"He suffered too much. He deserves to feel emotion on the pitch." That's Roberto De Zerbi on Dejan Kulusevski, who returns to the Tottenham squad for Monday's match against Coventry City after more than 500 days on the sidelines.
The Swedish winger last played competitively in May 2025, when a knee injury ended his season. What followed was a brutal stretch of absence: Spurs lifted the Europa League without him, an entire Premier League campaign came and went, and Sweden played the FIFA World Cup 2026 while Kulusevski watched. Monday is his first step back.
De Zerbi's reaction says everything about the scale of it
The Spurs manager didn't frame this as a football moment. He was direct about that.
"It's not football. I'm not speaking about football," De Zerbi told reporters on Sunday. "He suffered a lot and his reaction was great." When he told Kulusevski the medical staff had cleared him, the player "smiled like this (wide)." Over 500 days of rehabilitation tends to put things in perspective.
Kulusevski will start on the bench — sensible management for a player returning from that kind of layoff. Whether he features at all depends on the flow of the game, but his mere presence in the matchday squad is a significant shift for a Tottenham side that desperately needs one.
Spurs need this more than they're letting on
The timing matters beyond the personal story. Tottenham are bottom of the Premier League after six matches without a win. Six games, zero points from a victory — that's not a rough patch, that's a structural problem. De Zerbi is still finding his footing after replacing Ange Postecoglou, and the squad's attacking options have looked thin.
Kulusevski, when fit, is the kind of player who changes games from wide areas — direct, technically sharp, capable of making things happen in tight spaces. Antepost odds on Spurs finishing in the top six will likely tighten slightly just on the news of his return, though he won't fix six winless games overnight.
The work starts Monday. "Deki, he suffered too much" — and now, finally, he gets to suffer on the pitch instead.
