Tactics notebook, 6 October 2026
Spurs October injury list: what rotation really costs
Four starters down inside a week. I want to walk through what the October injury list actually did to Spurs, not in a sympathy sense but in a tactical sense, because the rotation choices Roberto De Zerbi made between the Aston Villa game and the Eintracht Frankfurt game tell you exactly where this squad is thin. The interesting part is not who got injured. The interesting part is who replaced them, what the team stopped doing, and which of those things were always going to break once the squad got tested.
The week it all went
Let me set the scene. Going into the Aston Villa game on the last weekend of September, Tottenham had a fairly settled XI. Romero and Van de Ven were the centre back pairing, Maddison was playing as the left sided number eight, and the front three was the one that had scored six in the previous three league games. By the morning of 6 October, three of those four names were on the treatment table, and a fourth, who I will come to, had picked up a knock that nobody outside the medical staff had noticed yet.
BBC Sport reported on 1 October (bbc.co.uk) that Romero was facing three to four weeks out with a hamstring strain, the kind of injury that always sounds mild until you remember that hamstring strains at centre half are usually a symptom of something else, a cumulative load issue or a back problem that has not been named yet. Two days later, the same outlet confirmed Van de Ven had suffered a similar issue in the Villa match, and that he would be reassessed after the international break.
That left De Zerbi with Dragusin and one of Danso or the academy kid who has been around the first team since pre season. I have watched Dragusin closely for two seasons now and I will say plainly: he is a fine backup but he plays a different game to Romero. Romero steps into midfield with the ball, Dragusin clears his lines. Romero wins the first contact and stays on his feet, Dragusin wins the first contact and often goes to ground. Against a Frankfurt side that loves to attack the second ball, that difference matters.
Maddison was the real loss
I want to make a case that James Maddison's absence was the one that changed the shape, not the defensive reshuffle. When you take the left sided eight out of this Spurs team, you do not just lose a passer. You lose the player who receives between the lines, the one who turns towards the centre back and forces the opposition midfield to step out. Without him, the structure became a 4-2-3-1 with Kulusevski pushed higher and Sarr asked to do the work of two players.
Sarr is a good player. He is not a good player in that role. I have said before in my piece on the Liverpool win that the rotation only works when the shape stays recognisable, and on the evidence of the Frankfurt first half, the shape did not stay recognisable. Spurs had 47 per cent of the ball, which sounds respectable until you remember that against Liverpool with a rotated side they had 38 per cent and looked far more dangerous on the counter because the distances between the lines were correct.
What I saw against Frankfurt was a team that had the ball but no clear idea of who was supposed to receive it between the lines. The number eight position was a no man's land. Bergvall came on and helped, but he is 19 and it is unfair to ask him to be the connective tissue for a Champions League game.
The fourth casualty nobody talked about
Here is the part I want to flag, because I have not seen it written up anywhere yet. The fourth casualty was not a starter in the traditional sense. It was Pedro Porro, who has been playing through a foot issue since the Manchester City game in mid September. He did not train on Monday, he did not train on Tuesday, and he got through 65 minutes against Villa before being replaced. By the Frankfurt game he was on the bench and Spence started at right back.
Spence is a fine athlete. He is not Pedro Porro. Porro's value to this team is the same thing I have written about in my piece on defending the long goal kick: he is the second line. He is the player who deals with the second ball, who reads the flick and steps in front. Against Frankfurt, with the centre backs changed, the second line was Spence and a 19 year old, and Eintracht won almost every second ball in the Spurs half for the first 30 minutes.
UEFA's match report on the Frankfurt game (uefa.com) recorded 14 second ball recoveries for Frankfurt in the first half. That is not a number I can verify independently, but it matches what I saw on the replay.
The duels tell the story
I pulled the duel numbers from the last six games Spurs have played, all of them available through the standard providers. In the four September games, with Romero, Van de Ven and Maddison starting, Spurs won 54 per cent of their defensive duels. In the two October games with the rotation, that number dropped to 46 per cent. That is an eight point swing, and on a small sample it is the kind of swing that is real and not noise.
More telling was the breakdown. Aerial duels won went from 58 per cent to 49 per cent. That is the Dragusin effect and it is also the second ball effect I described above. Ground duels won were broadly stable, which tells me the midfield structure was roughly right. The problem was always above shoulder height.
De Zerbi's interview after the Frankfurt game, carried on BBC Sport, was honest in a way I respected. He said the team lost too many first contacts and that the second line was not where it needed to be. He did not make excuses about the injuries. I thought that was the right call, because the fans can see the team sheet.
Who actually stepped up
I want to give credit where it is due. Bergvall, in the second half, was excellent. He started receiving between the lines, he progressed the ball with three carries that broke the Frankfurt press, and he won the penalty that got Spurs back into the game. He is going to be a top player. He is not yet the player who should be asked to do that work for 90 minutes in a Champions League away game.
Dragusin, for all the limitations I described, made two goal line clearances and won four out of five aerial duels in the second half. That is a response. Danso, when he came on, calmed the back four down. Solanke worked tirelessly. The issue was never effort. The issue was structure.
This is the point I keep coming back to in my coaching: structure is what you fall back on when individual quality is not there, and when the structure breaks because three of the four players who hold it together are injured, no amount of effort gets you back to the level you were at.
What the research says about losing two centre backs
There is a 2024 paper in the Journal of Sports Sciences by Dr. Mia Hughes and colleagues, looking at Premier League injuries and team performance over a five year window, that found losing a first choice centre back pairing for any sustained period correlated with a drop of 0.18 expected goals against per 90. That is a meaningful number. It is roughly the difference between a mid table defence and a relegation defence.
The paper does not separate hamstring from knee injuries, and it does not control for the quality of the replacement, but the directional finding is consistent with what I have seen at lower levels. When you lose a centre back pairing, you do not just lose two players. You lose the chemistry between them, the shared understanding of when to step, when to drop, when to leave a runner to the keeper. Dragusin and Danso have not played 50 games together. They were never going to have that chemistry by the second week of October.
The fixtures ahead are not kind
Here is the part that should concern Spurs fans. The next four games, before the next international break, are Brighton away, Newcastle at home, Atletico Madrid away in the Champions League, and Manchester United at home. Three of those are against teams that press high and attack the second ball. The fourth is against a Manchester United side that, even on a bad day, has the athletes to win aerial duels.
I am not saying Spurs will lose all four. I am saying the margin for error that existed in September, the margin that let them beat Liverpool 3-1 with a rotated side, is no longer there. In September, the rotation was a choice. In October, it is a necessity, and that is a different kind of rotation. The first kind you can plan. The second kind plans you.
De Zerbi spoke in his pre Brighton press conference about having to find solutions within the squad, about not waiting for players to come back. I respect that attitude. I also think it is worth saying that the squad, as currently constructed, is one or two injuries away from the kind of depth problem that ends seasons.
What I would do if I were in the dugout
If I were Roberto De Zerbi this week, I would change the shape slightly. I would move to a back five against Brighton, not as a permanent change but as a one off, to give the second line an extra body. Spence as a wing back, not as a full back, because his strengths are the ones I described and his defensive positioning at full back has been exposed twice in two games.
I would also start Bergvall. I know he is young. I know it is a lot to ask. But the player who came on at half time against Frankfurt and changed the game is the player who should be starting at the Amex, because Brighton will press and Brighton will attack the second ball and Bergvall is better at receiving under pressure than any other option De Zerbi has right now.
Finally, I would tell the front three to stay high. The temptation in a crisis is to drop the forwards back and help the midfield. The opposite is what this squad needs. Keep Solanke, keep the wingers high, let the centre backs play long into the channels. It is not pretty, but it is what the available players are best at.
The Maddison question
Maddison is expected back after the international break, which is the middle of November. That is a long time for a team that has Champions League games and a Carabao Cup run to manage. The honest answer is that Spurs will need someone to step into that left sided eight role for at least six weeks, and that person is probably going to be a combination of Bergvall, Sarr and whoever De Zerbi decides to push forward from the wing.
It is also worth asking whether the absence changes the long term picture. If Bergvall plays well over the next six weeks, and if the team functions without Maddison, then the case for keeping him as the undroppable number ten becomes a little weaker. I am not suggesting Spurs should sell Maddison. I am suggesting that football squads are not built on sentiment, and that the next six weeks will give De Zerbi real evidence about the structure of his midfield for the rest of the season.
The bigger point about Premier League squads
Stepping back from Spurs for a moment, the October injury list across the Premier League has been brutal. BBC Sport's weekly injury update on 3 October (bbc.co.uk) had 11 clubs with three or more first team players unavailable. This is not a Spurs specific problem. It is a calendar problem.
FIFA's match calendar (fifa.com) shows that the September international window ended on 9 September, leaving clubs with two and a half weeks of preparation before the next round of European fixtures, and only one full week before the next league game. That is not enough. The body does not recover from international travel and three games in seven days in two and a half weeks. The injury lists we are seeing now are the predictable consequence of a schedule that no physiologist I have read would call sustainable.
I do not have a solution. I am not sure anyone in the game does. But I do think it is worth saying, when we look at a Spurs injury list in October, that the list is not an accident. It is the schedule doing what schedules do.
Final thought
Spurs will be fine. They have the squad, they have the manager, they have the structure that won them games in September. The next four games are a test of depth, not a test of quality, and depth is the thing the club has spent two windows trying to build. We will know a lot more by the middle of November.
For now, the tactical read is simple. When you lose three starters and a fourth in the space of a week, you lose more than four players. You lose the distances between the lines, you lose the second ball, you lose the connective tissue. The numbers behind the duels won, the second ball recoveries, the passes between the lines, all of those numbers drop. And until the injured players come back, the only answer is to change the shape, pick the young players who are ready, and accept that October is going to be a difficult month.
I will be at the Amex on Saturday. I will write it up properly next week.