With four goals in four games, Brennan Johnson has played a key role in turning Tottenham‘s season around. Here, we look at his recent upturn in form.
“One Brennan Johnson, there’s only one Brennan Johnson…”
If anyone needed a reminder of how quickly things can change in football, they need look no further than the recent fortunes of Brennan Johnson.
Just two weeks ago, the Tottenham Hotspur forward had been targeted so much on social media that he decided to deactivate his Instagram account. Much of the abuse he received had come from his own team’s fans in the wake of Spurs’ 1-0 defeat in the north London derby.
A £50 million lightning rod for criticism, Johnson’s Spurs career hasn’t been the smoothest. Despite plenty of positives, not least his 10 assists in the Premier League last season – a tally only two players topped – many fans choose to focus on his near-misses and weaknesses. After a slow start to 2024-25, the abuse – understandably – got too much for him.
Since switching off social media, however, Johnson has scored in four games in a row – including in back-to-back Premier League games for the first time in his career – starting with the winner against Coventry City in the EFL Cup and ending with the first against Manchester United on Sunday. Spurs have won all four of those games, and the outlook of their season now looks rather better than it did after the Arsenal loss.
Those social media trolls don’t have much to say all of a sudden. Johnson has completely turned his season on its head, and he has played a key role in putting his side on track for a successful campaign.
With 87 minutes gone at Coventry, Spurs were 1-0 down and staring at early elimination from a competition the fans will be desperate to win after a terrible performance at second-tier opposition.
After an equaliser from Djed Spence, Johnson provided the winner with an ice-cool finish having raced on to Rodrigo Bentancur’s pass. Spurs had escaped the kind of embarrassment that would have taken a long time to recover from, and they were – crucially – in the draw for the next round.
Johnson was supposed to have a rest for that game but was forced on as an 18th-minute substitute for the injured Wilson Odobert. And just days later, he started against Brentford, and – again – he scored the goal that put Spurs ahead after they’d gone 1-0 down, only this time inside 60 seconds.
Then, shortly after Radu Dragusin’s seventh-minute red card in the Europa League against Qarabag, Johnson’s assured finish gave Tottenham a lead that they wouldn’t surrender en route to a 3-0 win.
And on Sunday, Johnson netted the only goal Spurs scored while United still had 11 men on the pitch, tapping home after Micky van de Ven’s incredible run and assist. He couldn’t really have done less to create that chance, with Van de Ven running 56.1m metres with the ball before laying on a tap-in for Johnson, but the Welsh forward was in the right place to score from close range. Once again, as the opener, it was the goal that separated the sides, meaning all of Johnson’s four goals in four games have been the ‘winner’; the goal that put Spurs into a lead they would not give up.
It means Johnson, within the space of eight games in all competitions at the start of 2024-25, is already just one goal off matching his total in 34 games last season (five).
He is Tottenham’s top scorer this term, and given the importance of all four of his goals in recent weeks, appears to be – on current form at least – their go-to guy.
He is unorthodox as a winger in the modern game in that he plays on his natural side; that is, he is a right-footer playing on the right flank. Among the Premier League’s best sides, there are very few other examples; Pedro Neto at Chelsea and Alejandro Garnacho at Manchester United are the most prominent examples but they both sometimes play on the opposite flank. Jacob Murphy and Adama Traoré play on the right for Newcastle and Fulham, while Mohammed Kudus plays on the left for West Ham, but higher up the league, at each of last season’s top four – Manchester City, Arsenal, Liverpool and Aston Villa – the wide forwards all play inverted.
He can use his left foot, but he is very one-footed, particularly when it comes to finishing; he just isn’t a threat cutting inside on to his left and lining up a shot. Since signing for Spurs, just eight (12%) of his 65 non-headed Premier League shots for the club have been with his left foot. His touch map for 2024-25 so far shows just how little he comes infield.
He only has one left-footed goal in 42 appearances for Spurs – a tap-in against Wolves last season – and scored just three times with his left in 109 appearances for Nottingham Forest. It means that when he runs at an opponent, there tends to be only one direction he’ll go and, as a result, only one option for the defender to think about. That’s been part of what led to some of the frustration among Spurs fans.
Having just one trick isn’t necessarily a problem. Arjen Robben is everyone’s favourite example of a player against whom every defender knew what was coming (cutting inside on to his left foot and shooting) and was nonetheless powerless to stop him.
But in the early part of this season, Johnson was shifting the ball down the line too slowly when trying to work a shooting opportunity, and was struggling to get clear sights of goal as a result. There were also fewer of the quick bursts down the line and low balls across the face of goal for a striker to finish – the kind of goal that has become a staple of this Spurs team under Ange Postecoglou. No Spurs player got more Premier League assists last season for a single teammate than Johnson did for both Son Heung-min and Richarlison (three each), with most of those first-time finishes from a low cross.
But with no assists to his name this season (sorry, his ball to Dejan Kulusevski at Old Trafford on Sunday doesn’t count due to the massive deflection), he needed an improvement in front of goal. And after a slow start, he has delivered.
His four goals in 2024-25 have come from 3.0 xG, an overperformance in front of goal that is a million miles from last season. In 2023-24, he scored five goals for Spurs from 11.0 xG. In Premier League games only last season, his five goals came from 10.6 xG, an underperformance compared to his xG of -5.6, the second-worst such rate in the entire division behind Dominic Calvert-Lewin (-5.9).
His record suggested either a lack of quality when it came to putting the ball in the net or a lack of confidence. Postecoglou suggested it was the latter when addressing the online abuse Johnson was subjected to last month.
“You’re talking about a young guy who is probably lacking a bit of confidence at the moment,” the Tottenham manager said. “Things haven’t gone his way.
“But he comes here every day, he’s working his backside off, he’s asking for feedback, he’s doing everything right, he’s trying so hard to become the player he wants to be. It’s hurting him a lot.
“It’s not like he’s out on the town and he doesn’t care and he rolls up late. So what’s his crime? His crime is he isn’t performing at the level that people expect of him.”
We’re now only a short time on from those comments, and Johnson has proved Postecoglou right: there is no issue with his finishing ability. He is also showing with his smart movement to get in behind that there is more to his game than shifting the ball out of his feet and getting a shot off, although in the last few weeks he has shown just how good he is at doing that. He has also shown a useful knack for shooting smartly through his direct opponent’s legs and towards the far corner of the net, which he did for his goal against Qarabag and when he so nearly doubled Spurs’ lead at United, only to hit the post.
Johnson has also played an important role in helping his side implement their hugely effective press. Spurs have more high turnovers (winning the ball within 40m of the opposition’s goalline) than any other team in the Premier League this season (82 – at least 15 more than any other team), and also lead the way (alongside Bournemouth) for the number of those turnovers that have led to shots, with 15 each. Fairly disappointing, however, is the fact that only one of their 92 high turnovers has led to a goal.
That stat exemplifies Spurs’ biggest problem this season: finding the net and, in turn, putting games to bed. They should have got more from both the Leicester draw and the Newcastle defeat but were made to pay for failing to finish off their many chances. Johnson was as guilty as anyone in those early games.
But in the space of four matches, Spurs have scored 11 goals and have found their goalscoring touch. Even if the opposition hasn’t been the strongest, the circumstances have made this run hugely impressive.
First, there was the late show at Coventry; then they recovered from an early set-back to come from behind and beat a good Brentford side convincingly; they won a European tie despite playing most of the game with 10 men; and on Sunday, they won without their captain and talisman at Old Trafford, which is always a tough place to go (yes, really). Johnson has been integral to every win.
In the space of these four wins, he has hit a hot streak which hasn’t just silenced his doubters, it’s got them singing his name.