Marcos Senesi collected Bournemouth’s Players’ Player of the Year award on his way out of the club and has chosen to spend the next four years at a side that finished 17th with no European football to offer him. Tottenham have signed him on a free. The LaLiga and Serie A clubs who wanted him will be asking how they lost a player who cost nothing to a team that finished below half the division.
What Tottenham are getting in Marcos Senesi
Senesi is 29 and left-footed, a defender who would rather pass his way out of trouble than launch it clear. He made 128 appearances in four years at Bournemouth and started 37 league games last season, providing five assists from the back. Centre-backs do not usually turn up on the assist chart that often. He had offers from Spain and Italy this summer and turned them down because he wanted the Premier League and wanted to stay in London.
Set that beside the rest of the window and it reads differently. Jan Paul van Hecke arrived from Brighton for £52m, Andy Robertson came in on a free, Martin Dubravka joined in goal, and Spurs have been open about wanting up to three more with the £65m Solanke record now under threat. That record looks likely to fall before the window shuts, and you can follow every deal as it lands in our latest Premier League transfer news. Senesi is the low-risk part of it. He cost nothing and walks into pre-season with four Premier League seasons behind him.
How Senesi fits alongside Van de Ven
Micky van de Ven defends with his pace. Senesi steps out with the ball and breaks lines with his passing, which gives De Zerbi a way of building from the back that this side has not really had. Van de Ven has played left-back for the Netherlands, so one option is to push him wider and pair the two. The other is rotation across a long season. A defence that leaked as often as Tottenham’s did last year can use either.
There is a reason a player this good was available for nothing. Andoni Iraola, the manager who built that Bournemouth side, is leaving for Bayer Leverkusen, and a project looks different once the person driving it walks out. Argentina left Senesi out of their final World Cup squad too. A fresh start under a coach who values exactly what he does was not a hard choice to read. Whether that steadies a back line that shipped too many goals, or whether Senesi is the floor of this rebuild rather than the ceiling, rests on the signings Spurs have not made yet.
