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Last week, after Tottenham had lost 4-1 at home to Arsenal, Igor Tudor was bullish. It was possible leaving his post-match press conference to think he was a man with the energy and personality to drag Spurs away from the relegation zone. This week, after Tottenham had lost 2-1 at Fulham, Tudor was deflated. The previous week he had spoken of defeat in the North London derby as being part of the process, a game that would startle his players into understanding what was required of them. This week, he just mumbled about having to forget the game and move on. A week in the Tottenham job seemed to have broken him.
Tudor is a specialist firefighter. He has saved teams from worse positions than being four points clear of the relegation zone with 10 games to go, which is where Spurs stand now. But that is what makes his defeatist tone so shocking. He spoke of “big problems”, dismissing a question about his 4-4-2 formation with the snort of a man asked about the shade of the carpet in his hallway as his roof burns down. He talked of an attack that lacks quality, of a midfield that cannot run and a defence that is not prepared to “suffer” to keep goals out. He made fairly explicit that he thinks his players lack the requisite character and pointed out how Fulham were better at reading the game, accusing his players of lacking “brain”.
Perhaps this, too, is part of his process. Perhaps he hopes to provoke the players into a response. Perhaps he already thinks he has nothing to lose. But this resembled nothing so much as Antonio Conte’s infamous attack on the squad and directors after his Tottenham side’s draw against Southampton in March 2023.
“Tottenham’s story is this. Twenty years there is the owner and they never won something, but why?” Conte raged. “The club has the responsibility for the transfer market, every coach that stayed here has the responsibility. And the players? The players? Where are the players? In my experience, I can tell you that if you want to be competitive, if you want to fight, you have to improve this aspect. And this aspect, I can tell you, in this moment is really, really low. And I see only 11 players that play for themselves.”
Conte left the club by mutual consent eight days later.
Already there are rumblings about Tudor’s future. Since beating Everton in October, Tottenham have won just two of their last 19 league games. That’s half a season in which they have taken 12 points. They haven’t won in 10. They’ve lost their last four. That is relegation form. They’re only five points worse off than they were after 28 games last season, but back then there was an obvious bottom three who were already cast adrift. This time, that part of the table is more volatile, and what seemed implausible even two or three weeks ago now feels horribly real. Tottenham may actually go down.
This should be unthinkable. They are, after all, the defending Europa League champions and they finished fourth in the Champions League league phase – which probably says more about the relative strengths of the Premier League and the rest of Europe than it does about Spurs. They were one of the five clubs who led the breakaway to form the Premier League in 1992, and one of the six English clubs involved in the doomed Super League project. Ten years ago on Saturday, they beat Swansea to move to within two points of the league leaders Leicester. They have, by common consent, the best stadium in the country. How has it possibly come to this?
Injuries, clearly, are part of it. Spurs are now without Djed Spence, Destiny Udogie, Ben Davies, Rodrigo Bentancur, Lucas Bergvall, Mohammed Kudus, Dejan Kulusevski, James Maddison and Wilson Odobert because of injury, while Cristian Romero is serving a four-match suspension for a red card received against Manchester United. Dominic Solanke and Radu Drăgușin are fit now, but have both missed large chunks of the season. That is not normal, and yet something similar happened last season.
The squad’s construction is another part of it. The title-challenging group of players of a decade ago grew stale but was not refreshed – in part because of the cost of the new stadium but also because of Tottenham’s insecurity about being perceived as a selling club. There was perhaps also an anxiety that they would not spend well, one that has been justified in the years since, a situation exacerbated by a reluctance to spend; no Premier League side had a lower wages-to-turnover ratio than Spurs last season.
A lack of overarching footballing vision has led to a parade of wildly differing managers, from José Mourinho to Nuno Espírito Santo to Conte to Ange Postecoglou to Thomas Frank. The squad that remains is a hotchpotch of promising but largely unproven young talent and stagnating Premier League-proven players.
And as Spurs have stood still, others have caught up. The warnings of last season were not heeded, and now that at least two of the promoted sides have proved capable of a fight, Spurs’ league situation is worse.
The financial consequences of relegation would be desperate, but there’s also the embarrassment. Were Spurs to go down, it would be worse than their relegation in 1977, probably the most shocking relegation since Manchester United in 1974. Modern football was not designed for this.
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This is an extract from Soccer with Jonathan Wilson, a weekly look from the Guardian US at the game in Europe and beyond. Subscribe for free here. Have a question for Jonathan? Email [email protected], and he’ll answer the best in a future edition.
