LONDON – Roberto De Zerbi needed a midfielder who could change the tempo of a game. What he wanted, it emerged Tuesday, was someone who had once been forced to watch from the sidelines for ten months because he had placed bets on football matches, including games involving his own club. Tottenham Hotspur agreed a £100 million deal with Newcastle United to sign Sandro Tonali, the Italian international whose story now includes a gambling ban, a comeback, and the most expensive transfer Spurs have completed in years.
The fee demands context. Newcastle paid AC Milan £55 million for Tonali in the summer of 2023, which was a club record at the time. De Zerbi’s Tottenham is paying £100 million for a player who spent most of his first Premier League season suspended. That gap – nearly double the original outlay, two years on from the signing – reflects both how dramatically Tonali’s stock recovered after his ban and how specifically De Zerbi believes this particular player unlocks the system he is building at Spurs.
The backdrop the deal cannot escape is October 2023. Weeks into his debut Premier League campaign, Tonali received a ten-month ban from the Italian Football Federation after admitting to placing bets on Italian league matches, including games involving AC Milan while he was still on their books. The suspension cost him the better part of his only full season at Newcastle. He returned to first-team football in August 2024. What followed over the next eleven months was a systematic demonstration that his ability had been shelved, not diminished. Tonali made 34 Premier League appearances last season, was consistently rated among the division’s best central midfielders by underlying metrics, and generated the kind of scouting reports that eventually reached northwest London.
De Zerbi has been specific about the demands of his midfield. His system requires a player who can win possession high up the pitch and distribute quickly while under pressure – a midfielder who reads where the ball will go before it arrives there. Tonali, 24, fits that profile in ways the current Tottenham roster does not replicate. His ability to win tackles and immediately shift the phase of play from defensive to attacking was the quality that made him exceptional at Milan before the ban interrupted his trajectory, and the quality that De Zerbi has now spent £100 million to bring to north London.
Inside the club, De Zerbi’s coaching staff had identified Tonali as the priority midfield recruit as far back as January. The manager’s preference at Brighton and Marseille was always for a deep-lying playmaker capable of recycling possession under pressure while contributing to the defensive phase. Spurs’ existing midfield options were adequate rather than transformative. Tonali, at his best, makes the pressing structure sharper at the source and the transition from defence to attack faster at the point of interception.
What Tonali walks into is a starting role and a system built for him. Tottenham finished fifth in the Premier League last season, qualifying for Europe without threatening the top four. De Zerbi arrived as head coach in January and spent the spring reorganising the squad’s identity rather than patching its most obvious flaws. This summer has been devoted to finding the players his structure demands. The Tonali deal, the most expensive of the window, is the clearest statement yet of where De Zerbi believes Spurs’ ceiling sits.
For Newcastle, the sale complicates the story they have been trying to tell since the Saudi ownership takeover in 2021. Tonali was the headline arrival of that era’s ambition phase, the first player whose price tag signalled genuine intent to compete at a different level. Recouping £100 million addresses the financial optics and leaves a notable profit. It does not address the practical problem of replacing him in a European football transfer market already thinned by the competing demands of the 2026 World Cup summer. Sporting director Paul Mitchell said the club respected Tonali’s wish to move on, a formulation that signals reluctant acceptance rather than enthusiasm for the outcome. Newcastle finished seventh last season and begins the new campaign without the midfielder around whom much of their attacking structure was built.
The transfer lands Tottenham a player whose 2024-25 form was among the best in the Premier League for his position. It does not resolve the question of which version of Tonali they are actually getting. The peak iteration – the one generating Serie A Player of the Year discussion at Milan in the seasons before the ban, the one with a legitimate claim to being one of Europe’s best midfielders under 25 – has not been seen at its full register since his career was interrupted in the autumn of 2023. Whether the player who impressed Newcastle’s coaching staff last season represents a return to that level, or a very good midfielder operating just below it, is a distinction De Zerbi is paying £100 million not yet knowing.
Tottenham is expected to formally announce the deal by the end of the week, pending a medical. The shirt number Tonali will wear at Spurs – he wore 8 at Newcastle – has not been confirmed. What has been confirmed is De Zerbi’s belief that a footballer’s worst chapter does not define his best years, a calculation the Premier League will have opinions on from the first day Tonali pulls on a Spurs shirt.
