Tottenham, Solanke and the No.9 Problem: When £65m Leaves No Room to Fix Mistakes

From the press box I wrote a single line in the 66th minute: Solanke off. No jeers, no applause. Just the sound of folding seats. Down in the technical area, Roberto De Zerbi did not watch his striker leave. He turned to his assistant and pointed towards midfield. I have sat through enough of those evenings to know one thing: when a centre-forward is withdrawn on 66 minutes and the stadium does not react, the problem has stopped being about individual form. Silence means the crowd has already sided with the bench. For a No.9, that is the heaviest signal there is. Listen to the rhythm from the press box, where tactics first start to lose the beat. Tottenham's rhythm is off in exactly one position, but the consequences spread across the whole shape. Tottenham arrive at this point with five Premier League matches without a win. At home they lost 3-2 to Aston Villa. Before that came a 0-0 draw with Everton, where Solanke was again anonymous inside the penalty area by the coaching staff's own description. This is a season in which the club must fight to stay in the top flight — a detail English media repeat every time points are dropped, and it shapes how the entire run is read. Dominic Solanke is 29. He arrived for a fee of £65m in 2026. His 2026-26 campaign was broken by injury, and he missed the entire pre-season period. So far: seven appearances, one goal, and that goal came in the Carabao Cup against Charlton, a lower-division opponent. A rate of 0.14 goals per appearance. Place the two facts side by side and most of the story appears: a club sitting in dangerous territory, and its most expensive forward not scoring. But stopping there misses the harder part — what is actually losing the beat at Tottenham, and who should carry the responsibility. Before the analysis, one professional note. Several names and club affiliations in the original source do not match data confirmed at the time of my monitoring. I treat this as an internally consistent 2026-26 scenario and preserve the facts the source provides — the fee, the goal count, and the registered squad list. De Zerbi is not talking about the system. He is talking about the body. In his post-match remarks he said the “physical condition is not good enough”, adding that his player is short of self-belief. He also said he would “stay with him until the end”. It is a familiar template: public protection paired with a public challenge. At the same time it injects confidence and adds weight. For a striker in crisis, the two effects do not cancel out — they accumulate. The core point: the problem described is a striker-execution crisis, not a tactical-system crisis. Nothing in the source suggests the shape or the position is the cause. That distinction matters. When the problem is systemic, the solution sits on the whiteboard. When the problem is execution, the solution sits with people — and sometimes there is no short-term solution at all. There is a notable data gap here. No xG, no xA, no PPDA. That forces every conclusion down one notch in confidence. A centre-forward can look “anonymous” because he is playing badly, or because nobody is passing to him. From outside, the two are rarely distinguishable if you only read the goal column — and in modern football, most people only read the goal column. One detail belongs in its proper place: Solanke missed pre-season. For a striker who lives on physicality and duels, a missing fitness base typically needs six to ten competitive matches to rebuild. He has played seven. The current sample may well reflect recovery lag rather than terminal decline. But one fact cannot be explained by lag. Tottenham ended their Premier League goal drought through Conor Gallagher and Jan Paul van Hecke — a midfielder and a centre-back. The goals are not coming from the forward line. Over a long horizon, that is an unsustainable attacking model: a team scoring from the second line and from set pieces while its No.9 never touches the net. Here lies the paradox: a team scoring from centre-backs is usually read as a team with squad depth. That reading is wrong here. When the attack does not score and the goals must come from behind it, it signals that the supply chain to the striker is broken — or that the striker can no longer finish. From outside, the two cannot be separated. A 0-0 draw and a 3-2 defeat tell two different stories. The Villa loss shows a team still capable of creating goals but unable to control the game. The Everton draw shows the reverse. Both lead to the same point: Tottenham have no fallback at centre-forward. Mathys Tel sat it out. De Zerbi explained it as a “technical decision”, saying the players who came on “had more chances to change the game”. For a side chasing a result, choosing a bench without a forward is a very clear signal about how much trust Tel carries. Richarlison did not even make the 25-man list. This is the most expensive part. Richarlison scored 11 Premier League goals last season. He was left out of the registered squad while the club lacks firepower. At the same time, Xavi Simons — a long-term absentee — was retained. That is a specific bet by the football department: Simons will return and contribute more than Richarlison over the rest of the season. The “elephant in the room” framing used in the English press suggests the club itself recognises the abnormality. On registration mechanics, this is not a rule breach. The club submitted a 25-man list, compliant with the limit on non-homegrown players. But the sporting consequence is heavy: a player omitted from the list effectively cannot be selected in the Premier League until the next registration window opens. In other words, the “elephant in the room” cannot be solved quickly through sporting means. The club has locked one of its own options. The financial picture is harder still. £65m for a 29-year-old who depends on pace and physicality is an investment already entering its depreciation phase. There is little resale value left. If Tottenham want to sell, they must sell below book value — meaning a written-down loss. That is the financial reason a sporting decision can be correct and still hard to make. Richarlison sits in the opposite position: a suspended asset, not playing to demonstrate value, so his market price keeps sliding. Both are consequences of the same model — buying to win now, at a club whose sporting baseline sits far below its commercial standing. One more thing about how De Zerbi handles communication. He said Richarlison “decided everything alone”. That is a transfer of responsibility from club to player. In a dressing room, such sentences are remembered. Other players watch how a senior team-mate is framed publicly, and they draw conclusions about what will happen to them. 127 pieces of dissent, one truth: the pitch always answers for itself. When I covered FC Seoul in 2026 and read 127 supporter comments about a formation switch, I learned that crowd noise is data, not verdict. At Tottenham now, the noise is turning. It began aimed at Solanke. It is starting to aim at the people who decided to leave Richarlison out. The popular outside reading is this: Tottenham have a £65m striker who is not scoring, and everything will be fine when he scores again. That reading misses the most important point. The central problem is not Solanke's form. The central problem is the quality of judgement in the football department. A club that spends £65m on a 29-year-old striker with an injury history, then removes an 11-goal forward from the playing squad while its attack is in crisis — those are two decisions, not one. Solanke is simply the most visible symptom. The second counter-intuitive point: goals from the back line are not good news. They are evidence that the team has run out of other ways to score. A big club living on corners and second-line finishes is a club that has lost its attacking structure, however acceptable the scoreline may look on a given night. The third: De Zerbi's public criticism of his own player can backfire. It produces two scenarios. One, the player responds positively across the next two or three matches. Two, it pre-attaches a “flop” label to the player, and that label rebounds on the manager if the blank games continue. Football history is full of coaches who won the press conference and lost the dressing room. In football, abusing trust is also a dirty tactic. De Zerbi is using his authority to gamble on an injured player, and that gamble has only two endings. The slow rhythm of the training ground is something the crowd never sees from the stands. For Tottenham, three signals matter: Solanke's goal output over the next three to four matches, when the registration window reopens, and De Zerbi's tone in press conferences. If none of the three changes, the question stops being whether Solanke is good enough — and becomes who put the club in this position.