Chelsea's Xabi Alonso as well as Roberto de Zerbi of Tottenham are in an "impossible position" this season, believes The Observer's Rory Smith.

The managers took charge of their clubs in the spring and oversaw a lot of activity in the transfer window, with Chelsea and Spurs ending the summer as the second and third-highest spenders respectively .

Smith says the changes to their squads is why Alonso and De Zerbi need time to build coherence in their sides.

"We're kind of asking them to do something impossible," Smith told BBC Radio 5 Live's Monday Night Club.

"The Premier League spends July and August pumping three-and-a-half billion pounds around Europe to buy all of these players and then on 1 September it's like 'right, we want to see coherent football teams immediately'. It doesn't work like that.

"Football's about connections and relationships and understanding and the reason none of those teams have any is because they're constantly full of new players. It seems really obvious.

"It strikes me the managers are in an impossible position because as soon as the results don't come, the easy thing to do is sack them, but the real problem is we're asking them to build coherent sides instantly out of all of these random resources."

Listen to the full episode on BBC Sounds here