The Now Apparently Weekly Spurs Rant
Out of two cups in less than a week, Tottenham's season is starting to unravel.
It’s coming to something, really, when the advice being given to Tottenham Hotspur is that the best thing for them is a week off from playing football altogether. But so wrote Jack Pitt-Brooke in The Athletic this morning and the somewhat galling thing to say is that yes, in a highly pragmatic sense, he is right.
At this point, at the end of a period during which what nobody whatsoever was calling a ‘treble’ was cut down to what is probably its most difficult constituent part only, it’s difficult not to laugh. They’re a danger to themselves, this lot. But it should be added that, as a slow, steady slide down the Premier League table has been undertaken, the cups were a consolation. They’d done alright in those. Right up until they weren’t doing alright any more.
And let’s be absolutely clear here; it’s pretty unlikely that they’ll get relegated this season. The gap is just too big already. But it is still possible, and for a club with a 62,000-capacity megadrome-entertain-o-complex that you’ve just paid a billion quid for, avoiding relegation isn’t something that anybody at the club should be giving themselves a pat on the back over. They all gone done fucked up.
It almost feels unnecessary to repeat the script again. Yes, the injuries have been savage. Yes, a schedule with more matches sandwiched into it, barely a couple of weeks after a major tournament, has taken a toll, and yes, it’s a work in progress. And when it does work, on the increasingly rare occasions when it does work, it can be some of the most beautiful football to watch in the Premier League.
But the problem is that the squad was thin to start with and the high tempo game can‘t not be held responsible as well, while the schedule has been the same for everybody, and it being a work in progress doesn’t butter any parsnips when that progress looks like a Jackson Pollock; beautiful in its own abstract way, but don’t try telling me there’s much of an actual pattern going on there. Aesthetic beauty doesn’t land either, when you’re in 14th place in the table and heading for your worst season in literally decades.
Because this is bad. On the verge of being historically bad. If they finish below 14th, it’s their worst season since 1994. If they finish below 15th, it’s their worst since they were relegated in 1977. And football in 1977 was a very different beast to today. Relegation was not the crisis then that it would be today. It was just a thing that sporadically happened at some point to almost everybody.
In 1977, Manchester United, Chelsea, Leeds, Liverpool, Aston Villa, Newcastle and Manchester City had all been Second Division clubs within the previous two decades. Three years earlier, Spurs had lost a UEFA Cup final. Two years prior to that, they’d won one. They’d also won the League Cup twice in the previous six years. A more egalitarian game and no huge drop in broadcasting revenue—which at the time would have been very little; what clubs fretted about over relegation at the time was a further fall in attendances—made it manageable.
But times have changed. Soap operas have to be more sensationalist, these days. And at a time when Spurs are, relatively speaking, on the right side of the top table when it comes to income and money-making, being this far away from where they feel that they should be could be a bigger problem for the club than actual relegation was in 1977.
Times have changed. Missing out on European football will cost tens of millions of pounds. More will be lost in terms of Premier League prize and TV money. It’s difficult to imagine any commercial or sponsorship deals being worth more as a result of their recent performances. And the Spurs fans of 2025 don't even have the gossamer thin comfort blanket of recent silverware. There are no upsides to having this sort of season. Not now.
And the knock-on effects will be felt on the pitch, with potentially less money available for new players that were needed at the end of the transfer window that ended a week and half ago anyway, and a lack of European football meaning that the sort of solid, proper, get-this-goddam-job-done pro that they need far more of will be less likely to sign, while other individual talents could be more easily tempted elsewhere.
This is how these things become structural. If Spurs think they’re too big to fail, they’re only fooling themselves. There would have been a time when the supporters of Nottingham Forest may have thought it could never happen to them but while they’re flying at the moment, they were below the Premier League for more than two decades. Sheffield Wednesday fell in 2000, and have never fully resurfaced. Both of these clubs, by the way, also spent time in the third tier.
And the frustration is that there does remain time to more than fix this season for Spurs; at least a bit. Nobody from third down has been particularly consistent, and an actual run of wins to counterbalance, well, almost everything that’s happened in the League since the end of December could potentially lift them back towards the top half of the table. There are apparently a clutch of players due to come back from injury right now. It could be that this piece looks extremely dated by 7 on Sunday evening, although lads, it’s Man United.
But this runs deeper than recent form, and most seem agreed on that. We’ve all seen this sort of thing so many times before that no-one is really that prepared to pin this on the manager. Spurs have broken so many in the past that they should probably come with some sort of health warning. This football club could seriously damage your career.
It’s also true to say that, for a proportion of us, we want it to work. It’s a romantic idea. But for how long should supporters be expected to just put up with this? It’s worth remembering at this juncture that they’ve paid upwards of a grand for a season ticket. No-one would suggest that they’re entitled to anything for that money, by the way, but the club certainly can’t afford to alienate them, either.
As ever, the question of what happens over Ange Postecoglou is a thorny one. Short of winning the Europa League and/or what would need to be an increasingly remarkable-looking turnaround over the final third of the season, he’ll surely be going in the summer. It’s most likely that the biggest reason why he’s still there now is that no-one readily springs to mind as a replacement who’d take the job, and that it kinda doesn’t really make much of a difference before the end of this season anyway.
Of course, regular readers will be aware of my occasional irritation over bigger clubs poaching liberally from smaller clubs, but times like this we all effectively become the goddam Child Catcher, laying out a trail of win bonuses in the direction of our gingerbread manager’s office. Who would I like to manage them and whether I think it would be a good idea for them to manage Spurs are two very different questions. I’m not sure I could imagine being able to answer the latter affirmatively in good conscience.
Realistically, I’d like Andoni Iraola (or at least his style of football), but his touchline demeanour does suggest that Spurs could really break him. And there comes a point at which it just feels cruel for my wishes, regarding a football club at which I do not even hold a season ticket, to run roughshod over the mental health of another. Run for your life, Andoni, you’re too pure a soul for this.
The Brentford win was, well, a win. Brentford, like so many others in that mid-table cluster, are capable of blowing hot or blowing cold at the moment. And next up are Manchester United, the sort of match at which it really does feel as though a sinkhole could open up, swallowing both teams and claiming victory for itself. Choosing a winner between those two is clearly a fool’s game.
Maybe the Brentford match was the story for the rest of the season. Maybe a corner has been turned. But then you watch back the supine nature of their performance against Liverpool, and you see them getting beaten quite comfortably by an Aston Villa team that is clearly and unequivocably better than them in just about every department, and you start to wonder. Buckle up, lads. Just a third of the season left to play.