Dinamo Zagreb analysis with European football expert Andy Brassell

We take on Croatian champions Dinamo Zagreb in the first leg of our UEFA Europa League, Round of 16 tie at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium on Thursday night (8pm).

Ahead of the first leg, we’ve again tapped into the knowledge of European football expert Andy Brassell (@andybrassell), a regular on BT Sport and the pages and podcasts of the likes of The Guardian, Football Ramble and talkSPORT.

Andy on Dinamo Zagreb

"I guess people have watched Dinamo Zagreb more closely since Luka Modric’s arrival at Spurs in 2008, and they are doing really well. Go to last season in the Champions League, and first game up, they beat Atalanta, a team people really fancied and almost reached the semi-finals - they beat them 4-0 in Zagreb, an amazing result. Not only were they in a group with Atalanta, they were in with Shakhtar Donetsk and Manchester City, yet went into the last game of that group still capable of qualifying. They didn’t really get turned over by anyone. They lost 2-0 at City and they were 1-0 up against them in the final game before losing 4-1 in the end when they had to go for it. If they hadn’t conceded a 98th minute equaliser to Shakhtar (in Matchday Four), then they could have possibly progressed with City.

"Last season, they had Dani Olmo in midfield, and he made a difference. He’s since moved to RB Leipzig and become one of their best players. You look at Mislav Orsic, who scored the winner against Krasnodar in the second leg of their Round of 32 tie last month, and he’s a terrific player. He scored a hat-trick in that win against Atalanta last season and he’s interesting, much like Olmo, he can play further forward but he tends to play in midfield and sneak into the box, so he’s quite difficult to pick up. He’s definitely one Spurs will have to watch for. There is also experience in there as well. They have Kevin Theophile-Catherine at centre-back, he played for Cardiff for a bit. They have Stefan Ristovski at right-back, good experience there. Orsic is 28 as well, he’s been around the block, including a tour of clubs in Japan and Korea before he came back to Croatia. That balance is quite important.

"Dinamo Zagreb have a really nice balance of producing players, as we know from the likes of Modric, that’s a huge part of their economic model, to be able to sell players. They are still producing players. If you look at Josko Gvardiol, the left-back, he’s signed for RB Leipzig next season. They signed him before the start of the season and loaned him back to Dinamo. So, we can talk about them producing young players at a very high level indeed.

"They have a bit of a battle for the title at home with Osijek, and I wonder if that has kept them sharp as well. Considering they started this season by not getting into the Champions League - they lost against Ferencvaros of Hungary in the third qualifying round - they’ve recovered really well. We touched on it before this season because they were in the same group as Wolfsberg, but to win that group and win it comfortably with CSKA Moscow and Feyenoord as well is super-impressive, especially considering they lost a player like Olmo.

"Dinamo Zagreb are a team who you expect to see as a perennials in Europe, but you don’t expect them to be this competitive. As Jose Mourinho alluded to when the draw was made, to beat Krasnodar home and away, considering they are a team that came out of the Champions League, considering they are a very well-funded team, is really impressive. They’ve done it all under a new coach, Zoran Mamic, this season and it all suggests a really good continuity there. They performed consistently against more storied teams in Europe last season and they are doing it again this season."