Tottenham Hotspur attacking midfielder and winger Wilson Odobert is one of the more underrated players in the squad, but most Spurs fans have not forgotten how well he played during the 2025/26 Premier League season just before his ACL tear. It has been a long road to recovery, but the young Frenchman appears to be ahead of schedule in his return, already coming back to practice with his teammates this week when he was expected to make his return in January.
Spurs will not rush back their gem too quickly, and Roberto De Zerbi must be eager to work with a player the club paid a fair bit of money to Burnley for a couple of years ago in the hopes that he could become the next big thing.
Odobert has some extra motivation, as if he needed any more of it, when he returns, because he just watched his teammate Mathys Tel, for both the French youth national team and at Tottenham, get a call up as a pre selection to the French senior side for the upcoming November international break.
Sure, it is only the Nations League, but a call up to France is the most difficult to obtain out of any national system right now, given how much talent, especially attacking talent, Les Bleus have. Better yet, when it comes to Tel, the additional motivation now for any French player is that when they get called up like this out of the blue, they are being hand chosen by Zinedine Zidane himself - the greatest French player of all time and one of the greatest players to ever grace the pitch.
Wilson Odobert was playing even better than Mathys Tel before his ACL tear last season, and both players fought through immense criticism to become rare bright spots in Thomas Frank's dreary Tottenham Hotspur side. Tel had some issues this season with consistency and sloppiness, but since returning to the starting lineup for Roberto De Zerbi, he has been the team's best attacking player again with a brilliant goal against Chelsea and great all around play as a dribbler and creator.
So if Zinedine Zidane took notice of young Tel after just two weeks of bouncing back for Spurs, then Odobert has to be even more excited, because if he hits the ground running quickly upon acclimating from his injury return, then there's a potential spot for him on Zizou's list, too.
This article was originally published on www.hotspurhq.com as Wilson Odobert just got a major sign for extra motivation when he comes back, too .
