De Zerbi is right: you cannot buy mentality in the transfer market

What mentality actually means in football

Mentality is not attitude in the dressing room, though that is part of it. It is the collective habit of a group under pressure: whether they press harder when they are losing, whether they hold a lead or collapse under it, whether they defend set-pieces with the same intensity in the 88th minute as the 8th. It is behaviour that has been repeated so many times it has become automatic.

That automaticity is the key. It is built through shared experience, through a coaching environment that demands it every day in training, and through the kind of low-stakes repetition that only comes from time together. You cannot shortcut it by signing someone who has it elsewhere, because what they have is the habit of behaving that way inside a different system, with different teammates, under different pressure.

Why the transfer market cannot deliver it

The transfer market moves individuals. Mentality is a group property. This is the core of the problem, and it is worth being precise about it.

When a club signs a player with a reputation for leadership or resilience, they are signing someone who demonstrated those qualities in a particular context. Virgil van Dijk at Southampton was a good player. Virgil van Dijk at Liverpool, inside Jürgen Klopp's specific defensive structure and culture, became something different. The player did not change in isolation. The environment changed around him, and the environment was already there when he arrived.

The reverse is equally true. A player who looks mentally fragile at one club can look transformed at another, not because they have changed as a person but because the collective around them has changed. Mentality is contagious in both directions.

This is why clubs that spend heavily in a single window so rarely see an immediate return in character. The new arrivals have not yet been through anything together. They do not know instinctively how their teammates will react when a game turns against them. That knowledge only comes from shared difficulty, and shared difficulty takes time.

The Spurs context

De Zerbi's comments land in a summer where Tottenham have been spending at a scale the club has rarely attempted. Savinho from Manchester City, Omar Marmoush, and further targets beyond them: it is an audacious window by any measure, and De Zerbi is the manager trying to turn those arrivals into a functioning team.

The spending is not the problem. The observation is about the limit of what spending can do. A squad assembled quickly, with players who have not yet shared a pre-season, a bad run, a comeback, a derby defeat, does not yet have the connective tissue that produces consistent behaviour under pressure. That is not a criticism of the players or the club. It is just how group psychology works.

The discomfort from outside the club has always been about who is spending, not how much. But De Zerbi's own point is the more interesting one: the spending is necessary, and it is also insufficient.

What clubs can actually do

Mentality is coached, not bought. It requires a manager with a clear and consistent demand on how the team behaves, a training environment that replicates pressure, and enough time for the group to internalise it.

The clubs that have built genuine collective resilience, the Liverpool sides under Klopp, the Leicester of 2016, Atletico Madrid across Diego Simeone's tenure, all share one thing: a manager who made the behavioural standard non-negotiable and stayed long enough for it to become culture. The players changed. The culture did not.

There is a partial market solution, and it is continuity of core personnel. If a club can retain the players who already carry the culture, new arrivals have something to absorb rather than something to construct from scratch. This is why breaking up a successful squad is so costly in ways that do not show up in the transfer fee: you are not just losing a player, you are diluting the environment that made the other players better.

De Zerbi knows this. His track record at Brighton showed a manager who could build mentality in a group, turning a mid-table side into one of the most coherent pressing teams in Europe, not through elite recruitment but through a clear and relentless demand on how the game was played. The question at Spurs is whether he gets the time to do the same thing with considerably more expensive raw material.

The honest verdict

Mentality is built, not signed. The transfer market can bring in players who have demonstrated it elsewhere, but it cannot replicate the conditions that produced it. A new squad needs shared experience, a consistent coaching demand, and time. There is no shortcut, and the clubs that have tried to buy their way to resilience have generally found that the more they spent in a single window, the longer it took to arrive.