We put it to you that Richarlison is the most Spurs player of the club’s current banter era.
You look at Richarlison and think how much more Spurs could he be, and the answer is none.
There are more obviously crowd-pleasing answers. You might suggest Harry Kane for his infamous trophy-dodging, but he’s also just objectively too good at football, isn’t he? His being at Spurs was an outlier, a bottling of lightning that happens to a club once in a generation if they’re incredibly lucky. The Spursiness all belonged to the club in magnificently and relentlessly failing to achieve anything tangible with the world-class superstar that fell in to their lap.
No, he doesn’t quite fit the bill. Then there is the even more obvious chortle-generating route of identifying a player who is simply sh*t. That also isn’t really quite fair, though. Modern Spurs – before this season, at least – have generally been a very specific kind of sh*t which is the kind of sh*t that is almost but not quite actually good.
This is where Richarlison comes in. He is nearly good. He is Proper Spurs. He has no club honours on his CV whatsoever, for one thing. He has been Brazil’s No. 9, but at a time when Brazil’s glamour and glitz has looked somewhat weather-beaten and frayed at the edges, a football team being carried by stories of an increasingly distant past. The timeframes don’t align, but it’s a tale as old as Spurs.
He scored the goal of the tournament at the 2022 World Cup, but nobody much remembers that now because Brazil crashed out disappointingly. You can’t tell me that isn’t something imbued with overwhelming Spurs energy. This is a club that has worra-trophied itself not one but two Puskas-winning goals in the recent years from Son Heung-min and Erik Lamela.
Richarlison has that inherently Spursy knack for occupying the indefinable liminal space between good and rubbish. He can never go truly unnoticed because he’s far too busy a footballer. He grabs your attention, but then doesn’t actually do anything to justify your continued focus. Again: Spursy, that.
His first season at the club was spent so desperately trying to impress that he was perpetually offside, racking up a string of yellow cards for goals subsequently ruled out by VAR. When he did finally get a goal, it looked like he had rescued an improbable stoppage-time point from 3-0 down at Anfield, only for Spurs to then concede an even later heartbreaker.
Somehow, a striker who had made it to April without scoring a Premier League goal managed to locate a way to make scoring one even worse than not. Tell me any other club-player combination that could possibly pull that off.
His second season contained a brief spell where he scored goals and Spurs won games. It seems like an actual eternity ago that he was scoring twice in a 4-1 win over Newcastle, for instance. That’s partly because it is. It was in late 2023.
In January 2024, 15 months ago now, he scored his seventh goal in seven games as Spurs beat Brentford 3-2. It’s notable because that is the last time Richarlison scored for Spurs in a Premier League win. His seven Premier League goals since have earned Spurs precisely one point – and that was via a pair of goals a few days later at Everton.
In the last year, Richarlison has scored five Premier League goals in five Premier League games, and Spurs have lost the lot. Just imagine how he must feel about that, and you have in your mind the very essence of the Spurs experience.
Even at the bleakest of times, Spurs are never entirely without hope. That’s the cruellest part of it all, in many ways. Look at them now. They are apparently actively trying to finish 17th in the Premier League, yet find themselves three tantalising matches away from ending English football’s most talked about if far from longest trophy drought.
It makes no sense that this has happened, but yet it also makes perfect sense. Because Spurs. Because Richarlison.
One of the reasons we like Richarlison so very much is that he is a player whose effort can never be doubted. There are few keener exponents of tearing about desperately trying to make things happen while giving the distinct impression of not really knowing how or why.
He is, when you think about it, a player apparently custom-built for desperate moments and thus futile consolation goals. And that perhaps explains why it feels like every single one of his Tottenham goals has been to halve the deficit in the 87th minute.
And recently, that is barely an exaggeration. This is a striker who has, somehow, scored in four of his last five Premier League appearances. Which is good. Every one of those goals has arrived in a mortifying Tottenham defeat. Which is bad. Everton, Leicester, Wolves, Forest. That’s three of the bottom eight, and a Forest team that sufferballed Spurs into oblivion in a manner everyone apart from Ange Postecoglou fully expected.
Three of those four goals halved Spurs’ deficits in the 92nd, 85th, and 87th minutes. Needless to say, no late equaliser was found.
The fourth was a first-half opener against Leicester which appears off brand yet only serves to prove the point harder than ever. Here is a player and club whose freak matches so seamlessly, so flawlessly, that this goal broke the world so much it caused a Leicester team that had lost its previous seven games – and would go on to lose its next eight without scoring a single goal – to score two in five minutes at the start of the second half.
That, surely, is the clearest sign of Richarlison’s ungodly power to amplify already critical levels of Spursiness to even greater hilarious and terrifying heights. It is, frankly, a gift that should not be necessary. It is perhaps even unwise. Who knows what grave irreparable damage it may be causing to have such a ridiculous player and such a ridiculous club operating at these new and unexplored edges of the nonsense universe.
What we do know is that his now surely inevitable winning goal in Bilbao next month is going to hit like crack.
