In the last fortnight, two happenings have coincided at Tottenham Hotspur: they have been confirmed as the ninth richest club in the world and simultaneously been dragged towards the relegation zone by a sixth defeat from their last seven Premier League games.
Spurs have been ravaged by an injury crisis that currently leaves them without 12 first-team players, including both first-choice centre-backs, two strikers, a left-back, three wingers, two other midfielders and the goalkeeper.
Despite that, since deputy stopper Antonin Kinsky arrived on 5 January, they have not signed a single player – leaving them with no outfield additions at all, even as they sit 15th in the table and with Ange Postecoglou unable to name a full bench for the 2-1 home loss to Leicester City.
Postecoglou recently warned the club they would be “playing with fire” without reinforcements. He had insisted Dominic Solanke needed “help” before the £60m summer signing was ruled out for up to six weeks with a knee injury.
January is a notoriously quiet window but across the top flight, outgoings are up from £90m last year to around £250m in 2025 – though approximately half of that is down to Manchester City alone.
So why aren’t Spurs spending?
European revenue
Postecoglou’s side are currently 16 points off the European places, though they can still qualify for the Champions Leage by winning the Europa League, or the Conference League via the Carabao Cup. Spurs have played in one continental competition or another in 17 of the last 19 seasons – but they are at serious risk of missing out in 2025-26.
“Being in Europe you’ve got five matches bringing in at Champions League level £4-5m a match,” football finance expert Kieran Maguire tells The i Paper.
“You’re losing £20m there, you’re losing £30m from non-participation, another £10m from sponsors where you’ve not got bonuses, you’re already £60-70m down.”
If Spurs qualify for the second or third-tier European competitions, they are at risk of fewer Category A matches and are therefore limited in what they can charge for tickets.
The wage bill
However, Spurs are in an exceptionally comfortable position otherwise. They have dropped a place to the ninth wealthiest club in the world – per Deloitte’s 2025 Football Money League – but remain in the top 10 due to a lasting “brand” helping to increase “incremental commercial revenue”.
In 2024, their overall revenue was approximately £516m (allowing for conversion rates).
The key figure, though, regards the wage bill – specifically, the amount of their turnover they are spending on salaries. It has gone down from 45 per cent to 42 this year – the lowest of any of the 20 clubs in the world with the highest revenues.
That means there is a huge amount of leeway they could be using but aren’t. “Uefa say 70 per cent is squeaky bum time,” Maguire adds. If they are not willing to change that wage structure – they’re still averaging around £110,000 a week – they are at an immediate disadvantage when it comes to attracting players.
One peculiar factor that affects Spurs rather than other clubs is that their revenue has rocketed thanks to the new stadium – wages have not necessarily increased at the same rate. The percentage of wages to turnover ratio is thus slightly out of kilter.
In 2017, the last year at the old White Hart Lane, the wage bill was £127m. In 2023, it was £251m – by comparison City spent £423m, Liverpool £373m, Chelsea £404m, Manchester United £331m. Spurs did, however, spend more on wages than Arsenal that year.
“They’ve tended to be sixth in the wage budget for many, many years,” Maguire says. “And that’s why players go elsewhere or they don’t come to Spurs in the first place.
“On the basis of the sixth-highest wage bill, you expect them to finish round about that position. Now they’re having a particularly bad season this season, but in other seasons they’ve been knocking around that position, so the correlation in player investment and final league position is evident very much at Spurs.”
An injury crisis
Nevertheless there is a hesitancy within the club to potentially create a longer-term problem if too many players are bought simply to replace those who are injured currently – the majority of those on the sidelines are expected to be back by the end of February at the latest and several of them earlier than that.
Radu Dragusin is a perfect example, one source pointed out. The defender is playing regularly during Micky van de Ven and Cristian Romero’s absences but when he was initially brought in as cover, his agent was vocal about his desire to move on if he wasn’t given more game time.
Other than loanees, most players would be signed on a three-year deal, minimum.
Players unavailable
Before personal terms are even discussed, players need to be up for sale. Fewer are available this January because of the new Champions League and Europa League formats – due to the rejigged play-off system, more teams are still in with a chance of qualifying for the knockouts and are even more reluctant than usual to weaken their squads.
Spurs have also made a habit of targeting youngsters from bottom-half Premier League clubs or promotion-chasing Championship sides – last summer that meant Wilson Odobert from relegated Burnley and Archie Gray from Leeds United. That is precisely the category of clubs who cannot afford to let their most desirable assets go mid-season.
‘To dare is too dear’?
It has become a popular myth that Tottenham don’t spend any money but that partly dates back several seasons to the 18-month period between 2017-18 when they did not make a single first-team signing. Since the Champions League final in 2019, the have forked out over £800m on new additions, recruitment which has not always paid off.
What is the PSR situation?
There are clubs of a similar size – Newcastle a case in point – who cannot bring in signings until they sell due to the Premier League’s Profitability and Sustainability Rules (PSR).
So do Spurs have those concerns?
“No, they don’t,” insists Magiure. “Whilst they’ve made losses of £239m in the last three years, you exclude your infrastructure spend and that was £216m, so that means they got a loss of £20m. You add what it’s cost for the academy, arguably another 15m, so from a PSR point of view they’ve actually made a profit. They’ve got no PSR concerns whatsoever.”
What about Levy?
Against Leicester, chairman Daniel Levy bore the brunt of fans’ anger. One protest banner read “Our game is about glory, Levy’s game is about greed”, and another, “24 years, 16 managers, 1 trophy – time for change”. Throughout a turbulent second half fans told him to “get out of our club”, interspersed with chants of “we want Levy out”.
The Tottenham Hotspur Stadium and the state-of-the-art training ground at Hotspur Way are Levy’s great legacy but he is ultimately judged by supporters on results on the pitch. They failed to build on title challenges in 2016 and 2017 and have not won the FA Cup – a trophy lifted eight times by previous Spurs teams – since 1991. The Carling Cup of 2008 remains the only silverware of Enic’s tenure.
The quality of the signings is not entirely down to Levy – sporting director Johan Lange has also attracted scrutiny during a quiet month – but he has been in control of the key appointments to Spurs’ board.
In fact several technical directors have come and gone but none have stuck – Damien Comolli, Franco Baldini and Fabio Paratici, the latter departing after Fifa banned him from football for his alleged links to Juventus’ false accounting.
It’s well-documented that Levy is the Premier League’s highest-paid chairman but it is also worth noting he does not take dividends from the club, unlike many shareholders elsewhere.
The crux of the ire towards him, Maguire notes, is that Spurs “have always had the capacity to spend more but they’ve chosen not to. They wanted to set aside money for the development of the stadium but the new stadium’s there now, so that excuse doesn’t exist”.
“If you’re a club like Brighton [& Hove Albion] or Brentford,” says Maguire, “you just spend smart and you know the fans will buy into it because the owner has got so much good will in the bank. The fans inherently trust them – the Spurs fanbase don’t trust Daniel.”
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