TOTTENHAM HOTSPUR STADIUM — So little of Tottenham Hotspur’s season has been pleasant that it caught you completely off guard when something went their way. Joao Palhinha’s header hit a post, came back to his feet, hit Jordan Pickford’s stud and then just rolled over the line. Roberto De Zerbi sprinted down the line like one of the former managers who failed here.
Spurs have at least escaped the worst news. For those who pay exorbitant prices to watch football here, that is reason for enormous cheer because what’s the point if you can’t take joy in the momentary exceptions to a nine-month drudgery?
And for one afternoon at least, Spurs looked like a Premier League team with conviction. They hassled a half-paced Everton without the ball and hurt them with it. Mathys Tel made Jake O’Brien look clumsy and unresponsive. Micky van de Ven swept up behind and Pedro Porro and Djed Spence took turns to flee down the right wing.
There were lots of performative screams after tackles by players who have spent far too much of the season not making enough of them. There were some nerves when news filtered through that West Ham had scored. But mainly it was… competent? Lo and behold, it worked. Note to self: try this again.
Tottenham fans have done all they can this season to try and force change, on and off the pitch: bus welcomes, pre-match and post-match protests, begging underperforming football misanthropes to be better and angrily telling them that they are letting everybody else down. Maybe it worked, maybe it didn’t – but they earned the right to cheer in exultant relief.
Those who pay to wear this shirt, rather than get paid or charge others, are the only ones who get that pass. Those trusted as guardians of the club have not earned that privilege. This is a construct entirely of their own making, a self-implosion that took Spurs from the Champions League to the edge of the Championship in months.
You might consider “Big Six” to be an outdated moniker in the age of Aston Villa overachievement and Newcastle United owned by the Saudi state; it isn’t. The latest revenue figures cover 2024-25, a season when Spurs weren’t even in the Champions League. Their revenue was £581m, a full £190m above any club outside of that VIP club. “Big” refers to income generation and thus advantage, not performance.
Which is just as well, really, for that hints at the great scandal of this Tottenham Hotspur failure. The clubs within the established financial elite don’t just have the greatest spending power as a one-off. But when they get things wrong repeatedly, they remain insured against the worst calamities because of that spending power.
Despite all of those advantages being carved into stone, Spurs have finished in the bottom four of the Premier League in consecutive seasons. This is not a club in financial disarray and so forced into austerity and slumping as a result. Tottenham were given a golden ticket and they are left with only scraps of dog-eared paper.
To finish 17th once with this club and this team is careless – to do so twice is an act of gross negligence. And it can only be on the leaders: Enic, Vinai Venkatesham, Johan Lange. Different managers, different styles, different players, same grim mood. Those at the top of the food chain determine the survival of those below them.
Where is the realistic faith in this improving? If you can mess this up this badly twice, despite so many warnings and so many mileposts along the sorry journey, why would it suddenly click now? Relegation, although a sorry indictment of pathetic underperformance, would have forced the entire thing to be ripped up. The fear is that deeply unimpressive people will now try to tweak their way out of this.
If so, Tottenham will make little progress. They may get a few less injuries, win a few more games and have a manager who stays a few months longer than the others. It seems unlikely that they will find themselves in this position again, although we said roughly the same a year ago and it got worse.
But until the leadership changes, either through being forced from their positions of power or by being forced to confront their own failures head on with systemic change that begins immediately, this is deckchair rearrangement on an industrial scale.
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