Sport

Why Tonali Is More Gattuso Than Pirlo

Ever since he emerged at Brescia, Sandro Tonali has been compared to Andrea Pirlo and it has never felt accurate.

Pirlo’s career began at the same club, too, and there is a similarity to the way they look, while they are obviously both central midfielders. Perhaps it has been easy to tie them together; football is about narratives, and finding a new player to fill the boots of a legend has long been a favourite for many.

Similarities to Roma legend Daniele De Rossi have also been noted in the past.

Tonali, who grew up as a Milan fan, has long attempted to distance himself from the Pirlo comparisons, stating he sees himself more as an heir to his midfield partner at San Siro, Gennaro Gattuso.

“It’s difficult to answer this, on the pitch I’m a little more like Gattuso,” Tonali once explained in an interview.

“Ideally, I want to be a mixture of all three [De Rossi, Gattuso and Pirlo]. For the fight I put in on the pitch, that’s more like Gattuso.”

Yet, despite Tonali’s own assertions back in his Brescia days, many people still assume he is more like Pirlo, to the point that he has almost been wrongly profiled seemingly across the board. He moved to Tottenham from Newcastle this summer in a £100m deal because Roberto De Zerbi wants a player who can control games and take risks on the ball, but that has never been Tonali’s game and he is being judged by the wrong metrics.

At Newcastle, having missed the majority of his first season due to a gambling ban, he was seen as an all action midfielder, somebody who could get the ball back quickly and play it simple. In short, he was the perfect foil for Bruno Guimaraes, who joined Arsenal but is much closer to the ideal midfielder Spurs wanted.

Initially, before his ban, there were teething issues between Tonali and Guimaraes because they struggled to define each other’s role. But when the Italian returned to the fold regularly in December 2024, everything changed. Eddie Howe deployed him as a number six with freedom to track the ball higher up if required and he made all the difference.

When he first played in that position against Liverpool, Newcastle were floundering in midtable but he allowed them to go toe to toe with the champions elect in a 3-3 draw at St James’ Park.

Ten successive league wins followed, propelling the Magpies into the top four, before a victory over the Reds in the Carabao Cup final at Wembley in March.

Newcastle ended that season in the Champions League and it wouldn’t have been possible without Tonali. He played like a £100m midfielder that season, and it would be unfair to reduce his role to nothing more than a defensive midfielder.

He scored a few important goals and has a ferociously powerful shot on him, but that doesn’t make him the metronomic conductor Spurs insisted they were buying.

When Guimaraes was out with a hamstring problem last season, missing 10 weeks of action, Tonali was given the platform to become that needle-mover who could drive Newcastle forward and didn’t take it.

Four league games into the Premier League season, De Zerbi’s side are winless. Tonali is taking a lot of the criticism as the summer’s most expensive recruit in a £300m spree, but the questions he is being asked to answer are not centred around his strengths.

In fact, he has looked neat and tidy at times and positionally, he is growing in confidence, but he will never raise Spurs’ level by controlling games at the highest level and he told everybody why himself seven years ago. He is more Gattuso than Pirlo.