Veteran manager Tony Pulis has backed Tottenham’s decision to take the squad away to Marbella for a team-bonding camp — revealing that his own players once bonded over beer and Blackpool beach instead of five-star Spanish resorts. Spurs boss Roberto de Zerbi used the warm-weather trip to drill in his principles ahead of Monday night’s trip to Coventry.
Tony Pulis (Credits: BBC Sport)
De Zerbi Needs Time With His £250m New-Look Squad
Pulis wrote that he had previously flagged how De Zerbi needed time on the training pitch after a poor start to the season to bed in and build a proper team. Tottenham spent more than £250 million on new talent over the summer, adding 10 players to De Zerbi’s squad, with several arrivals coming late in the transfer window.
The Marbella camp gave the Italian two sessions a day to work on team shape and direction — but, crucially, it also let him study the personalities in his almost-entirely-new group away from the grass. If the trip has worked, Pulis says, De Zerbi will for the first time truly understand the strengths and weaknesses of each individual, on and off the field.
From Austria to Blackpool: How Bonding Used to Be Done
The columnist drew on his own managerial days at Stoke, when he regularly took squads to Austria in pre-season — 10-day tests designed to expose character as much as fitness. Those trips, he believes, forged the inner determination that carried Stoke through tough early Premier League campaigns, and players who fell short of the dressing-room culture did not last long.
Modern bonding could not be further from Pulis’s own playing days, when Bristol Rovers were taken to Blackpool for three days of pre-season training: a shared guest house with three-quarter beds, running sessions on the sand, seven-a-side games on a park pitch — cleared of dog mess first — and a few evening beers with no curfew, so long as everyone was downstairs ready to hit the beach again at 8am.
That drinking culture, he notes, was everywhere in the 1970s and 80s game — a far cry from today’s science-driven elite camps. The surroundings have changed beyond recognition, but Pulis insists the underlying idea is identical: get the players living in each other’s pockets, and the team spirit follows.
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Source: BBC Sport — read the full story there.