One day, Spurs will make a January signing – but today is not that day. Instead, we have yet another piece of loan news. This one is with regards to young center back Alfie Dorrington, who has been recalled from Scottish club Aberdeen:
This one is a bit of a bizarre situation. Dorrington, who was one of Spurs’ brightest youth prospects at center back until a number of hamstring injuries
halted his development when on the fringes of the first team, was initially sent on loan to Aberdeen in the second half of the 2024/25 season following surgery. This loan spell was a successful one: with a regular starting berth, he put in a number of impressive performances and helped Aberdeen to the 2025 Scottish Cup (albeit in bizarre circumstances, where he scored an own-goal by deflecting ex-Spur Cameron Carter-Vickers’ header).
Heading back to Aberdeen for a full season therefore seemed like a rather logical move: regular senior minutes at a reasonably high level (with “reasonably” doing a bit of heavy lifting in that sentence), with European Football also on the cards after Aberdeen qualified for Europa League. Unfortunately, things didn’t quite end up going to plan on a couple of fronts. Firstly, the Dons switched from the back three structure they deployed in 2024/25 to a back four, leaving Dorrington as the odd man out; and then Aberdeen’s European campaign ended up as a bit of a disaster, as they crashed out of the Europa League playoffs and have now ended up mathematically unable to make the Conference League knockout rounds, reducing the number of fixtures (and therefore available minutes to go around) for the remainder of the season.
As a result, Alfie the Larger only made 9 starts in all competitions over the first half of 2025/26, and with minutes key at this stage of his development, a loan recall makes sense. There are apparently a few options in the English football pyramid as to where he heads next too, according to Alasdair Gold:
This will be one to monitor over the coming weeks; hopefully Spurs can line up a destination that makes sense both for the club and for Alfie’s development.
