These are tough times for Tottenham Hotspur.
Sunday’s Premier League defeat to Leicester City was their 13th in 23 matches in the competition the season. It means have now lost 56.5 per cent of their league games so far in 2024-25. If they maintain that rate over their remaining 15 fixtures, they will have the worst losing record of any Spurs team in the club’s 142-year history.
It is quite the decline.
Remember, Tottenham came fourth under head coach Antonio Conte in 2021-22 and fifth last season in Ange Postecoglou’s first campaign in charge. They may not have won a trophy since 2008 but in the 16 seasons since, Spurs have never finished outside the Premier League’s top eight, and been sixth or better 13 times.
After Sunday’s humiliating loss, data giant Opta give them just an 11.5 per cent chance of even finishing in the top 10.
What is clear is that they are far, far too close to the three relegation places for comfort, sitting eight points above 18th-placed Wolverhampton Wanderers.
So how has it come to this? How did a club that used to stand for consistency and stability suddenly find themselves trapped in this doom spiral? What’s happened to that solid high floor Tottenham always had?
Much has been written about the current injury crisis, which has spectacularly ruined this season. Much has also been written about Postecoglou and his unique style of play. But what about the underlying conditions and circumstances at the north London club? Can anything there explain how a team who always used to be competitive could suddenly go off a footballing cliff?
The wage bill has been slashed
It is impossible to fully analyse Tottenham’s struggles this season without considering the resources available to the manager/head coach, relative to previous holders of that job and relative to Spurs’ Premier League rivals.
Last week, the Deloitte Football Money League published its annual report, which contained one especially striking finding about Tottenham. It was the confirmation of what many people had thought: that the Spurs wage bill came down last season. According to leading financial services firm Deloitte’s figures, Tottenham’s salary spend for 2023-24, head coach Ange Postecoglou’s debut campaign, was £222million, down from £251m a year earlier.
This covers the departures from the squad of big earners including Harry Kane and Tanguy Ndombele, as Spurs got their wage bill back under control after it grew under Antonio Conte. (Tottenham will make their official figures for last season available later in this one.)
That decrease in the wage bill is notable for a couple of reasons.
Firstly because it shows that any idea of a ‘Big Six’ in English football, as determined by wage spending, belongs in the past.
Based on these Deloitte figures, Tottenham are in fact seventh among Premier League clubs, behind sixth-placed Aston Villa (who spend £256million on salaries, according to respected football-business analyst Swiss Ramble’s figures.) Spurs and neighbours Arsenal used to be almost neck-and-neck on wages. Now Arsenal (£327m) are spending more than £100m more per year than their local rivals in that area. Villa and Newcastle United are Spurs’ close competitors now, rather than what you might now call the ‘Big Five’.
Also, Tottenham’s wages-to-turnover ratio last season of 42 per cent was the lowest of all the clubs assessed by Deloitte. That means they are run more sustainably than their rivals, less exposed to risk if anything goes wrong. But it also leaves their fans wishing that the club would be a bit bolder in the transfer market, given how much theoretical leeway they have. Especially right now, with the winter window having a week to run and the first-team squad in dire need of bolstering.
Jack Pitt-Brooke
A recruitment gap
Rebuilds are never easy but it has been a struggle for Tottenham to get the age profile of their new team exactly right.
Postecoglou has presided over the dismantling of most of the old Mauricio Pochettino team, which in large part sustained Spurs all the way through until Conte’s tenure. Only Son Heung-min and Ben Davies remain from that generation of players. In the last few years, Tottenham have worked very hard to sign young players, in Fabio Paratici’s time at the club (2021-23), and continuing for Postecoglou.
But at times, it has felt as if they are still paying the price for not getting their signings right before Paratici joined the club. If they had signed younger targets back during the years when they struggled with recruitment, those players might now be of peak age. There is nobody in Spurs’ squad who joined the club between August 2015, when Son was signed, and 2020, when Sergio Reguilon arrived. (And if Reguilon had not come back into the fold this season after two years out on a series of loans, it would be nobody between 2015 and 2021, when Cristian Romero joined.)
That recruitment gap includes the 2018-19 season, where Spurs infamously didn’t sign a single player. The prospective teenage signings of that campaign would be the peak-age players of today and firmly established at the club by now.
All of this has made life harder for Postecoglou, who has generally just been dealing with younger players who have joined Tottenham in the past few years.
This could have been addressed by recruiting more peak-age players in the transfer market, and Spurs have made a few such signings since Postecoglou came in: Guglielmo Vicario, James Maddison, Dominic Solanke. Last summer, they looked at plenty of other established players — Jacob Ramsey (now 23), Conor Gallagher, Pedro Neto (both 24), Eberechi Eze (26) — but did not complete deals for any of them.
Apart from Solanke, who turned 27 in September, the focus was on signing teenagers: Lucas Bergvall, Archie Gray and Wilson Odobert. Yes, they could all turn out to be excellent investments, and Bergvall and Gray have done incredibly well recently, but it has left Tottenham a bit short of proven players in their mid-twenties who could have stabilised the team in difficult times.
Postecoglou has always defended the club transfer policy in public, but he surely would have had an easier time this season with more experienced signings.
Jack Pitt-Brooke
No more Kane and Son
For the best part of a decade, Tottenham could rely upon one of the deadliest strike partnerships in Premier League history to dig them out of trouble. Between Son’s arrival and Kane’s departure in summer 2023, the pair directly combined for 47 goals — a record for the competition.
During 2021-22, when Spurs pipped local rivals Arsenal to the fourth and final Champions League qualifying spot, Son was the top flight’s joint-top scorer with Liverpool’s Mohamed Salah (23) while Kane was directly involved in 26 goals (17 scored, nine assists). They both scored in a famous 3-0 victory over Arsenal that May, and there are lots of other examples of them winning games together.
They were world-class stars and relentless matchwinners both at the peak of their powers and Tottenham do not have anybody in their ranks right now who comes close to matching them. Dejan Kulusevski has been excellent this season, while club-record signing Solanke has impressed, but they still fall short of the levels Kane and Son set during that era.
While Kane joined serial German champions Bayern Munich before last season, Son stayed with Spurs. But the now 32-year-old’s performances have been underwhelming over the past six months.
As stated above, Son and defender Davies are the only senior figures left from the end of Pochettino’s reign in 2019. Eric Dier followed Kane to Bayern last January and Hugo Lloris moved to MLS a few weeks later. Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg arrived a year after Pochettino’s dismissal but is another senior pro to have left during Postecoglou’s time in charge. Some of those players may have no longer been first choice, but there has clearly been a loss of leadership within the squad.
At their peaks, Kane and Son were two players who led by example, and would regularly win matches in which the team overall had underperformed. Without that elite edge in attack, it is much harder for Tottenham to come out on top without playing somewhere near their best.
Jay Harris
Still adapting to a new philosophy
Postecoglou was presented to the fanbase as an antidote to the three managers who came before him when he arrived from Scottish champions Celtic.
Conte, Jose Mourinho and Nuno Espirito Santo have forged their coaching careers on pragmatic and reactive tactics. Under the right circumstances, they have been successful.
Conte and Mourinho are serial winners who have lifted trophies with clubs in different countries; Napoli have won seven league games in a row and are currently top of Serie A under Conte, Nuno has exceeded all expectations by guiding repeated relegation candidates Nottingham Forest to third in the Premier League at time of writing, while Mourinho ended Roma’s 14-year wait for a trophy by winning the 2021-22 UEFA Conference League, and his Fenerbahce side are second in the Turkish top flight.
Postecoglou likes to play expansive, attacking football; a style which involves taking risks. He pushes his defenders high up the pitch to try to control territory. The away wins over Manchester City (4-0) and Manchester United (3-0) this season are prime examples of what this looks like when everything works.
Flitting between these different coaching ideologies has had a long-term impact on Tottenham’s success.
How can you consistently challenge for trophies when your needs change every 18 months, depending on who sits in the dugout?
Postecoglou inherited a squad including players who had been signed for Pochettino, Mourinho, Nuno and Conte. For example, midfielder Ndombele, the club’s record signing until Solanke arrived, only officially left in the summer — two and a half years after his final Tottenham appearance. The new head coach has also shipped out Ivan Perisic, Emerson Royal, Davinson Sanchez, Joe Rodon, Giovani Lo Celso and Hojbjerg.
Younger players the club signed with a plan to develop them into stars, including Alejo Veliz and Bryan Gil, have not worked out. Postecoglou has had to slowly build his perfect squad over time, and that process is still far from completion.
If you compare Spurs to other Premier League clubs — not just Liverpool and Manchester City, but the likes of Brentford and Brighton — the key difference is consistency in their playing style over an extended period, even under different managers/head coaches. Yes, every new appointment is going to make small tweaks to the style but it helps when the overarching vision is defined by the ownership. It means there can be alignment across all departments in exactly what type of player a club should be recruiting.
For example, Liverpool signed Ryan Gravenberch when Jurgen Klopp was in charge but the Netherlands midfielder has reached new heights this season under the German’s successor Arne Slot. There are signs Tottenham have a more defined approach to the transfer market now under technical director Johan Lange, who was hired in November 2023, but it will take time for that to pay off.
After almost two years under Postecoglou, it certainly seems like Spurs still do not have the squad to match the demands of their head coach.
Jay Harris
The fans have had enough
The mood on the terraces doesn’t always link directly to what’s happening on the pitch, but it does usually give you a pretty clear picture of just how deeply the rot at a club has set in.
The first sign of serious fan unrest this season came at the end of Tottenham’s 1-0 defeat at Bournemouth on December 5, when there was a confrontation between Postecoglou and a small number of away supporters. Just over a week later, the fans made it clear their frustration was mainly aimed in the direction of the board rather than the coach as they chanted about chairman Daniel Levy throughout a 5-0 away win against Southampton.
Those songs have persisted at every game since, but reached a crescendo on Sunday when Bilal El Khannouss gave struggling Leicester what would prove a winning 2-1 lead at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, with shouts of “We want Levy out” also booming around the ground. The full-time whistle was met with boos, and the unfurling of a banner which read: “24 years, 16 managers, one trophy — time for change.” It has become the most striking image of Tottenham’s latest poor result.
There are lots of different reasons for the fanbase to feel frustrated with Levy. Tottenham’s squad has been decimated by injuries but, with just over a week of the winter transfer window remaining, the only signing so far has been goalkeeper Antonin Kinsky. Postecoglou has repeated that he and his players need help.
The club’s commercial power has been boosted by concerts and NFL games at the stadium and clever partnerships with big brands but it sometimes feels like the first-team squad is not at the top of the list of priorities.
You can make your own jokes about the stadium’s branding and music paying tribute to Netflix’s dystopian TV show Squid Game on the same day Tottenham lost 6-3 in chaotic fashion to Liverpool on the weekend before Christmas. There were protests against the ownership before kick-off that day which featured fans releasing black balloons into the air.
The relationship between the fans and the club was already frosty.
Last year, Spurs increased season-ticket prices by six per cent and made changes to senior concessions. Their most expensive adult season ticket costs a staggering £2,367 ($2,954), which does not exactly scream good value for money when they have not won at home in the Premier League since November 3. The Tottenham Hotspur Supporters Trust (THST) plan to talk about the “performance of the current ownership” at their annual general meeting (AGM) next Monday.
While Postecoglou speaks to the media multiple times every week, there has been no word from Levy, chief football officer Scott Munn or Lange.
Maybe it would be beneficial for everybody if a member of the club’s senior leadership spoke publicly about what has been happening this season and alleviated the supporters’ fears, or laid out what exactly their long-term plan is.
Jay Harris
A power vacuum inside the building
This season’s failings have turned attention not only onto Postecoglou but on the whole structure around him.
The current setup at Tottenham dates from 2023, the year Paratici and Conte left and Postecoglou arrived.
First, Munn came in as chief football officer, then Johan Lange as technical director in the autumn. Since those appointments, there has been a serious overhaul of the football departments, with strategic reviews conducted, some staff leaving and others being hired. It is a very different place today compared with even two years ago.
But what if something has been lost from all that turnover of experienced staff?
Whatever you might think about the reasons for Paratici’s departure (he resigned in April 2023, after being banned from football activities for 30 months over allegations of financial wrongdoing) he was hugely respected by staff and by players, who valued his experience from his days with Italian giants Juventus and his winning mentality. As well as overseeing recruitment, Paratici was a visible presence and a respected go-between, mediating between Conte, Levy and the players. He could represent the club’s views to the players, and solve the daily problems that cropped up.
Do Tottenham have a figure quite like that now? That is Munn’s role, but Paratici was such a unique outsized personality that he has still proven difficult to replace. Not just for his charisma and love of the limelight but also his big-club experience and winning mentality. (Tottenham have valued how Lange tries to conduct Spurs’ transfer dealings in private, but there is another side to that coin too.) Some people miss the elite experience and drive Paratici provided at the training ground.
Ultimately this puts more pressure on Postecoglou. He wants to focus on coaching the team but he is not exactly chatty with players around the place. It is very different from how open Pochettino would be, always making time to invite them into his office for a chat. If the head coach keeps his distance, he needs other people — both players and staff — to step in and fill that space.
Jack Pitt-Brooke
(Top photo: Andrew Kearns/Getty Images)