Tottenham's Long Journey: Finding Peace in Sydney

Tottenham’s 11,400-mile detour to the other side of the world has left Roberto De Zerbi and his players fighting jet lag, but buried inside the sleepless nights is a perk they rarely enjoy in north London: peace and quiet.

Thirty hours to nowhere near home

It took Spurs more than 30 hours to get from their Enfield training base to Auckland, New Zealand, with stops along the way. From there, they climbed back on a plane for another three hours or so to Australia, where Sydney – and a meeting with Sydney FC and then Chelsea – awaited.

On a map, Sydney is only 24 miles from Enfield. The catch? It is the Enfield in New South Wales, just outside the city, not the one that sits in Greater London and feeds into White Hart Lane’s daily routine.

De Zerbi has worn the travel. You can hear it in his voice.

“Just work and sleep, trying to sleep, because I am suffering a lot from the jet lag,” he admitted. “No restaurant, no nothing. Just to prepare the guys to play in the best way we can, and try to sleep something more than three or four hours!”

This is the trade-off of the modern Premier League tour: the grind for the gain.

Why they really go

These long-haul pre-season and post-season trips are not a mystery. Clubs cross time zones for three clear reasons.

• Money comes first. Promoters and sponsors pour millions into these events, and those funds matter in a league where every marginal financial edge can be turned into a transfer fee or a wage packet.
• Reach comes next. Planting the badge in new territories, selling shirts, and capturing the imagination of young supporters who might otherwise drift towards a rival club is now part of the job description.
• Then there is the give-back. For fans who stay up into the early hours to watch their team from thousands of miles away and might never afford a trip to England, the club comes to them instead. For one night, the television dream walks into their own stadium.

Coaches, if left to their own devices, would lock themselves away at the training ground and drill their players without interruption. Yet once the body clocks settle, tours can do something a training complex cannot. They trap a squad together. New signings and academy hopefuls eat, travel and work alongside senior pros, and cliques soften in the shared fatigue of delayed flights and hotel corridors.

The work becomes more concentrated. The distractions of home – family, friends, familiar routines – fade. Football fills the space.

A football club in a rugby town

Sydney, though, offers something different again.

Tottenham have a sizeable following in Australia. Official supporters’ group OzSpurs is well stocked with members, and the appointment of Ange Postecoglou put the club’s name firmly into the local news agenda.

Yet in a city of 5.6 million people, “football” – the Premier League’s version – does not rule the roost. Rugby League and Australian Rules Football dominate the sporting conversation. Many locals might recognise the name Tottenham Hotspur now, but ask them to pick out a Spurs player in a crowd and most would struggle.

That obscurity is gold dust for the players.

Back in London, a walk through a shopping centre or a stroll down a high street brings a steady stream of selfie requests and autograph hunters. Every outing is a public event. In Sydney, they can slip into the flow of the city and, for a few hours, disappear.

Blending into the harbour crowd

On Monday night, around 9.30pm, two of Tottenham’s youngest faces did exactly that.

Archie Gray and Lucas Bergvall wandered through the crowds around Sydney Harbour, taking in the lights and the sweep of the Opera House like any other tourists. They wore white Spurs-branded tracksuit tops and shorts, the Australian winter offering a mild backdrop rather than a biting chill.

The badges were visible. The names were not. Nobody stopped them.

The next day, the pair went out again, this time on bicycles, pedalling around the city with the same anonymity. A couple of fans have spotted players in passing, as well as members of the board and even the Lewis family, but nothing like the mob scenes that would greet them in London or back home in Europe.

The coaching staff have enjoyed the same freedom. They have been seen drifting through Sydney’s botanical gardens, heads down, stretching their legs between sessions. De Zerbi himself has been spotted walking the streets on his phone, still carrying the look of a man whose body clock is somewhere over the Indian Ocean.

A rare breath of fresh air

Being a Premier League footballer comes with obvious rewards: money, status, the roar of a packed stadium. The flip side is the constant scrutiny, the sense that every movement is watched, recorded, shared.

Here, on the far side of the world, Tottenham’s players can taste something closer to normal life. They can queue for coffee, wander along the harbour, ride a bike through a foreign city and feel, for once, like part of the crowd rather than the show.

For a squad living out of suitcases and chasing sleep across time zones, that quiet anonymity might be the most refreshing thing they find in the Australian winter air.