Eric Dier has questioned the summer spending of Tottenham’s Premier League rivals and says the squad are relishing the challenge of "shutting up" their own transfer critics.

Spurs made history by becoming the first Premier League club not to make a summer signing since the introduction of the transfer window in 2003 — a decision manager Mauricio Pochettino admitted was "difficult for people to understand" ahead of their opening 2-1 win at Newcastle.

Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool and the Manchester clubs all added to their squads but Dier said Spurs’s players are looking forward to proving spending is not essential, adding that none of their top-six rivals had made signings that would improve them.

"It’s a great challenge for us to shut everyone up," said Dier. "We’re going to enjoy that challenge. We’ve got a fantastic squad here, with fantastic players in every position.

"To strengthen it is not easy. All the other teams around us might have signed players but not many of those are better than the players they’ve already got. If you’re trying to create a better atmosphere or give the team a boost, then that’s cool but we’ll find the same boost in a different way.

"So we’re really happy, we’ve got a fantastic group. We really enjoy training together, playing together and being with each other. We’ll just continue to build on that.

"For the past three years we’ve been challenging the best teams in the country and last year we were challenging the best in the Champions League with the squad that we have here today.

"As the manager has said, we’re in a fight but we’re having to use different tools. We’ve known that for the past three years and we have to try and compensate for what other clubs can do in different ways with our attitude, work ethic, desire and we have to try and compensate in those ways. It’ll make us better."

Despite no new signings, Pochettino has promised Spurs will improve this season, partly thanks to the experience gained by their eight losing World Cup semi-finalists and France’s winning captain Hugo Lloris in Russia.

​Dier — who started at Newcastle along with Lloris, Harry Kane and goalscorers Jan Vertonghen and Dele Alli — praised the “silent but deadly” Spurs captain but said he felt largely unchanged after England’s run to the last four, stressing that only winning matters.

"He’s one of the best goalkeepers in the world," Dier said of Lloris. "Everyone in the squad looks up to him. His style is a quiet style but silence is sometimes deadly. Hugo can be a changed man because Hugo won it. Everyone else, we’re in the same boat. Only Hugo knows what it feels like because he won it and only winning it matters.

"We had a fantastic World Cup, we broke down many barriers. We managed to get to the semi-finals which was incredible but winning is the most important thing.

"Everyone else, back here at Tottenham, [we reached] the FA Cup semi-final last year but we need to go one step further and win."