Why this break has come at the worst time for De Zerbi & Spurs
Big spending always means big ambitions, but shelling out so much money on so many players the way Tottenham did this summer produces problems for any manager, and there is no quick fix.
If I was given a bundle of cash and asked to buy an outfit for a wedding, and I spent every penny of it on pink shoes, brown trousers, yellow shirt and orange tie, then I am sure you would all say that just doesn’t work.
That is similar to what has happened at Spurs, where the board backed Roberto de Zerbi to the hilt with an outlay on new players of around £400m.
It was an almost unprecedented occurrence from a club that has always been renowned for being careful with investment in their team, and it sent expectations from many Spurs supporters through the roof.
The club had just avoided relegation two seasons running, finishing 17th twice in a row, but suddenly some fans were looking forward to a season competing for trophies and a top-four finish.
Their early results and performances have been disappointing, of course, but fans have to understand all the different factors that affect you when you are building a team - and it is ridiculous to suggest De Zerbi should be under pressure already, especially after he kept them up last season.
De Zerbi took over as Spurs boss with seven games to go last season and the club 17th in the Premier League. Three wins and two draws were enough to keep them up.
Finding a way for your club to win takes a manager in lots of different directions but they all involve time - on the grass or with social interaction with the players.
Not only has De Zerbi not been given that early time and opportunity, the majority of his players have now been taken away from him for another three weeks on international duty.
De Zerbi has many other issues to deal with, from Tottenham’s poor home form to their inability to recover from conceding the first goal in games.
But his biggest challenge right now will be to fit those players who have just arrived in with the ones already at the club, into a unit that plays as a team and produces results so that the money the club has spent is justified.
All of this will take time, and patience, and all the kinds of little detail that supporters never see.
In my day, we were given time to create a team, and a family. For today’s managers, time seems more limited than ever.
We are only five games into the season but there are already some Spurs fans who seem to think De Zerbi is the worst manager in the world, even though he has proved elsewhere how good he is.
I like De Zerbi’s passion, and his approach. That will count for nothing if Spurs don’t eventually produce, but let’s give him a proper chance.
Spurs, Fulham and Bournemouth are the only top-flight teams yet to win a league game this season.
De Zerbi is a very passionate, straight-talking and ambitious manager who demands total commitment and backing from his board.
He has definitely had that at Spurs, which has left people wondering why he has made such a slow start.
But, before the season started, I thought his biggest challenge with so many different types of players arriving would be to put players together that fit as a team, not as a group of individuals.
I’ve been in that situation myself, for example in my early days at Stoke, when I signed Gerry Taggart and Michael Duberry to play together, two centre-halves who were complete opposites in relation to how they dealt with space on the pitch.
Gerry always wanted to drop off deeper because he wasn’t overly quick, whereas Michael was fast and didn’t ever worry about leaving space behind him.
I couldn’t make Gerry any quicker, so common sense locked in and I had to convince Michael that he would have to take a step away from his main strengths of pace and power and work along Gerry’s lines instead.
We spent a great deal of time on the grass in training until we finally got both working in unison. Both were different, but they understood the importance of working together as a pair for the benefit of the team. Even so, it still took time for it to click.
For any manager trying to build a successful team by developing combinations like that, the main thing you need is time with your players.
It can happen where a lot of new players settle in quickly at the same time and the team starts well - like Sunderland last season, or Brighton pretty much every year when they have lost several key players - but the difference is that while those clubs might also have changed their manager, they have not changed their identity.
Whether it is Sunderland and Brighton, or Brentford and Bournemouth, they all have a set identity so that when they look for a player to fit in a certain position, he has to have certain strengths.
When you don’t have that solid base behind you, knowing exactly what is needed for certain positions, then bringing 10 new signings and all in one window like Spurs have just done, is going to create many issues for the coach.
Each player has a different personality and needs different amount of time to settle in, not only to a new environment but also to adjust to the demands of a very single-minded and demanding coach like De Zerbi is.
This settling-in period would have been covered if all the players had had a pre-season together, to get up to speed with their team-mates and what De Zerbi is asking of them, with his front-foot style of play.
That did not happen, and then even after the season started, Spurs were still adding to their squad.
Coaching a team to be a team takes time, patience and a sound idea of the strengths of all your players.
Even when you have got that, trying to knit every player together takes time, and that is still De Zerbi’s issue now.
For starters, he was always playing catch-up. Because all of his players were not in place when the season began, he missed the opportunity to assess his squad and impose his own principles on his top group of players.
He is a coach at heart and will want to be out on the training pitch conducting a system of work for the team, in and out of possession, that he believes will bring success to the club. This international break means he cannot do that with all his players.
Another issue De Zerbi has is that he has only been in the job a few months and he is still getting to know the existing players, not just the new ones, on and off the grass.
On it, you need to find out who understands the importance of teamwork and who doesn’t, to iron out shortcomings and see what works and what doesn’t.
An example of when you realise something doesn’t work was my experience at a club who had just bought a right-back from a top Premier League team, for more than £1m which was big money at the time.
We were struggling at the bottom of the league when I came in and needed a direction on the pitch that would bring better results.
During the defensive work we were doing in training, the full-back kept picking up what were, in my opinion, poor positions while covering from the opposite side to where the ball was.
I must have stopped the session on at least four occasions to remonstrate with him and give my view, but in the end the lad told me that this is not what he believed was right.
I immediately replaced him with a young full-back from the reserves who had been playing for the opposition in the drill, who understood his role was for the team, and not for himself.
Getting things right off the pitch is so important too, and that involves getting to know what your players’ characters are like, finding out what they are like as individuals, and understanding their lifestyles.
I had three South American players at West Brom who were fantastic lads but we still had to look after them.
I spoke to my assistant, David Kemp, about taking them and their families out for dinner, and by spending time with them and their children and their wives I believe we won a degree of respect and trust that we would never have had if we had not bothered to meet them all together as a family.
You have to realise that players from different cultures can be used to living a different lifestyle, and this can make a difference to how quickly or how well they fit in.
I had one player in the Premier League whose routine I just could not believe, yet he became such an integral part of keeping a struggling club up.
His 24 hours typically played out like this - training from 8.30am to 1pm, home and bed until 9 or 10pm and then up and out again for dinner and then a casino or whatever, until the early hours.
Then he would be up for training, and he would go again.
It took me a few weeks to get to the bottom of this but, once I confronted him, he was adamant that his routine suited his lifestyle. He certainly knew the best restaurants around town, but his performances were always of the highest quality on the pitch.
Did he heed my advice? I think he did, but he was such a great lad, top player and a great team member that he wasn’t a problem anyway.
He had been a bit isolated from the rest of the squad at first, but it just took him some time to integrate.
Again, finding out about him as an individual and making personal contact with him, was important, and it was something I always saw as vital with all my players.
Tony Pulis was speaking to BBC Sport’s Chris Bevan.
