TOP, MIDDLE OR BOTTOM?

Let’s face it, most of us weren’t alive when Tottenham last won the league title. The question is, will this club ever have the courage to take back something that we’ve never known as being ours in the first place? With Liverpool and Manchester United up for sale, following the recent changeovers at both Chelsea and more significantly Newcastle, we will have four teams enjoying increased investment and the kind of refresh that can push them up the table. They add to the flourishing projects at Manchester City and a worryingly resurgent Arsenal. That’s six teams at the top table, chasing just four Champions League places. Spurs make it seven into four. Except we all know that seven doesn’t go into four. Inevitably three teams will miss out on the high roller’s table each season, so are Spurs about to stare down at their own chair legs and find they’ve also just gotten that little bit shorter? Indeed, will Spurs EVER win the league again?

For a team considered among the top clubs of England, we unfortunately have to look all the way back to 1961 to locate Spurs’ last league title victory. It’s utterly criminal that a club of our size has had to watch every other top club pass the trophy around, regularly lifting it multiple times over the last 61 years. The last time we won the league we absolutely stormed it, playing stylish football, dominating everyone, and eventually winning the title 12 points clear. We were the equivalent of being the Manchester City of that particular era. So imagine If City won this current 2022 championship, then didn’t win another until 2084? That’s how long we’ve suffered. The league title isn’t so much as overdue, more like they should have long called in the bailiffs.   

In recent years, Spurs seemed to step up and put everything in place to finally pay back what it owed to its patient fanbase, with its exceptional new stadium, world class training facility, top-level management and a series of expensive transfers. For a team that had found themselves perennially languishing somewhere in between the grimy floor and the banquet laid upon the table top, having hovered in a kind of football purgatory for decades – best of the rest, but always cropped from the top – we were finally finding ourselves set up to compete with the big boys. Six top four finishes in the last eleven years shows just how much we’ve been knocking on the door, so with the improved infrastructure we had hoped to establish ourselves further and take that difficult step back up to the pinnacle.

But as we strode forward, our competitors hopped, skipped and jumped. As we found a way up, those around us hurdled their way to another level. As Liverpool and United decide to go up for sale in the same month, the carrot we were chasing is no longer being waved in our face, more like it’s been rammed up our ass in a cruel turn of fortunes. However, Liverpool and United were always bigger clubs than us. They rarely fell far from the top table in-between titles. The investments at City and before them Chelsea were the real killer blows to our aspirations. These were the clubs that stuffed us. 17 of the last 21 titles were won by these four clubs, but we would surely have been closer challengers had the odious investments, sourced from the global sales of unfashionable oil no less, not been pumped into Chelsea and City. Just as we clawed ourselves back into contention, the last thing we wanted to see was Newcastle getting pumped up on the black stuff too. United and Liverpool’s fresh investments will only make the carrot feel uncomfortably larger.

So will their new flush of cash now cancel us out of the running entirely? Well, that of course depends on where they place their bets. Every new player signed to a team is a gamble of sorts. Even though the old adage that ‘the more you spend, the more likely a player is to do well’ is broadly used to judge a club’s new signing, there are absolutely no guarantees. Spending more money won’t always equate to improvements; it’s actually something of a fallacy. However, some teams can afford to gamble more than we can. Newcastle and City can repeatedly spunk it all on red if they fancy it, so if our competitors spend big money on a flop they’ll simply drop the player, sell or loan them out and buy a replacement, with little negative effect on their starting 11. If Spurs buy a flop, they can’t move on so fast. They suffer more, for longer, as they first persevere with the purchase, before ultimately struggling to fund a better replacement. 

So maybe this is it. Maybe this is where we’ve always been. Maybe this was and is our destiny. To compete, to flirt near the top, but never finish at the pinnacle. That elusive Premier League trophy has thrown us a flirtatious glance over the shoulders of the big boys that surround her, but we’ve never had the confidence to barge in and make that move. We haven’t won a league title in decades, and although we came close in the peak of the Pochettino era, (2015-2018), we’ve never really been favourites either. There’s always been a ceiling we can’t break, our noses forever pressed upon the glass as we look in from the cold outside. And even though we’ve built a considerable hammer in order to break that glass, our competitors have seemingly replaced it with something entirely bullet proof. The barrier’s been strengthened just as we looked like breaching it.

Of course the anti-ENIC mob have turned out in their droves on social media the moment Liverpool and United put up their ‘for sale’ signs. They harbour an unhealthy negativity that desperately looks for a moment to spring out and complain. They’ve somewhat understandably run out of patience with our owners, (two decades with one trophy has tested us all), so when it looks like a team that we are competing with is about to get intoxicated with new investment from new owners, then the Sauron-like eyes return upon Daniel Levy. The same old tropes about a lack of investment arrive, stirring up division as they turn on any fans that maintain more faith. According to their diatribe, the grass is forever greener. That any change of owner is surely better than what we’ve currently got in charge. They presume all new owners are better, which isn’t actually the case. They presume all owners will spend more money, which isn’t actually the case either. For every billionaire investment fund from Saudi Arabia there’s also a Mel Morris or a Mike Ashley.

There’s a lot of nuance to consider in the complex business world that is modern football ownership. These big seven teams will all run in various phases. Three of these seven teams will almost certainly be in transition each season, either between managers, at the start of a refresh, or at the end of a particular era, giving us a window of opportunity. These phases will be particularly slow if the likes of Liverpool and United have to also invest in new stadiums. Secondly, their new signings will sometimes flop and underperform and there are only two windows each season from which to correct things. Even if competing teams are stacked with world class talent, sides are usually only as good as their manager and there aren’t necessarily seven bosses of equal standards. Lastly, the league is concertinaing with investments continuing to grow at teams like West Ham, Brighton, Leicester and Crystal Palace, among others. These teams are even less likely to win the Premier League than Spurs are, but you can bet your bottom dollar that they’ll take points off the top sides more and more as things develop. It’s ultimately consistency that will now get you titles.

Spurs were once like an Everton or an Aston Villa, blowing hot and cold, occasionally threatening to sneak into the top four, but perfectly capable of sliding downwards into obscurity. Although a descent isn’t impossible, you cannot help but see just how strong Spurs’ foundations are. We are steadily improving on and off the pitch, no matter what the hot-take, knee-jerk, reactionary Twitter doom-scrollers declare after every setback. Without a carefree sugar-daddy billionaire, or an oil-doped bottomless fund, Spurs have to play the long game. We are a slow burn, a TL;DR version of a successful Premier League business.

It is perfectly possible that things could neatly fall into place, the stars could well align and we could sneak in. Gambles do sometimes pay off and managers are capable of pulling surprises. Nobody expected Pochettino to have us challenging for the title, nobody expected Leicester to win it. Has it gotten harder with so many teams winning the investment lottery? Yes, but the Premier League has many moving parts and nothing stays as it is forever. Guardiola and Klopp will move on eventually. Who will take on Newcastle and City once the middle east runs out of oil? Look what’s happened to Chelsea once their dubious owner departed. Liverpool and United may just get another version of the Glazer family. Imagine if Mike Ashley stepped in? OK, perhaps that’s a stretch, and although there’s talks of yet another huge Dubai-based investment fund floating around, it still remains unknown for now. 

We’ve been called a ‘swanky West Ham’ and a ‘Wayfair Chelsea’, stuck forever between the top middle and bottom without ever striking it lucky. We’ve forgotten what it’s like to pull the hot girl at the party, we’ve also forgotten what it’s like to be found face down in the swimming pool, but we know it’s still possible and whilst there is still a chance we will still accept the invite.  

With our competitors raising the bar, we can’t carry on doing what we’ve always done over the last few decades, so we need to step up with the tide and go again, but in reality we’ve already stepped up. Our new infrastructure and management has seen us spend more on better players, with our gambles in the transfer market paying off in recent months, (Kulusevski, Bentancur, Richarlison and Romero have all improved us). Pounds can convert to points when recruitment is solid and with Paratici taking over that key department from Levy we look like we’ve turned that important corner. We’re not that many fresh signings from breaking through. Add a Bastoni and/or a Gvardiol to our defence and just see how much better we do. Sprinkle a couple of quality wing backs into Conte’s options and we’ll soon be flying down our flanks. We remain up with the pack as things stand. It’ll take more than a slick of oil to see us slip back down.

It’s been a long wait, with many false dawns, but it’s fair to consider the next couple of transfer windows as crucial to our title chances, especially whilst United and Liverpool change over. Get that recruitment right in just the right areas and we could genuinely challenge once again. The big question is whether Levy will take this latest chance. Recent activity suggests he will. Having Conte in place will prove an additional pressure on our owners too. This could be our time, and as much as it hurts us to look at the fruition down the road at Arsenal, it has shown us that it’s clearly possible for a club of our size to step up.

It is also entirely understandable to let cynicism creep in too, for doubts to wreak havoc, after 61 years of bridesmaid-ing, but we need to trust that the measured development will continue, the evolution and progression has set us on a new path. Bridesmaids do sometimes eventually get married. So keep holding on, keep focussed on that pinnacle, keep your eyes on the prize and know this: if and when Spurs do win the Premier League title, it will be the best feeling you’ve ever felt as a fan of this great club. It will be a more pronounced victory, a more glorious turn, a better triumph, a mightier culmination, a finer fulfilment than every single one of those pretenders that have stolen it from us over those 61 long years. We will have done it the right way, it will mean more to us than anyone else; it will be true and it will be beautiful. We will be the shining example. We will be the underdogs with the knock out punch, crossing the line having run the farthest, with the greatest story to tell. Just hold on boys, we’re coming to take back what once was ours.