Sandro Tonali spent Saturday afternoon in a shirt that wasn’t black and white, and by the time Roberto De Zerbi withdrew him on 75 minutes, his old club had already put the game beyond Tottenham’s reach. There was something almost cruel about how it played out — the player Newcastle sold for up to £100 million this summer, watching from the touchline as two of the young unknowns his old club bought to replace him finished off a performance built on exactly the qualities his sale was meant to fund: patience, discipline, control of the moments that actually matter. Final score: Tottenham 0, Newcastle 2. But the story of this afternoon had been written months earlier, in a transfer window that pulled these two clubs in opposite directions.

Tottenham arrived at this fixture as a club trying to buy its way back to relevance. A year ago they were fighting relegation, sacking Thomas Frank in February and watching interim Igor Tudor lose all seven games of a doomed 44-day spell before Roberto De Zerbi walked into a dressing room sitting one point above the bottom three. He kept them up. This summer, handed total control over football operations and a five-year contract, he spent — heavily, and headline-grabbingly, none more so than the fee that brought Tonali south from Tyneside. It was meant to announce Tottenham’s return to the conversation about the top of the table.

Newcastle’s summer told the opposite story, and a stranger one. Eddie Howe, the manager who’d taken the club from Saudi-backed ambition to genuine Champions League contention across four seasons, walked away partly in protest at the decision to cash in on the spine of his side — Anthony Gordon to Barcelona, Bruno Guimarães eventually to Arsenal, and Tonali, the one Howe fought hardest to keep, sold to the very club Newcastle were about to play. Something in the region of £236 million came in. Curiously, most of it had already gone back out before Howe left the building — a goalkeeper from Sporting Braga, a winger from Hoffenheim, midfielders from Ajax and Monaco, none of them arriving with any reputation to speak of, and none of them, by most accounts, resembling the kind of player Howe had built a career recruiting. Matthias Jaissle only arrived afterwards, to manage a squad that had largely already been assembled without him.

There’s a theory doing the rounds at St James’ Park — unconfirmed, but persistent — that the recruitment had Jaissle’s profile in mind well before his appointment was ever made official, and that the identity of those signings said more about where the club was heading than anything said publicly at the time.

Which is what made Saturday feel like more than three points.

Tottenham had the players anyone would recognise, and for long stretches, the better of the football — more of the ball, more shots, more of the pressure that comes naturally to a side built around a £100 million midfielder rather than a teenager still finding his feet. What they didn’t have was control of the moments that decided the match. Newcastle gave up little clean space in front of their own goal, and on the couple of occasions Tottenham did carve out a real opening, Lukáš Horníček — another of those unheralded summer arrivals — was equal to it. When Newcastle’s own chances finally came, they were taken with a composure that made the scoreline look inevitable rather than fortunate.

Anthony Elanga gave them the lead just after the hour, teed up by Amar Dedić’s overlapping run down the right — the kind of combination Jaissle’s side had been quietly building all afternoon while Tottenham huffed and puffed in front of them. Spurs searched for a way back in, making three substitutions in one go to change the picture. Newcastle responded by bringing on reinforcements as well: Nick Woltemade had barely found his bearings on the pitch before heading down a ball from a corner that Yoane Wissa met with an overhead kick, the finish of a team playing with more conviction than its transfer-market value suggested it had any right to.

Man of the Match: Lewis Hall

There was a personal story running through the game too. Lewis Hall had conceded two penalties in his previous two outings, the sort of run that follows a young full-back around and invites doubt about his temperament in the biggest moments. Against a Tottenham side that looked intent on targeting him early, he produced the best performance on the pitch — winning more duels, making more defensive contributions than anyone else out there, and doing it while still finding the energy to get forward and create.

A debut to remember

And a few yards inside from him, in the same central-midfield zone Tonali and Guimarães used to patrol, Nico González made his full debut. It wasn’t chance-free — the physical battles mostly went against him, and Jaissle withdrew him after 71 minutes to preserve his fitness. But he barely misplaced a pass all afternoon (the long diagonal to Dedić to setup the assist for the goal a particular highlight) , the kind of technical composure that may well make him the central piece in the summer rebuild of Newcastle 2.0.

Both clubs go again on 5 September — Tottenham away at Nottingham Forest, still searching for a first point and already facing questions about whether spending can substitute for cohesion; Newcastle at home to Bournemouth, with the growing belief of a squad discovering itself in real time. It’s one result, early in a long season, and nobody at St James’ Park will mistake it for anything more than that. But for a club that spent the summer being told what it had lost, beating the team that bought its best player, at his own stadium, with the players bought to replace him — that’s a start worth having.

Will Spurs struggle again this season despite the massive summer spending? Has Newcastle found a formula under Jaissle that works? Join the conversation on X @mytoonarmy #NUFC