Tottenham Have Depth to Compete but Must Find Way to Win Without Mousa Dembele

Three games into the league season, Tottenham Hotspur have five points. They haven’t played badly, as such, and draws away at Everton and at home to Liverpool are entirely reasonable results, but there is a sense of them not being quite right, of a flow and a fluency and a drive from midfield not quite being there.

The reason is simple: Mousa Dembele is suspended.

“Without Mousa Dembele, we do not exist,” Spurs manager Mauricio Pochettino said, perhaps partly in jest, after Saturday’s draw against Liverpool. “Tottenham does not exist.”

Of all the consequences of Tottenham’s draw against Chelsea toward the end of last season, the game that confirmed Leicester City as champions, the greatest might turn out to be the impact of Dembele’s six-game ban for gouging Diego Costa’s eye.

He still has one match of that suspension left to serve and won’t be available in the Premier League until the home fixture against Sunderland on September 18, although he could play against AS Monaco in the Champions League four days before that.

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His importance to Tottenham is extraordinary. Since Dembele returned from a foot injury last October, Tottenham have not lost in a game he has started. His drive, his willingness to receive the ball in tight spaces and his capacity for emerging from trouble to poke a pass forward became invaluable—too valuable perhaps.

With him in the team last season, they averaged 2.3 points per game—without him, 0.9. Since the start of last season, Harry Kane has scored 24 goals in 27 games when he’s played with Dembele; in the 12 games he’s played without Dembele, he’s scored only one.

It’s an astonishing transformation for a player who started only 10 games (but came off the bench 30 times) in 2014-15 and who seemed to lack the dynamism needed to play in a Pochettino side. At least part of that was down to a hip problem, and he emerged as a key part of their asymmetric midfield three last season.

The tendency was for Spurs’ system to be described as either 4-2-3-1 or a 4-3-3, but the truth is it was somewhere in between the two. Eric Dier would sit, with Dembele advanced and to the left of him and Dele Alli advanced and to the right of the England man.

When the trio first came together, the roles of Alli and Dembele were reversed, which perhaps suggests how the roles of the two more advanced players are largely interchangeable in what is essentially a variant of the “open triangle” Jose Mourinho is so fond of talking about.

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This season, Dier and Victor Wanyama have started all three games at the back of midfield, with Alli in front of them against Everton and Liverpool. The triangle at the heart of the team is still asymmetric, but this time, it seems more closed than open; rather than one player whose responsibilities are largely defensive and two creators, there are two defensive players and a creator.

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That is a useful option to have, and it may be that in the Champions League or in the toughest Premier League matches, Pochettino may opt to play Dier, Wanyama and Dembele as his core, even if that means Alli moving out to the left.

Against Crystal Palace, and for part of the game against Liverpool, Kane was used behind Vincent Janssen.

Pochettino said after the Palace game that gave Kane more freedom and opened up more space for him. It is true he had six shots in the match against the Eagles, per WhoScored.com, but it seemed to come at the expense of balance and fluidity elsewhere. Although Kane did end up setting up the winner for Wanyama, it was a flick on from a corner rather than coming from open play.

The signing of Wanyama does give Pochettino the option of playing that slightly more defensive style, but his real value is in giving greater depth to the squad. That’s not to say he’s a back-up player—rather, he allows Pochettino to rotate and relieve some of the burden on his mainstays, something that becomes especially relevant with a Champions League campaign to negotiate as well as the Premier League.

But the Kenyan does not, as Dembele does, offer both defensive and attacking options in the same package. He is not a guarantor of balance.

Kane played 50 matches last season, and Alli featured in 46; no matter how good Pochettino’s conditioning work is, that is too much. It also, in part, explains why in every full season Pochettino has had at a club other than his first at Espanyol his teams have picked up fewer points per game in the final third of the season than in the first two thirds.

It’s easy to see in that context why Spurs should have then made the move for Moussa Sissoko, which they announced late on Wednesday.

The timing is odd—although chairman Daniel Levy is known for working hard and late to save money in transfer window—and you wonder whether that isn’t offset by the value of having the player in the squad earlier, learning how Pochettino plays so he integrates quicker. And had Sissoko been there, it's possible one of those draws might have become a win.

The France international has the advantage of versatility; he can play anywhere in Spurs' central triangle, as a holding player, a creator or somewhere in between. And as he showed in the first half of the Euro 2016 final, he can be a dominant influence in big games.

The issue has always been one of temperament. Too often at Newcastle United, he seemed a little diffident, particularly in Tyne-Wear derbies, but his talent is undeniable.

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The situation at Spurs is different, though. It’s not just that the club should be battling at the opposite end of the table—it’s that Spurs can leave him out if they want. In his three full seasons at Newcastle, Sissoko missed only eight league games. Tottenham have a squad in which no player, no matter how well they are playing, will be asked to start anything like that number of matches.

It took until the end of the transfer window, but they at last have a squad that should be able to cope with the twin demands of the Premier League and Champions League.

The issue now is ending their reliance on Dembele. You can have a squad as large and as balanced as you want, but if it can’t win games without one man, however gifted, it doesn’t make much difference.

All quotes and information obtained firsthand unless otherwise indicated.