The Times

Atletico Madrid are interested in signing Rodrigo Bentancur and Cristian Romero from Tottenham Hotspur this summer.

Romero, the Argentina centre back, expressed his desire to try “new places” and to play in La Liga during an interview last week but Tottenham also face a fight to hold on to Bentancur, the Uruguay midfielder who has only one year left on his contract.

Spurs want Bentancur to sign a new deal and have opened talks with the 27-year-old’s representatives but Atletico are one of a handful of European teams ready to capitalise if no agreement is reached. Tottenham signed Bentancur in a deal worth about £21million from Juventus in 2022 and he has made more than 100 appearances for the club. Spurs want to extend his

Cristian Romero has suggested he wants to leave Tottenham Hotspur this summer by revealing his desire to play in Spain.

In an interview with an Argentinian journalist conducted after Tottenham’s Europa League win over Eintracht Frankfurt on Thursday night, Romero circled La Liga as the one league he would “love to play in” and said he was keen to go to “new places”.

Spurs were aware of the interview, which took place at Tottenham’s training ground, but it was organised by Romero with the Argentinian reporter, Gaston Edul. The club will not be taking any disciplinary action against Romero. The posted clips appear to have been edited, with the full version yet to be published.

Asked what motivates him, Romero said: “I try above all

It began half a century ago on the windswept terraces of Middle Park stadium, on the southern edge of the world, where the coastal breeze would carry the wafting scent of souvlaki: a life in football that eventually would take Ange Postecoglou back to the continent he left as a child. What looms on Thursday, in a stadium encircled by a German forest, may well be the biggest game of that life. Win in Frankfurt, pull off the result of the season, and Tottenham Hotspur can still aspire to the trophy that may earn Postecoglou a third season. Lose, and the defining job of his coaching career is doomed to end in failure.

The stakes are immense. It took Postecoglou 30 years of hard, patient

Ange Postecoglou has accused Tottenham Hotspur’s critics of “turning gold into crap” but admitted that the “general sentiment” is that he will not be in charge next season.

The Spurs head coach spoke for ten minutes during a terse press conference to preview his team’s Europa League quarter-final first leg with Eintracht Frankfurt. He was irked by questions on Brennan Johnson and Mathys Tel’s penalty dispute against Southampton on Sunday, and Arsenal fans chanting “Are you Tottenham in disguise?” at Real Madrid during their 3-0 Champions League victory on Tuesday night.

“We scored, we won. [I’m] delighted. It’s incredible, it’s just . . . literally turning gold into crap when it’s Tottenham,” he said, referring to the 3-1 win over Southampton, when Johnson was

If VAR denied Tottenham Hotspur a dramatic equaliser in what was another pulsating duel with Chelsea, not even the technology could scrub Ange Postecoglou’s bold and bullish reaction when Pape Matar Sarr’s shot hit the net.

As the Tottenham fans celebrated in the far corner at Stamford Bridge, Postecoglou instinctively turned towards them and cupped his left hand behind his ear. Five minutes earlier, he had brought Sarr on for Lucas Bergvall and many Spurs supporters had booed the decision while some even openly taunted their head coach with chants of “You don’t know what you’re doing”.

Postecoglou clearly felt vindicated, although the wisdom of baiting his own fans at this point in Tottenham’s season, and at this precarious moment in his tenure, was certainly

The Tottenham Hotspur chairman, Daniel Levy, has hit back at criticism of their lack of spending and told fans he will never risk the financial stability of the club.

Levy defended Tottenham’s recruitment strategy after the club published their latest financial results on Monday, which also showed that Levy received £3.728million last season, meaning he remains the highest-paid executive in the Premier League.

Tottenham have spent almost £600million net on transfers in the past ten years, which is about £160million less than Arsenal and £300million less than Chelsea, while they have fallen even further behind the top teams when it comes to spending on wages.

Tottenham’s results for 2023-24 show their wage bill dropped from £251million to £222million last season — considerably less than their

Tottenham Hotspur were staring at extra time with a buoyant AZ Alkmaar when James Maddison let the ball roll across his body, sneaked between two red shirts and began the sequence that would send Spurs into the quarter-finals.

This was Maddison at his instinctive and inventive best, and how Ange Postecoglou needed him, just as Spurs appeared to be letting this tense and frenetic Europa League tie slip from their grasp. Instead Wilson Odobert tapped in his second goal to secure a 3-1 win for Spurs on the night (3-2 on aggregate) to ease the pressure on Postecoglou and book a meeting with Eintracht Frankfurt in the last eight.

Postecoglou had bristled on Wednesday at the framing of this game as win-or-bust for the season

The clearest illustration of the speed of Djed Spence’s revival is perhaps that he is even in contention to be called up for England this week, a year after he could not even find an English club.

Spence had just returned to Tottenham Hotspur on January 4 last year, after a disastrous loan at Leeds United that was supposed to last the season but got cut short after just four months. He was hampered by injury at Elland Road and kept out of the team by future Spurs signing Archie Gray, but it was his attitude that was deemed problematic: Spence did not show up to some club events, including the Christmas visit to a local children’s hospital; he complained about being played out of

Ange Postecoglou said his team “didn’t have the right mindset to tackle an away fixture in Europe” and were “nowhere near the level we need to be at” after a desperately disappointing performance against AZ left them needing to come from behind to salvage their Europa League campaign. “We didn’t get to grips with any part of the game,” Postecoglou said. “We didn’t really tackle the challenges we had out there in a real positive way.”

The Tottenham captain Son Heung-min, one of many disappointing performers, described the result as a “big, big wake-up call”. Spurs had come to Alkmaar knowing that the Europa League will define the success or failure of their season, and with a sense of having some wind in their sails

It says something about the frenzied nature of Tottenham Hotspur’s season that they effectively used this Premier League match against Manchester City to prepare for a Europa League tie against AZ Alkmaar.

As Spurs chased an equaliser early in the second half, three players stood on the touchline wearing yellow bibs, watching on with their hands on their hips. They were Son Heung-min, Tottenham’s star player and captain, Djed Spence, their best player for the past two months, and Dejan Kulusevski, their standout player of the season.

In the 59th minute, all three finally got the call from Ange Postecoglou and just the sight of them pulling jumpers over heads drew a ripple of applause from the home crowd. They were introduced one by one