De Zerbi's public criticism of his Spurs forwards is the surface. The goalless shape underneath is the harder question.

Tottenham have yet to score in the Premier League this season. Roberto De Zerbi has publicly criticised his forwards and his medical staff. The tactical picture behind the press conference is murkier than the criticism suggests.

Tottenham drew 0-0 with Nottingham Forest on Saturday and, per Sky Sports, remain without a Premier League goal this season. Roberto De Zerbi's response was to publicly criticise his own forwards for their decision-making and to point an unusual finger at the club's medical staff for influencing his substitutions. Paul Merson, writing and speaking on the same outlet, called the pattern 'worrying.' Both reactions are interesting, but neither gets to the underlying question: what is Spurs' attacking shape actually doing, and why isn't it producing chances that turn into goals?

The contrast at the top of the same table sharpens the question. Arsenal, the Guardian's Football Weekly podcast notes, maintained a perfect start with a win over Chelsea. Tottenham, well off the pace, have yet to score in the league at all. The two trajectories are early indications of two very different reads of the same brief: one team is converting structure into goals, the other is not.

The De Zerbi who arrived at Spurs from Marseille had a reputation, earned at Brighton and consolidated in France, for building attacks that flowed. His sides probed half-spaces, overloaded one side, and pulled centre-backs out of shape with rotations designed to drag markers away from the zones where the ball actually went. The principle was not possession for its own sake but possession that bent defensive lines until something cracked. At Brighton, that approach generated more than enough goals to compensate for what was, defensively, an open style — and a squad that was happy to commit bodies forward in numbers. At Marseille, the same ideas survived a more pressurised league schedule because the individuals in the final third could finish the chances the system created.

At Tottenham, neither side of that equation is working. A 0-0 with Forest is, on its own, no great shame — Forest are organised and have made life difficult for stronger attacks. The cumulative picture, though, is what matters: a team built for flowing attack, with no goals scored, and a manager blaming his players' decisions in front of the cameras.

Two things follow from that, both tactical. First, the absence of goals in open play points to a structural issue rather than a finishing one. Even modest finishers in the Premier League convert a non-trivial percentage of clear chances; if Spurs are creating next to none, the issue is upstream of the striker. Either the build-up is breaking down before it reaches the final third, or the final-third structure is producing shots only from low-value positions. De Zerbi's criticism of his forwards' decisions is consistent with the latter — if runners are arriving late, if combination play is forcing the wrong pass, if the shape isn't stretching the back line, then individual decision-making becomes a downstream symptom. It is the kind of failure mode a possession-based system shows when one passing lane is consistently closed off but the team continues to try the same route.

Second, the medical-staff row, which on the face of it is a procedural dispute, may also be a tactical one in disguise. Managers unhappy with medical staff influencing substitutions are usually managers who wanted to change the game earlier or differently and were told they couldn't, often because a player who wasn't fit was declared fit, or vice versa. That kind of interference reshapes the available tactical options mid-match. If De Zerbi felt unable to make the changes his read of the game demanded, that is a constraint on the system, not a footnote. Merson's concern about dressing-room trust lands in the same place: a public airing of internal friction is the kind of thing that, in tactical terms, costs the manager authority over his own substitutions for the rest of the campaign.

There is a risk, though, in reading too much tactical signal into De Zerbi's public comments. A manager under pressure reaches for available scapegoats, and forwards and medical staff are obvious ones. The more revealing test will be the next two matches: whether Spurs create chances of the kind that would actually test a goalkeeper, and whether substitutions are made early and decisively, on the manager's terms. If both happen, the Forest stalemate reads as a blip and De Zerbi's frustration an overcorrection. If neither, the criticism we have heard this week is the surface, and a more serious tactical conversation is coming.

For now, the evidence supports something narrower than the headlines suggest. Tottenham are goalless. De Zerbi is unhappy, publicly, with decisions and processes inside the club. Merson, a credible voice on dressing-room dynamics, thinks that approach carries risk. None of that tells us what shape Spurs are playing, what the pattern of their attacks is, or where exactly the system is breaking. Those questions will be answered on the pitch over the next fortnight, not in the press conference — and the answers will tell us a great deal more about De Zerbi's project than the post-match interviews ever could.