Why Mousa Dembele Was Tottenham’s Most Surprising Player in 2015/16

Despite a calamitous final-day defeat at the hands of Newcastle United, Tottenham Hotspur enjoyed a great season in 2015/16. 

Hugely exceeding pre-season expectations, Spurs had more or less secured a return to the UEFA Champions League by March. 

While Mauricio Pochettino deserves a significant share of the credit for their success, many of his players also played far beyond the level that might reasonably have been predicted. 

Toby Alderweireld, Danny Rose, Eric Dier and Dele Alli all somewhat surprisingly won places in the Professional Footballers’ Association Premier League Team of the Year, but none outperformed their predicted level like Mousa Dembele. 

By the end of last season, Dembele had largely been exiled from the first team and started just one game after February. 

Having shone in his debut Tottenham season in 2012-13, the Belgium international had suffered through debilitating injury and progressively performed worse until reaching his his nadir on December 11, 2014. On that day, Dembele gave an abysmal performance in a UEFA Europa League defeat at the hands of Besiktas.

Keen observers of Tottenham’s fortunes would have noted a correlation between his removal from the first team in the months after that defeat and a general uptick in the team’s form. 

In this latest season, that correlation was totally inverted. Tottenham didn’t lose a game in which the 28-year-old started in his preferred central-midfield role in 2015-16. 

In a season in which Harry Kane score 28 goals in …

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