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Management Relegation
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Not really no. Win or lose it’s not over.
100%.
Every single Spurs fan should also be a Brentford fan tonight.
Leeds, if they lose are so vulnerable.
Additionally there will still be 7 games to play.
The onus is all on us however and it's vitally important that we don't self-implode.
We need to put Forest under so much pressure and force issues. We can do it.
Wonder who Archie Gray will be supporting??
Be quite something if he scores a goal that relegates them. He’d probably never be allowed back in Leeds!
There are always a few scenarios.
Farke will know the importance of today's game but I don't think they will find Brentford easy opponents. (famous last words)
I watched Bournemouth against United last night, and Bournemouth have nothing to play for but they never stopped and deserved their point.
Brentford relinquished 2 points on Monday but Andrews was quite calm. They will want to get even closer to the top 5. If they win it really helps all the other 3 teams in that relegation fight.
What Leeds do have, even better than our own is a very good goal difference. Might be crucial in any final analysis.
Tense.
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He could always pretend to be his brother..
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Agree - can see we are fitter and getting players forward in the last two. With a few more returning players we’ve got enough to win a few but could be close
Wanna see VDV LB and Richy and Solanke in a pair
What football thinks of Tottenham’s tailspin: ‘Incompetence of the highest order’
Why have Spurs slid into relegation danger? We asked a range of senior football figures for their theories - and who they hold responsible
www.nytimes.com
What football thinks of Tottenham’s tailspin: ‘Incompetence of the highest order’
Daniel Taylor, Oliver Kay, Gregg Evans, Steve MadeleyFor large parts of this season, it has felt like the whole of football has been rubbernecking in Tottenham Hotspur’s direction.
A point above the relegation places with eight games left and without a Premier League win since the turn of the year, Tottenham are in genuine danger of dropping out of England’s top division for the first time since 1977. Will they scramble to safety over the next two months? Or will they pay the ultimate price for what is, in the words of one senior executive from a fellow Champions League team, “incompetence of the highest order”?
The Athletic has been gathering the views of a variety of leading figures within the sport — club officials, boardroom decision-makers, analysts, agents and coaches — to establish what they think has brought Spurs to this position.
As well as approaching various people from around the Premier League, we have also widened the scope to other countries to see what they make of the Tottenham crisis. The Bundesliga, for example.
“We saw this here (in Germany), with a few big clubs getting relegated, and it was always a long time coming,” says a boardroom figure at one leading Bundesliga side. “Lots of decisions were wrong over many years, and it looks like the same situation (with Tottenham). I would worry (if I were working at Spurs). There are some very big German clubs that assumed (after relegation) that promotion would be natural, but it never is. Hamburg spent seven years in our second division.”
For context, everyone we have approached has been given the opportunity to remain anonymous so they can speak with freedom and not have to worry about damaging relationships with the Tottenham hierarchy. All of those quoted in this article are currently working in football.
It is also important to note that some of them talked to us before the 3-2 Champions League win against Atletico Madrid on Wednesday which suggested Spurs might have overcome their worst form. The 1-1 draw at Liverpool last weekend, featuring a 90th-minute equaliser from Richarlison, was another encouraging result.
On the flipside, the 5-2 first-leg defeat to Atletico last week was startling in all sorts of ways and led, ultimately, to Tottenham being eliminated from the Champions League, losing that round-of-16 tie 7-5 on aggregate. Igor Tudor’s position as head coach remains the subject of scrutiny and, among all the people we have spoken to, not one was willing to speak up for the Croatian, or support the reasons for hiring him just over a month ago after the sacking of summer appointment Thomas Frank.
Thomas Frank was sacked in February after eight months at SpursSteve Bardens/Getty Images
Others have questioned whether the players have taken enough responsibility. “There are so many who are in the business for themselves,” says one high-ranking executive. “It’s all that shrugging and pointing — ‘It’s not my fault!’ — like watching a kids’ team.”
One agent who spoke to The Athletic claimed it is openly known that some of Tottenham’s regular starters want to leave, and pointed to reports that England midfielder Conor Gallagher had become the club’s highest wage-earner after joining from Atletico in January as another potential problem.
“Daniel Levy (the long-time club chairman fired last September) would not have done that deal on those wages, but they panicked,” he said. “So if he (Gallagher) is the highest-earning player at the club, you’ve probably got (Micky) Van de Ven, (Cristian) Romero and others saying, ‘Hold on a f***ing second…’.”
Mostly, though, almost everyone has noted Spurs’ plight is not just about one decision but more a culmination of events at a time when the club have become a financial juggernaut.
They are widely regarded as having one of the best stadiums in Europe, one where non-football activities such as concerts, NFL games and boxing events helped the club post record revenues last year of £528.4million, up 152 per cent from 2016, the year before their old White Hart Lane home was demolished. Their training complex, opened in 2012, is also considered among the finest in the country.
“It starts with the expectations of the fans, which are much higher than they should be,” says one high-ranking Premier League executive. “That’s not because Tottenham aren’t a big club and don’t have the resources to compete, it’s simply because other clubs are further ahead in that journey of being elite.
“There has been a focus, rightly, on infrastructure: get the stadium built, drive up the revenues, give yourself the best chance of competing on the field through the financial power you have created, and then make sure you have the training facilities. The problem is, having generated those revenues, they haven’t invested in the right way, at the right time, with the right players, so they have ended up with a squad that looks unbalanced. As a consequence, successive managers have struggled to get performance levels to meet the fans’ expectations.
“Have they had the right management over the last decade? The answer is probably no, and when I say ‘management’, I mean sporting directors, chief executives and people around the club who really know and understand football.
“They have appointed a coach (Tudor) who has never played or coached in the Premier League, has only ever been at clubs for 12 months at a time, and immediately the fans have taken against him because they look at his record and say, ‘What the hell?’
“So, you’ve got this combination of events over many years that have led to this point. There is a toxicity around the club and a sense that this (relegation) is almost inevitable now.
“If it happens, it could be good for the club in the sense that it might create the watershed moment for everyone to wake up (and realise) the focus now needs to be on football – not NFL games, pop concerts or the racetrack under the stadium, but football. In order for that to happen, they need people in there who know football from back to front.”
Spurs has become a destination venue for events such as London’s annual NFL gamesJustin Setterfield/Getty Images
The inference, plainly, is that is not the case at the moment.
Others say the same, citing the club’s recruitment as being high among the list of failures.
“I think, fundamentally, Spurs don’t know what they are,” says one club chairman. “They can’t do what Bournemouth and Brighton do. They can’t even do what Crystal Palace do. Then they can’t sign the players that Woolwich, Chelsea and the rest (of the big spenders) do, because those clubs have always had a solid structure in terms of financial stability and they (Tottenham) are also just not attractive enough.
“When you look at who they have signed, the personalities just don’t make sense. They have signed really badly in general, but they have also had the classic problem that a lot of clubs experience: they have had a lot of different coaches with different styles, and a lot of different sporting directors, employing different ways of building a squad, and they have ended up with this Frankenstein’s monster of all sorts of different types of players, personality-wise, style-wise and age-wise. It’s just incoherent.”
Inevitably, Levy’s name has come up a lot. Tottenham’s former chairman was sacked early this season by the Lewis family, the majority shareholders, after running the club for them for 24 years.
Would Spurs be in this mess if he was still overseeing business as their highest-ranked executive? It is a question that will polarise opinion among Tottenham’s supporters, many of whom protested against Levy’s leadership and will doubtless point out that many of the decisions that backfired in recent years were made by him. But it is clear that, within the sport, his departure is regarded as a big factor in this slide into trouble.
“He was never the problem,” says one Premier League executive, matter-of-factly.
“This will probably upset a lot of Spurs fans,” adds an agent, “but the biggest issue is the departure of Daniel Levy. If Daniel was there now, there is no way they would be in this mess. It’s been horribly mismanaged.”
“You cannot underestimate the seismic change in the boardroom and how that has impacted things,” says another executive, from one of England’s leading clubs. “Levy ran everything for 20-odd years. Now, they’re looking inexperienced. You only have to look at other big clubs who have struggled or been relegated — there’s been chaos and change in the boardroom.
Daniel Levy: a problem or a safeguard for Spurs?Ryan Pierse/Getty Images
“Change was needed at the start of the season and they looked at Frank (hired away from a smaller Premier League club, Brentford) as that guy. When Frank was sacked there was no obvious replacement but, sometimes, it’s so clear that there’s no way back for a manager.
“What’s happened since is not surprising, because of the lack of options to lead the club forward. They hired the only person in Europe who would take the career risk of relegating a Super League club. I still think they’ll get out of it, but it’s going to be much tighter than I previously thought.”
More will become clear at the weekend, when Tottenham, in 16th position, play at home on Sunday against a Nottingham Forest side one place below them. West Ham, level on points with Forest, go to Aston Villa in a game kicking off at the same time and are currently showing the best survival spirit among the endangered teams. Spurs, meanwhile, have not won a league game at home since December 6.
“When you analyse their performances, there isn’t really any identity,” says a leading club analyst. “Thomas Frank’s Brentford team were a great example of a team with a very clear identity who knew exactly what they wanted to do, with and without the ball. But that didn’t translate to Spurs at all.
“There was none of the defensive structure you saw under (Antonio) Conte and none of the front-foot play you saw under (Ange) Postecoglou. They were trying to combine both, but ended up doing neither.”
The nadir for Spurs came in that tragicomedy in Madrid last week, when they were 4-0 down after 21 minutes and their 23-year-old goalkeeper, Antonin Kinsky, making only his third start of the season, was substituted in the 17th minute having given away two of the first three goals with mistakes.
“That was a mess,” says the analyst. “He (Kinsky) looked out of his depth and, although it was horrible, I could see why they took him off. But I don’t rate (the usual first-choice Guglielmo) Vicario either.
“Romero, Van de Ven, (Dejan) Kulusevski, (Pedro) Porro, (Dominic) Solanke, (James) Maddison, (Mohammed) Kudus… they’ve got all these players who look great when they first arrive, but they don’t sustain it.
Antonin Kinsky is consoled by Cristian Romero after being taken off at Atletico MadridJavier Soriano/AFP via Getty Images
“They have been a poor team for two years. I don’t think they’re bad players, but it looks like the culture and environment are poor. Postecoglou was appointed because they wanted to change the style, Frank was appointed because they wanted to change the culture, but under the new guy (Tudor), it’s all about trying to stay up at any cost. It’s all very confused, and it shows on the pitch.”
Incompetence of the highest order? The boardroom figure who used those words is willing to elaborate.
“They have everything they should need to succeed,” he says. “To have that infrastructure and not exploit it to its maximum by making poor football decisions, that is absolutely unacceptable.”
Will Spurs stay up? That, of course, is the key question and, despite everything, most of the replies we got to it were yes.
But then what?
“Whatever happens next, they have years of work ahead of them,” says one Premier League executive. “They have so many average players they need to get out, as well as spending the money to get new players in, and that’s going to be a massive challenge.”
Exactly; even if we lose ( which we won’t) ; that doesn’t mean we’ll go down instead the nightmare goes on .
Never allowed back in Leeds ?
There's always a silver lining , its a shithole !
Mr Universe was in training or he might have taken the job.
Having watched a lot of champo football, the thought comes that 3 up and down is wrong.
Will Middlesboro do better than Spam, us or Forest? I doubt it.
Why not go back to a two legged playoff between the 3rd bottom and 3rd in the championship?
Will Middlesboro do better than Spam, us or Forest? I doubt it.
Why not go back to a two legged playoff between the 3rd bottom and 3rd in the championship?
Relegation from Premier League in same season that Woolwich lift trophy would represent ultimate indignity for angst-ridden Spurs fans
George Chesterton
22 March 2026 6:06am GMT
“A Tottenham fan is not just supporting a club, he is entering a long-term relationship with hope deprivation, public humiliation and the occasional burst of beauty designed purely to keep the bond alive,” explains Alistair MacCallum, a Spurs season-ticket holder of 40 years.
You would have more luck finding beauty in Mordor than the lilywhite half of north London at the moment.
Entering the precincts on Sunday are Nottingham Forest, who are placed just one point and one league position below Tottenham. Although an unexpectedly respectable draw with Liverpool and a victory in the second leg of their Champion League tie over Atlético Madrid has raised spirits off the abyssal plain, a couple of decent results still manages to feed the Spurs “it’s the hope that kills you” narrative.
For months Spurs had contrived to get worse and worse, but what effect has the threat of relegation had on their angst-ridden supporters?
“I put the phrase ‘define emotional abuse in the context of being a Tottenham fan’ through ChatGPT and it didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know,” adds MacCallum.
‘We are a big joke club’
Of course relegation is not unprecedented but, in a sport defined by The Premier League Years that says football began in 1992, only those with memories stretching back to Spurs’ last relegation in 1977 have any inkling of what might be coming.Advertisement
They also flirted with the drop in the 1990s, but the difference today is that Tottenham is a global financial powerhouse, so the stakes are immeasurably higher. The supporters’ strained relationship with a club they feel increasingly disconnected from only makes the emotional toll worse.
“I don’t like people feeling sorry for me,” says Matt Bush. “I’d almost rather people abuse us. It’s this new kind of pity for us that I absolutely hate.
“An Woolwich-supporting colleague saw me come into the office and he just looked down. I said, “Come on, just give it to me” and he said: ‘I’m sorry but I can’t do it to you.’ And that’s worse. We are a big joke club. There’s no pride in it anymore.”
For those young enough to be facing this without battle scars, the possibility of relegation is as much a shock as it is traumatic.
“I had a positive relationship with Spurs,” says student Jake Gee. “But now I can see how I’ve actually fallen into the pattern of disappointment.
“I’ve found that part of being a Spurs fan is having to defend yourself as soon as you say you support Spurs. It took me a while to comprehend what was going on because I would always say: ‘I’m a Tottenham fan.’ And everyone’s reaction would be: ‘Of course you are – you’re such a Tottenham fan.’ And now I’m getting to grips with that.”
Woolwich title, Spurs relegation: the ‘ultimate nightmare’
It’s even tougher for the old hands, having been conditioned to expect the worst but never really believing it would happen. Spurs fans are like Charlie Brown running up to kick the ball, thinking that this time it will be different and Lucy won’t pull it away at the last minute and leave them sprawled on the floor.But the triumph of hope over expectation is a luxury they can no longer afford. The pain of potential relegation in the same season Woolwich win the title will be too much for many.
“Supporting Spurs builds up a certain type of mentality,” says Dean Wallman. “You assume things can go wrong at any moment. You don’t feel secure being 3-0 up in injury time. If you score a goal early in the game, you think: ‘It’s too early.’ It’s that psychology that the club has and supporting the club has given it to me over the years. I’m a third-generation supporter, so in some ways I’m glad I haven’t passed it on to my children.
“If the ultimate nightmare occurs and Woolwich win and we go down I might have to swallow something hard and jagged.”
“I’m spending far too long thinking about it – it has definitely woken me up at night,” says Chris Leadbeater, 50, The Telegraph’s travel correspondent. “I know it’s just football. But when you’ve invested, in my case, 40 years supporting this team, it becomes a huge part of your identity and your psyche.
“I’m in a sort of despondency where I’m beyond the fury stage. There’s also a bit of denial, although I fully expect us to get relegated.”
Everyone I spoke to knew at least one person who is withholding season ticket payments for next season, despite price freezes. It seems the appeal of playing Lincoln City in a half-empty stadium has not yet filtered through.
“Because it feels like the world is going to s---, you look to football for a kind of distraction,” says season-ticket holder Joelle Chess. “In life you have certain things that you enjoy doing and they’re meant to add to your life. This just takes away. I want them to put up a fight, but at the moment it’s like they’re sad. And then we’re sad, so that creates a horrible self-perpetuating cycle.”
‘Relationship between club and fans completely broken’
At this juncture, fans of yo-yo clubs who face the biennial ordeal of circling the Premier League’s plug hole might be tempted to pull out the world’s smallest violin. But Tottenham being relegated is substantially different to Wolves or Burnley and even Leeds or Forest going down.Five years ago, Tottenham were one of six – admittedly hubristic – English clubs deemed enormous enough to put themselves forward for the much-maligned European Super League. They are currently ninth in the global table of football revenue generators. All this means relegation would delight everyone else even more. But that doesn’t stop Spurs’ parlous situation presenting a kind of warning.
“The relationship between the club and the fans is completely broken,” says Bush. “And we are like a live experiment right now, so if we get relegated and they don’t do something to placate us, I think that will be proof that the breakdown is complete.
“I think Tottenham’s particularly bad at this, but I don’t think any club cares about their fans. And is that a relationship people want with their football club, bearing in mind the amount of emotional investment everyone puts in? That makes Spurs a test case. We are the guinea pigs.”
Credit: Andrew Couldridge/Reuters
Spurs going down would constitute the mirror image of Leicester City winning the Premier League in 2016 – a symbol of English football’s meritocracy, where both dreams and nightmares can come true. But it could also spook the Premier League’s 11 American club owners into thinking this is a red flag they can’t afford to ignore. Spurs better hope if they do go down, those relegation-averse Americans don’t start plotting a way to pull up the drawbridge.
Back on a human level, observers are taking the opportunity to either pity their hobbled rivals or to think, paraphrasing Oscar Wilde: “You’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh.”
“It’s a kind of loss or grief more than anxiety,” says Bush. “That’s a coping mechanism – we have just resigned ourselves to getting relegated and that allows you to be less stressed. But you’ve still got that overwhelming sense of sadness.”
“The club’s changed,” adds Wallman. “I get the feeling, certainly this year, that they don’t really care about me. I think a common thought among fans is ‘Why should I care about them?’”
But the bitterest pill is unlikely to deter genuine supporters from returning, even given their assumption that the club takes them for granted. “I’ve accepted my lot for next season if the worst happens,” says Leadbeater. “I’m committed to this three-legged horse for life.”
https://app.telegraph.co.uk/footbal...ca41-4c3d-8a39-5eaaf6879e53&overrideBack=true
I don't think people really understand the nuance of this comment.
Obviously, mathematically it's not over.
But if we lose today, Forest go ahead of us.
Possibly WHU too.
Puts us in the bottom 3 going into the international break having won 1 point from a possible 18.
The worst form of anyone in the league.
Quite clearly facing an uphill battle against bent officials.
Getting beat on by the media at every chance.
Having to wait weeks for another game.
Losing today would be the worst game of all our remaining games to lose IMO.
Don't even think it's a matter of being soft.
Nobody running our club for 1/4 of a century has any idea that they should be fighting.
It’s simple for me and I asked the same question pre Palace: if we cannot avoid a loss in this game today, then which of our 7 remaining games are we going to do the necessary in?
Wolves would be the only side remaining lower than us in the league - but they are our bogey side and have found some form recently.
Leeds are only 1 place above us and probably our best shout for points after today.
The rest are a nightmare: Everton had the second best away form in the Prem and are very much in the hunt for Europe.
Brighton have won 4 of their last 5 (1 loss being Woolwich) and our pushing for Europa or even CL.
Sunderland - 3 home losses all season, pushing for europe
Then it’s Villa and Chelsea.
Lose today and we are down - simply because there just aren’t the games left to reverse this. Even 7 points would likely not be enough.
This is huge
Wolves would be the only side remaining lower than us in the league - but they are our bogey side and have found some form recently.
Leeds are only 1 place above us and probably our best shout for points after today.
The rest are a nightmare: Everton had the second best away form in the Prem and are very much in the hunt for Europe.
Brighton have won 4 of their last 5 (1 loss being Woolwich) and our pushing for Europa or even CL.
Sunderland - 3 home losses all season, pushing for europe
Then it’s Villa and Chelsea.
Lose today and we are down - simply because there just aren’t the games left to reverse this. Even 7 points would likely not be enough.
This is huge
Stop dooming, things change quickly in football and we are going to be getting players back after the Intl break anyway, chill out.
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