LONDON — It might look a relatively innocent fixture on paper, but deep down, Tottenham Hotspur manager Roberto De Zerbi’s stomach will have dropped upon learning his side would open up the 2026-27 Premier League season away to Brentford.
Perhaps the Bees lack the star power of the Premier League’s top sides, but they do provide the sort of tactical nightmare that, on paper, can defy the best. So it proved on the pitch at the Gtech Community Stadium as they hammered Spurs 3-0.
It’s a chastening scoreline and it could easily have been worse. Igor Thiago pinged a second-half penalty off the post as the Bees buzzed about in the evening sun, looking fit and ready for the new season; in stark contrast, Spurs stumbled about, never once finding their footing.
Much is expected of Tottenham this season after their big summer spending generated headlines and placed them at the very center of the discussion in June. They attacked the transfer window with gusto early on, signing midfielder Sandro Tonali for an initial £92.5 million from Newcastle United, Mateus Fernandes from West Ham United for £85 million and center back Jan Paul van Hecke from Brighton & Hove Albion for £52 million, and committing big wages to prized free agent additions Marcos Senesi and Andy Robertson.
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The hierarchy promised to spend and vowed that the club would not sleepwalk into yet another relegation battle, having finished 17th in the previous two campaigns. The early, big outlay not only delivered on that message, it signaled an expectation to catapult up the table and into the European conversation.
But at first opportunity, Spurs fell dreadfully short of those expectations. In fact, a truly painful 90 minutes showed how far away from Brentford they are — let alone the very best in the country.
Some caveats do apply here: Regardless of how much they spent on their additions, De Zerbi is still molding a very new team. If at times they looked like a collection of strangers out there, well, it’s because to some extent they are.
They were also missing three obviously crucial players for the opener: New captain Micky van de Ven was not in the squad, having missed all of preseason with injury, Pedro Porro’s delayed return from the 2026 World Cup naturally omitted him, and £85 million man Mateus Fernandes began on the bench due to fatigue in his calf. Twenty-year-old Archie Gray — who barely played toward the end of last season under De Zerbi — led the team out as captain simply due to the fact that the club’s first four captains weren’t starting.
But Tottenham’s aggressive approach with their transfers, bulking up with six players (and they’ll still add a few more), was to create a squad capable of coping with absence. After last year’s injury hell, they knew what was required. Missing Van de Ven hurts, but Senesi was one of the standout left center backs in the Premier League last season with Bournemouth; you cannot ask for a better deputy than him. Lucas Bergvall is not the preferred option in center midfield, but he’s still a full international, a World Cup goal scorer and a possible £50 million transfer if Spurs were to decide to move him on in this window.
These players weren’t just beaten, they were hammered. Perhaps the most jarring way to put it is that in this performance, Brentford looked like everything Spurs want to be.
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They started the game at a ferocious speed, pushing high up the pitch and pressing Tottenham during their buildup. They committed five men high up when goalkeeper Antonín Kinsky played his goal kicks short, showing no fear of being picked apart. That’s exactly what De Zerbi will have wanted — and he might have been surprised to see the Bees do it — but they could not take advantage of it. In fact, they were forced long over and over, and lost the ball over and over.
It took Tottenham 22 minutes to actually get their foot on the ball on the halfway line and move it around a bit. By that time, they were 1-0 down and had experienced a couple of close shaves, with Thiago hitting the bar with a header (although the flag later went up).
In contrast, the Bees got on the ball early and often, moving it freely. The sort of positional rotations you expected of Spurs actually came from the hosts — be it left back Keane Lewis-Potter and central midfielder Mathias Jensen interchanging roles for a few minutes, or right back Michael Kayode bursting off the shoulder of Tottenham’s defense looking for a one-on-one opportunity.
The one new signing Brentford started, Mamadou Sangaré, looked absolutely phenomenal, dropping into gaps to cover his colleagues’ forward runs, then instigating a brilliant give-and-go on the edge of the box that led to the first goal. It was an assist, and a debut performance, to be proud of.
The hosts were so comfortable by the 50th minute, 3-0 up and sitting in an impenetrable deep block that left no space for Spurs to attack, that Thiago’s missed penalty barely even registered. The stadium sang his name jovially regardless, because a fourth goal would simply have been a bonus.
Meanwhile Fernandes, who had been thrown on at halftime to take control of the midfield for Spurs, stood screaming and pointing at pockets of space he wanted his teammates to move into so he could try to unlock the defense — but no one was moving.
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De Zerbi will rightly stress to his players that this is simply one game, and it is broadly true that very few clubs come into the new season actually ready to play. With preseason tours, long haul flights and the World Cup causing delayed returns, no one is in tip-top shape.
But there’s losing performances — and then there’s this. Whether Spurs like it or not, the expectations have been set. They need to get much closer to meeting them, and fast.
