Goal crisis & in drop zone - so why is Spurs' £60m striker stuck in U21s?

Richarlison has only made one Premier League appearance for Tottenham this season

Less than four years after representing Brazil at the 2022 World Cup, Richarlison’s downward spiral at Tottenham was laid bare as he scored in front of a couple of hundred supporters for the under-21s against Cheltenham Town in the EFL Trophy.

The Brazilian, who cost Spurs £60m from Everton and was rubbing shoulders with Neymar Jr and Vinicius Jr on international duty not so long ago, looked almost embarrassed to celebrate his thumping half-volley against the League Two outfit.

He also notched a penalty in a shootout that Spurs’ reserves lost 7-6 after a 2-2 draw.

Richarlison, 29, was making only his second appearance of the season, and his first since the end of August against Brentford, having been left out of Tottenham’s Premier League squad.

Manager Roberto de Zerbi insisted the decision to omit him from the club’s 25-man squad in September was not his, following the forward’s failed move back to Merseyside at the end of the transfer window.

With just three goals, Spurs are the top-flight’s lowest scorers this season and second bottom in the table. So the decision to leave last season’s 12-goal leading scorer out of their league plans looks increasingly difficult to justify.

For a couple of hours on transfer deadline day, it seemed only a matter of time before Richarlison left Tottenham.

He was closing in on an idyllic return to Everton, more than four years after swapping Merseyside for North London.

But after expressing his desire to depart, a proposed move to the Hill Dickinson Stadium fell through, leaving both the player and club with few alternatives at such a late stage of the summer transfer window.

“He decided everything alone,” De Zerbi said in September. “He spoke with me at the beginning of the pre-season and told me his idea and desire was to leave.

“At the end we go to bring another striker [in] and, like I said at the beginning of the pre-season, I want to keep the players, just the players that want to stay and be proud and with the right passion to stay here.

“Then for everything and other problems, it is not my business and not my job. It is the responsibility of the club.

“I can’t say nothing because I didn’t decide anything. The message of Richarlison from the beginning of the season has been very clear. I accepted that and for me [there is] nothing [to say].”

Later that month, a proposed move to Brazilian side Vasco da Gama also fell through after Richarlison failed to agree personal terms.

He was also ruled out of Spurs’ Carabao Cup tie against Liverpool last month, with only players registered in their club’s respective league squad eligible to feature in the competition.

The ex-Watford forward may now have to get used to the surroundings of English football’s lower leagues, with the EFL Trophy’s group stage offering him a rare opportunity to gain competitive minutes before January.

Just six games into the new Premier League season, Tottenham may already be regretting their decision not to register Richarlison.

Since arriving from Everton, he has scored 27 top-flight goals in 103 appearances.

He was also Tottenham’s leading scorer in the competition last season, netting 11 times in 32 appearances as they narrowly avoided relegation to the Championship.

Dominic Solanke’s late equaliser against Manchester United on Saturday was the first Premier League goal from a Tottenham forward since Richarlison netted against Chelsea back in May.

Former England striker Alan Shearer questioned Solanke’s quality on Match of the Day, describing him as “nowhere near good enough” - the 29-year-old has scored just 13 league goals since joining two years ago from Bournemouth in a £55m deal.

De Zerbi, though, was pleased with Solanke’s performance and contribution after his first goal of the season rescued a point at Old Trafford despite Spurs being reduced to 10 men.

But despite the Italian’s positive view and faith in his frontman, Tottenham’s problems in the final third are difficult to ignore, having spent £300m on new recruits over the summer.

When they failed to score in their first four Premier League games this term, supporters inside the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium were holding banners begging the 2025 Europa League winners to find the net.

Richarlison might not provide the answer to all of his side’s problems, but his inclusion in the Premier League squad would surely have been more beneficial than allowing him to trudge around the pitches of England’s lower-tier clubs and show his finishing prowess in front of sparse crowds.

Lille considering legal action after Santos injury

French club Lille say they are considering taking legal action after defender Tiago Santos suffered a knee injury from an “uncontrolled and dangerous” tackle against Le Havre on Saturday.

Santos, 24, was carried off on a stretcher having ruptured his anterior cruciate ligament (ACL), as well as suffering a meniscal tear in his right knee.

He was tackled by Le Havre midfielder Amir Richardson in the first half of Lille’s eventual 1-0 win and, while it was given as a foul, Richardson did not receive a yellow or red card for the challenge.

Lille said they have asked the league to refer the incident to its disciplinary panel, believing it should have been a red card because the tackle was made “from behind, uncontrolled and in a dangerous manner”.

“Beyond the injury itself, the circumstances in which it occurred and the lack of sanction raise serious questions for the club,” the club’s statement added.

“LOSC has referred the matter to the French Football Federation and the Professional Football League in order to obtain an examination of the handling of this action by the refereeing team and the video assistance.

“LOSC is studying the possible remedies and reserves the right to take any legal action to obtain compensation for its damages.”

The club said Santos will be unable to play for “several months”.

Le Havre responded by saying that the club and Richardson expressed their support for Santos in his recovery, but backed the decision of the match referee and the video assistant referee.

They also questioned Lille’s move to “punish its player after the fact, since such a decision would fall outside the current regulations”.

“HAC respects all fellow Ligue 1 clubs and expects the same respect in return,” Le Havre added.

BBC Sport has contacted the LFP, which runs the French professional leagues, for comment.

Lille are second in Ligue 1 and face Arsenal in the Champions League on Tuesday.

The star is Luis Enrique - inside the plans to keep PSG at the top

Johan Cruyff, a man Paris St-Germain boss Luis Enrique deeply admires, used to say the hardest thing in football is winning after winning.

This season has been designed by Luis Enrique at PSG with that conundrum in mind.

The back-to-back European champions could become only the second team to win three consecutive Champions Leagues this season. They are also aiming for a third successive league triumph.

They visit Manchester City for Wednesday’s Champions League tie sixth in Ligue 1, with just three wins, two draws and one defeat. Nobody in Paris is panicking, though.

Luis Enrique’s side made a similarly slow start last season, but the coach was confident the results would come.

“Do you want to bet against us?” he said recently.

Luis Enrique recently signed a contract until 2030, and so have a number of players central to his plan.

The big danger is that a group who have won everything will believe they can relax without anyone noticing.

Much of what he has done so far is about preventing exactly that.

Paris St-Germain won a third consecutive Ligue 1 game by defeating Le Mans 3-1 on Saturday

When the club announced his new contract, they also confirmed new deals for Joao Neves, Fabian Ruiz, Willian Pacho, Lucas Beraldo and Senny Mayulu, sending a clear message to the dressing room that this is still a long-term project.

There has been remarkably little change in the technical staff since Luis Enrique arrived at PSG in 2023.

Assistant Joaquin Valdes has been alongside Luis Enrique since their Barcelona B days, and he is the one who talks to the players on a personal level.

He also helps keep his boss grounded when Luis Enrique’s mind drifts too far away, and you can see him in the background in every news conference.

Rafel Pol, who handles strategy and acts as second in command, is another constant presence.

Very little of the way they train on and off the pitch has altered during Luis Enrique’s three years at the club.

The players aren’t shown a huge amount of videos, but there is a big screen on the training pitch to correct players and two cranes for the coaches to see everything from a height.

The one real change though is in the luxury of depth - a factor that proved key last campaign.

Luis Enrique can now regularly leave out a couple of key players from his squad and the team does not suffer.

Ousmane Dembele was not in the squad for the win against Le Mans on Saturday, and earlier in the season it was Lucas Digne who was left out. Against the bigger opponents, such as Manchester City and Barcelona, the starters arrive rested.

Against Le Mans, he used eight players that would not start the bigger matches, and, with the match level, he brought on four of his ‘stars’ to ensure the win.

His attack has been renewed after Gonzalo Ramos, Bradley Barcola and Lee Kang-in all departed.

Dani Gil, Paris correspondent for the Spanish radio station COPE, explains: “Barcola could not be given the minutes he wanted, they had won everything and been paid well for it, and the club could do with players who were hungrier.”

“Mika Godts and Ferran Torres fit that description. Neither has yet won at club level what the departed players won.”

Barcola was not rated by the coaches as someone who could reach the level Dembele sets, yet his flashes of brilliance were enough to convince Liverpool to pay £123m for him.

Summer signing Torres is the more intriguing case. He went through a difficult stretch psychologically, worked on his mental strength and now calls himself ‘the Shark’.

He was unhappy at Barcelona when he was not playing regularly, even though last season produced his best numbers.

Now, having netted the winner for Spain in the World Cup final, he has scored seven goals in France. For the first time in his career he feels really wanted.

He also knows what kind of team he has joined. In a Luis Enrique side the star is Luis Enrique, and the forward is content with that.

PSG defeated Arsenal as they retained the Champions League in 2026

The way of playing, the standards, the habits, they all belong to the coach, and the players slot in.

It explains why the club could sell famous names without the team losing its identity.

Luis Enrique, who has taken a space that PSG’s Qatari owners had never handed to any other coach, has turned a club once seen as a collection of expensive signings into one envied by the rest of the world, by signing wisely but also by drawing value from the academy.

Four homegrown players - Warren Zaire-Emery, Mayulu, Quentin Ndjantou and Ibrahim Mbaye - played in the Champions League last season.

The first-team headquarters sit at the top of a hill, and the academy is at the bottom, so the young players have to climb, literally and metaphorically, if they want to make it.

The campus was officially opened in November 2024 after an investment of 350m euros, and for the first time the professional teams, the men’s and women’s academies and the school all share one site.

The method is imposed from the top down. The under-23s coach is a former player, but the style comes from Luis Enrique’s first team, with constant meetings between them and academy directors.

Yohan Cabaye, director of the training centre, speaks often to director of football Luis Campos and Olivier Gagne, the deputy director of professional football. Campos, Gagne and Luis Enrique attend youth league games whenever they can.

The recent international break showed that way of working. Only four first-team players remained at the club.

Sixteen academy players were away with their national teams too. Luis Enrique spent the three weeks on the training ground with the youngsters as they got the rare chance to impress the coach.

Pep Guardiola and Luis Enrique were team-mates at Barcelona from 1996 to 2001

His relationship with the media is distant. When asked what he had done during the three-week break, he said it was of no interest to anyone.

It is his way of marking distance. He keeps friendships with two or three Spanish journalists, who might get an answer to a phone message, but in France he has drawn a firm line.

There is no ‘off the record’, no coffee with reporters and no one-to-one interviews for anyone. In his first year he answered in Spanish, and now he replies only in very good French.

Yet when football is the subject, he is very interesting.

Before the Le Mans game he opened by saying that, as usual, we worry about the most banal things in football. Then he explained how French perception works.

When PSG win, the rivals are considered inferior, but when they struggle, it is declared a catastrophe. He said the view from the media is always extreme.

And next, the Etihad.

It will be fascinating to see how Luis Enrique handles the subject of former manager Pep Guardiola, who will be present at the game, and the charges brought against City by the Premier League. My sense is that he will stand up for him.

There will obviously be a meeting between them, and that is Luis Enrique’s way of saying something, not necessarily about the case itself but about what he thinks of Guardiola’s legacy.

They know the questions may arrive in Manchester, but the PSG media team has no plan to prepare a coordinated response. That is how much they trust the manager.

Whatever he is asked, expect the same Luis Enrique: sharp, managing the pressure and comfortable at the top.

Elite schedule 'not sustainable' amid 55-game seasons

Cole Palmer missed the 2026 World Cup after struggling last season with chronic injury

The Premier League may have just returned from a three-week break, but for many of its stars there was no rest at all.

Of all the Premier League players called up by their countries, 25 played 360 minutes - the full length of four games - during the extended international break.

These included 13 players who featured for their clubs at the World Cup, such as Liverpool captain Virgil van Dijk, who also played 55 games for his club last season.

Van Dijk is one of several players, including England’s Declan Rice, Morgan Rogers and Harry Kane, who played more than 4,000 minutes in all competitions in 2025-26 and have started on a similar trajectory this season.

According to expert sports scientists and psychologists, this cannot be maintained.

“It is not sustainable,” Dr Dave Richardson, head of psychology, sports science and wellbeing at the University of Lincoln, told BBC Sport.

“We will start to see more clamour when we are not happy with the quality of performances; the public pay to see high quality.”

The impact of the hectic schedule is already being seen in players picking their battles.

Five players - Cole Palmer, Marcus Rashford, Rice, Kobbie Mainoo and Tino Livramento - pulled out of the England squad before the latest international window.

Germany’s Kai Havertz and France captain Kylian Mbappe also withdrew from the recent international break.

Maheta Molango, CEO of the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA), said the withdrawals were emblematic of a “sick” system.

“When England see five players who need to withdraw when the single most proud moment a player has is to be called up for the national team, you just ask yourself, what’s wrong about the industry?” Molango said.

“They love to play for England. They love to play for their national team. But, unfortunately, your body puts a limit to it. You cannot cheat biology.”

Molango wants a mandatory three-week summer break and a three-week “retraining” period every summer.

But Dr Richardson, who has worked with Liverpool on player care and psychology, says that will be impossible in the current fractured system of sporting bodies.

“The problem is that there is no one body covering the playing schedule, and they all want predominance,” he said. “They are all vying for the spotlight and championing their product as the best.

“Without that overarching independent body, it may not be sustainable.”

Dr Chris James, an expert in the impact of sleep on sports performance and psychology lecturer at Cardiff University, says men’s football is failing in its duty of care towards players.

“Particularly in the men’s game, there is a culture where you need to look like they are coping,” he told BBC Sport. “It is like going back in time, with attitudes to mental health.

“There is a lot of work you must break down that stigma, that mental health is an equal partner to physical health. I have more of these conversations in men’s football than with women.”

Kylian Mbappe suffered an injury during the last international break with France

Former England defender Matt Upson, speaking on BBC Radio 5 Live during the Nations League home game versus the Czech Republic, said the extended early international break would have positives and negatives.

“It is nice to have that intense period together - you can benefit a lot with breaking down the barriers around the dressing room; the manager gets to work on the training field a lot,” he said.

“But four games in this period is a lot at this stage of the season, after a summer of competing as well.”

Upson’s former England team-mate Paul Robinson says proper provisions and preparations are needed between games, but any attempt to reduce a player’s minutes would be futile.

“When you get to mid-season, it is about two days’ preparation for a game, and then two days recovery,” he told BBC Sport.

“With so many games, the timespan that they have is much shorter. Managers say they don’t have much time on the training ground and that is understandable because the demands on a player are so much, and recovery days are just as important as the preparation days.

“But I think from a footballer’s point of view, the game schedules are not overly taxing if you can manage yourself in between the games.

“And say, if Norway and England get to the final of the Nations League next summer, and their respective managers turn around to Erling Haaland and Harry Kane and say ‘it’s been a long season, you have three weeks off - then do you think those two players are going to sit back and accept that?

“No chance. They are going to say ‘we want to play’. Players want to play in these games.”

But Dr James says the high of playing tens of games per season is only temporary, with the lows risked by increased possibility of injury and constantly having to be switched on to the elite level being far worse.

He says players are turning to coping mechanisms, such as using snus, to stay focused.

“Football still does not really appreciate the recovery needed physically and psychologically,” he said.

“Players need to be people. Mental detachment is much trickier when there is increased fixture density. True recovery is about stepping away from our professional responsibility.

“The physical load can lead to more injuries, which can have a greater psychological impact. That will add a lot of stress - who am I if I am not playing? They will then also be worrying about contracts.

“It’s about education - feeling good in the moment [by playing a lot of football] does not mean it is good for them. They might feel they are physically capable of playing these matches in a row, but mentally they may feel wrung out.

“This is where clubs can be doing a better job of educating players - the benefit of downtime. You must sell to players why this is worth something.”

Dr Richardson says some clubs are better at supporting players, citing Brentford as having a strong sports psychology team.

But with the Club World Cup introduced, the World Cup potentially expanding and no sign of a reduced number of games in the Premier League, domestic cups or Uefa competitions, there looks to be no clear path forwards.

“The players have got little control over the calendar. As we have seen, some of them will decide to step away,” said Dr Richardson.

“That lack of empowerment is difficult - that and the fear factor of not participating, of losing the place in the pipeline. But if you play and get injured, you lose your place anyway.

“Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”

Snus - small nicotine patches placed in the gums - is growing in popularity among players

Burnham to release details of Man City meetings

Prime Minister Andy Burnham has said he will release details of his meetings with senior figures at Manchester City.

It follows criticism of his comments in the wake of the club being found guilty of all charges related to breaches of the Premier League’s financial rules.

An independent commission found City had broken rules over a nine-year period between 2009 and 2018 by creating “sham” contracts with commercial partners to secretly funnel more than £830m into their football operations.

Burnham’s previous role as mayor of Greater Manchester has led to questions about his relationship with City’s Abu Dhabi ownership, with Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch demanding No 10 release all details of meetings between the prime minister and senior figures at the club.

“I’ve been asked by the leader of the opposition to publish details of my meetings, which I’m happy to do and I’m going to,” Burnham told the Rest is Politics podcast.

“I will quite clearly put out there everything that I have done working with them in my previous role as Mayor of Greater Manchester.”

“None of it is recent, actually, in terms of the meetings I had. I only had one significant meeting, actually, and that was in 2021.”

The prime minister initially told the BBC he would be “really concerned” if Manchester City’s owners decide to sell up following the guilty verdict before later denying his reaction had “downplayed the seriousness of the findings”.

However, some Premier League clubs were so “astonished” by Burnham’s stance that sources told BBC Sport they were “concerned” about political interference in the appeal process.

Sanctions are yet to be announced and City have lodged an appeal against the verdict.

City returned to action for the first time since the guilty verdict when they played at Liverpool on Sunday, winning 3-0.

Burnham was mayor of Manchester from 2017 until earlier this year and his tenure took place during a sustained period of success for City.

As mayor, he championed investment from the Gulf as a way of growing Manchester’s economy, a strategy which was initially pursued by the city’s leaders before Burnham became the inaugural elected mayor of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority.

“I don’t think I misspoke,” said Burnham of his past comments on Man City’s owners.

“What I would say is my mind hadn’t been on all of the issues. My mind had been on Labour Party conference and I was doing interviews in relation to it.”

“And also, I didn’t link those two things. You know, the questions linked those two things. What I would say is they’re very separate.”

“The football issues are different from the investment issues. People will try and conflate those two things, but they shouldn’t, in my view.”

“The football issues, the findings of the independent commission are serious, as I said in the interview.”

The entire process involving the charges against Manchester City is independent of the Premier League.

An independent commission held a 42-day hearing in 2024 which led to the verdict announced last month, with City also guilty of all charges except one relating to non-cooperation with the Premier League investigation.

The commission’s report said that “a number of important club witnesses gave false evidence in key respects and that some knowingly gave untrue and dishonest evidence”.

A separate independent appeal board will hear City’s appeal. The club continues to deny any wrongdoing.