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Igor Tudor has said Tottenham are in “an emergency situation” but issued a guarantee that his new team would escape relegation.
Tudor is a veteran of short-term appointments and has performed rescue jobs at Udinese, Verona and Juventus. He offered a curt “100%” in response to questions on his confidence in Spurs’s survival. The Croat’s tenure begins on Sunday with a north London derby at home to the wobbling Premier League leaders, though a lengthy injury list leaves him with only 13 fit senior players.
“What I saw this week was the quality of the players,” said Tudor, contracted until the end of the season after replacing the sacked Thomas Frank last weekend. “We have enormous quality in the squad.”
A coach presiding over 12 remaining league matches, the Champions League being a lower priority with Spurs five points off the relegation zone, made no promises of living up to the club’s attacking traditions.
“When you start pre-season and then you have 50 days in pre-season and you have 20 players, of course then we see the style,” Tudor said. “This is an emergency, an emergency situation, when you need to find fast what suits the 10 plus three players and it’s totally different.”
Tudor tries his best to avoid league tables. “When I coach I never watch the classification. Maybe it sounds strange. I don’t watch where we are. It’s a process. If you ask me what we are going to see on Sunday, I believe that we are going to see something concrete, something good that the people will like.”
Arsenal have won three from eight league matches in 2026 so Sunday offers Spurs opportunity to sabotage their bitter rivals and forge a path towards safety. Tudor said he had “big respect for [Mikel] Arteta who made an amazing team, one of the best in the world with the style of play and amazing mentality in the team, with 11 players behind the ball, pressing from the back. So it is a big challenge for us. Maybe at the moment it is not the best one but you never know in football.”
Tudor pledged his total commitment. “I came here not to visit the city. I have come here to do a job at a very difficult moment for this club. We work every day, like all coaches do. Every day, focus on the work and live it 24/7. Even if you go to the restaurant or a museum, you are thinking about how to make the team play better. It’s a strange job.
“This is an era of information. Everybody speaks, everybody has comments, everybody has discussions. Sometimes you can lose yourself in listening to too much information. In my life, generally, especially when I work in a club, I never read nothing in the newspaper, on television, nothing. I just want to focus on this, enjoy this, because to think about other things, what others think about you, can give you nothing.”
Alongside Tudor will be Bruno Saltor, a former coach at Brighton, Chelsea and West Ham. Tomislav Rogic, the new goalkeeping coach, and Riccardo Ragnacci, the physical coach, have worked with Tudor on previous assignments.
Tudor has his first job in the Premier League having coached four clubs in Serie A plus Marseille, Galatasaray and Hajduk Split. “I believe in Italian coaches,” said the former Juventus and Siena midfielder. “The way I feel is half-Italian, half-Croatian in the way of football education because I played there. Italian football gives you something that maybe some other leagues don’t give you. Of course, tactical preparation and I believe they are the best about mentality things.”
Frank failed to get the best out of Tottenham’s squad. Tudor requires a quick fix. “We need to become a team, we need to become a group of the people who are available, who will give something more. Who will not watch themselves, but each other.
“I never speak about results. I never speak about what we need to achieve at the end of the season. I don’t believe in this. I believe in today’s training. This is all I want the players to think about.”
