Roberto de Zerbi’s Tottenham spell makes more sense when you start in Brescia. He was a mascot at 4 or 5, following Brescia home and away with his father, and that upbringing shaped the identity he carried into management. Tottenham have taken 10 points from their last five Premier League matches, a decent run, but the bigger story here is where De Zerbi says his football values came from.
Brescia’s grip on de Zerbi
“My dad is crazy about football. He was one of the leaders of the Brescia tifoseria. At home, we lived and breathed football. He was the one who passed that passion on to me,” De Zerbi said. That background matters because it was not just childhood nostalgia, it was football culture at home and on the curva.
De Zerbi also says the family had to rebuild after hardship. “We had to rebuild our lives from scratch,” he said, after his father was forced to sell the family mat factory and the home he grew up in during the early 1990s economic crisis. That lived experience helps explain why his ideas are usually framed around principles, not just patterns.
He spent 19 games on loan at Brescia in 2008, then later wrote about the club from the touchline rather than the stands. Rosanna Pedrollo, who spent 50 years at Brescia and joined the administration in 1968, remembered Alfredo de Zerbi as a man who organised away trips and looked after supporters. Salim Lamrani, author of Football According to Roberto de Zerbi, said De Zerbi had preserved the “principles of solidarity and generosity” given to him by his parents.
Tonali and the city that shaped both of them
Sandro Tonali is the other useful link in this story. He joined Brescia aged 12 and made his Serie A debut as a 17-year-old. He also met De Zerbi in a city that was small enough for the two to cross paths quickly.
“Brescia is so small. I had two weeks there and met him two or three times. We spoke about Brescia, about the difficult situation facing our club,” Tonali said. He has been a regular presence for Tottenham too, averaging 84 minutes across his last five Premier League matches. His recent ratings sit at 6.9, with a high of 7.2, which is steady enough to show he is not just a passenger in the side.
The club’s collapse gives the whole thing sharper edges. Brescia Calcio were excluded from professional football by Italian authorities last summer, and Union Brescia replaced them at Stadio Mario Rigamonti. The place that produced De Zerbi and Tonali is still there, but the badge that once anchored it is not. That is why this story carries more weight than a simple local connection piece.
Tottenham finished 17th in the 2025 Premier League season. Their current run of 10 points from five matches does not settle anything by itself, but it does show why De Zerbi’s background keeps getting mentioned whenever people talk about how he builds teams. The next league games will tell us more about the football, but the Brescia thread is already clear enough.
Written by Jack Mercer with AI-assisted research, cross-checked against 1 outlet. How we work →
