At Tottenham Hotspur, a £400 million summer of ambition has collided with the oldest truth in team sport: money assembles talent, but only time assembles a team. Roberto de Zerbi, five games into a vast rebuild, finds himself judged by results before the work of integration has had any real chance to begin. As Tony Pulis observes from hard-won experience, the invisible labour of understanding players as people — their rhythms, their characters, their need to belong — is precisely what cannot be rushed, and precisely what the calendar is now denying him.