more likely to be concentrated in the 80th minute of the third match. A player who has had one full session and one modified session is more likely to switch off at the crucial moment.
What I would tell my staff on Friday morning
If I were naming the squad on the Friday before the Bodø trip, I would be honest about three things. First, the central spine plays together in one of the two matches, not both. If they play at the weekend, they rest on the Thursday, and come back for the Sunday. If they play on the Thursday, they rest at the weekend, and start the Sunday. I would not split them. A spine that has trained together all week is a spine, a spine that has not is a collection of individuals.
Second, the wide players rotate against each other. One wide forward plays the weekend, the other plays the Thursday, and the third is on the bench for both, ready to come on if the block produces an injury. The reason is simple. Wide forwards cover the most ground, take the most one on ones, and tire the fastest, and the cost of a tired winger in the 70th minute is a transition the other way, which as I keep writing is exactly what Spurs cannot afford.
Third, the goalkeeper is the only outfield position where I might ask one player to start all three. The gloves are heavy, but the legs are fresh. A modern goalkeeper who distributes short can be asked to play three in eight, and the cost of a tired goalkeeper is rarely a goal, it is a clearance that is not a pass.
The honest part about what this costs
The honest part is that blocks like this are not won by the coach who rotates the most cleverly. They are won by the squad that has the most depth in the right places, and Spurs, even after the summer window, are not yet a squad with five players for every position. They are a squad with two and a half in most places, and with one and a half in a few. The cost of a block in a squad like that is that someone will play through a knock, and that knock will become a two week injury in the international break, and that two week injury will become a six week absence, and so the block that was supposed to be managed becomes the block that triggered the next one. I have seen it at my own level, and I have seen it at the top. It is the same curve.
De Zerbi knows this. The staff knows this. The question is not whether the block is survivable, it is whether the cost is paid in the right place, on the right player, in the right match. I would rather pay the cost on a 24 year old midfielder in the Europa League than on a 28 year old centre back in the Premier League. I would rather rest the central playmaker against Bodø and play him at the weekend. I would rather start the second choice goalkeeper in Norway, even if the fans and the cameras want the first choice. The block is a series of choices, and the choices are made by people, and people have limits, and the limit of a human body in an eight day block is a real, measurable, defensible number. I have written in the injury list piece that rotation has a cost, and the cost is the player who is asked to play two, and the staff who have to ask him, and the supporters who have to watch him tire. None of that is a tactical argument. All of it is a coaching argument. The block is where tactics end and people begin.