The New York Times

“Hours ago… Minutes ago… These men were behind barbed wire, locked in the strongest cage that man could devise. These men plotted, these men dared, these men lived, The Great Escape.”

You can picture it: Roberto De Zerbi standing in front of an interactive whiteboard at Hotspur Way with a video compilation of Tottenham Hotspur’s greatest moments playing in the background, featuring these iconic words from The Great Escape, the 1963 adventure and war film starring Steve McQueen.

In Tottenham’s case, it’s the gilded cage on White Hart Lane that will be the scene for their great escape, should they manage to beat the drop on the final day at home to Everton.

But Spurs are in a race against time to start picking up points — and crucially, wins — if they are to remain as one of the six clubs never to have been relegated from the Premier League. In De Zerbi’s mind, the mountain is clearly surmountable, but they will have to overcome a psychological mountain first.

There have been several so-called great escapes in the Premier League, but none more famous than West Bromwich Albion’s in 2004-05.

Managed by England and Manchester United icon Bryan Robson, who took over from Gary Megson in October 2004, West Brom became the first team in Premier League history to survive after being bottom on Christmas Day.

De Zerbi cannot go to the January market for mid-season reinforcements as Robson did, but uniting the squad off the pitch can help to build camaraderie in the group.

“When I spoke to Bryan about coming in, we never spoke about football,” former West Brom, Arsenal and Everton forward Kevin Campbell told The Athletic in 2020. “We spoke about family and about leadership, and he said, ‘Right, I’ll see you at the training ground tomorrow’. That was it.

“We started to do things as a squad as well. We went to the races and went out for meals. A few beers — nothing in the papers — but we started to do things as a squad, and that helped us grow.”

It was a February trip to Orlando that did the trick for that West Brom squad, who delighted in using Campbell’s American Express platinum card in the Florida nightclubs. De Zerbi took the Spurs players to the Bacchalia restaurant in Mayfair to try to build that unity within a group that hasn’t won a league game in 2026. It was almost as lavish as that West Brom trip, too, with a leg of lamb priced at £130.

There has been a discernible lift at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium since De Zerbi’s arrival. His faith in the team — trusting them to take possession of the ball and building confidence in their technical quality — is being held back only by their lack of confidence in themselves and the unit. More time spent together, both on the training pitch and away from it, and a much-needed three points could give them that psychological boost they need.

“The connection then was great — we just clicked as soon as we got back from the trip and it took off,” said left-back Paul Robinson, part of that West Brom team in 2004-05. “It just took someone like Kev to come in and make us realise what we needed to do. It gave us a bit more leadership, a bit more togetherness and a bit more drive. That’s all we needed.”

West Brom won three of their four games after that Florida trip, boosted by the January loan signing of Kieran Richardson from Manchester United, who brought quality to a midfield short on creativity. Survival remained unlikely going into the penultimate week of the season, when they travelled to face United, needing to avoid defeat to stand a chance. They drew 1-1 at Old Trafford before beating Portsmouth 2-0 on the final day, whose fans delighted in the relegation of rivals Southampton.

Tottenham appear to be in a showdown over the remaining five games with London rivals West Ham United, who are two points ahead of Spurs in 17th. It is a remarkable turnaround from their perspective, considering they were 12 points behind Tottenham on New Year’s Day, with the north Londoners picking up just six points across their 15 league matches in 2026.

After Monday’s 0-0 draw with Crystal Palace, West Ham face Everton and Brentford, who are both chasing European spots, before hosting title-challengers Arsenal. It’s a difficult run, but they can take inspiration from the 2006-07 side, who won seven of their final nine games, including a 1-0 win at Old Trafford on the final day, to beat the drop.

“We looked doomed at one point, and people outside the club didn’t think we’d stay up,” Teddy Sheringham, a Spurs legend who played for West Ham between 2004 and 2007, told The Athletic last month.

“There’s a saying in football that when you’re winning games, you can’t see yourself losing, and when you’re losing games, you can’t see yourself winning. That’s how it felt, because we went on an 11-game winless run, then won seven of our last nine.”

The final game of that winless run was against Tottenham, who beat West Ham 4-3 at Upton Park. Spurs came back from 2-0 down and 3-2 down to get back on level terms, before Paul Stalteri scored an added-time winner for the visitors.

“I think most of the fans were convinced we’d get relegated,” says former West Ham midfielder Hayden Mullins. “The loss to Tottenham was another blow, but we just felt there was nowhere else for us to go. It united the team, and I remember we had a chat among ourselves in the training ground afterwards. We were in a really bad place.”

It’s a position Tottenham can surely relate to. They are without a win in 15 league matches, and will match the club’s longest winless run in history (16 in the 1934-35 season) if they fail to beat Wolverhampton Wanderers on Saturday.

Through all the league’s great escapes, there is an individual whom fans point to as the inspiration for their survival. In West Brom’s case, it’s Richardson; in West Ham’s, it’s Carlos Tevez. For Everton, there have been multiple saviours over the years, from Richarlison to more unlikely heroes such as Barry Horne.

Even for a club with a history as rich as Everton’s, beating Wimbledon 3-2 on the final day of the 1993-94 season to secure Premier League status remains one of the most fondly remembered days at Goodison Park.

Like Spurs now, Everton were firmly established as one of the biggest clubs in England at the time, having been crowned champions of England just seven years earlier. Their slide towards a relegation scrap was more gradual than modern-day Tottenham’s, but that didn’t make it any less of a shock for them to be in the drop zone with one game to play that season.

Everton were 2-0 down after 20 minutes that day, before Graham Stuart pulled one back to go in level at the break. On the 67th minute, Horne brilliantly levelled for Everton, firing in on the half volley from 30 yards.

“Anyone who’s played sport will understand,” Horne told The Athletic in 2025. “If you’re not confident, you don’t do things like that. At this point in the season and in the game, I was playing well after a poor start at Everton.

“But the fact that it was such a ridiculous goal — I say ridiculous because I only scored three for Everton in my four years — the effect it had on the crowd and on Wimbledon meant it was more than just a goal.”

With the wind in their sails, Everton got the winner in the 81st minute through Stuart, who sidefooted into the back of the net from the edge of the box, but it was Horne who went down in club folklore.

“Now we’re leaving Goodison, and people are starting to put books and videos together,” Horne said as the club prepared to move into Hill Dickinson Stadium. “You realise it’s been 133 years (at Goodison Park) and when people talk about events, that’s usually one of them. It means I’m part of Everton’s history and that’s brilliant.”

Judging by his performance on the weekend, perhaps Xavi Simons is the character to stand tall for Spurs, a side who are not a typical ‘great escape candidate’.

However, Tottenham, in their current situation, would love to have their name alongside the league’s famous great escapers.

Tottenham Hotspur have held discussions with Sebastian Kehl about their vacant co-sporting director role, with the German currently the leading contender for the job.

Kehl has been out of work since leaving a similar role at Borussia Dortmund in March. Spurs are searching for a replacement for Fabio Paratici, who left the club in February to take up a position at Serie A side Fiorentina.

According to sources familiar with the situation, who were not authorised to speak publicly, Spurs aim to appoint someone alongside current sporting director Johan Lange, who has been part of this recruitment process.

Lange and Paratici briefly had a job share, from the Italian’s return to Spurs in an official capacity in October until his departure to Fiorentina.

No formal offer has been made to Kehl yet and, for now, he remains undecided on his career’s next steps. The former Dortmund midfielder and long-time captain, worked for the club in several non-playing roles following his retirement in 2015, before succeeding Michael Zorc as sporting director in 2022.

Kehl has other options and has consistently been linked with a move to Bundesliga side Hamburg, where there is another sporting director vacancy. However, sources close to Kehl, granted anonymity to protect relationships, have told The Athletic that he remains unsure about an immediate return to football.

It’s also uncertain what impact Spurs’ potential relegation would have on the situation, with Roberto De Zerbi’s side two points from safety with five league games to play.

Kehl’s Dortmund legacy a mixed bag

Analysis by Germany correspondent Seb Stafford-Bloor

Kehl’s four years at Dortmund were difficult. The period marked a significant shift away from their traditional recruitment strategy, with the focus moving towards mid-career players and away from the elite, younger prospects with which the club was more often associated. They wanted to become more emotionally stable and less dependent on volatile young careers.

The results were mixed. Dortmund came extremely close to winning the Bundesliga in 2023, losing out to Bayern Munich on the season’s final day. They also reached the Champions League final in 2024, losing 2-0 to Real Madrid at Wembley. However, there has been a lack of coaching stability, with Dortmund employing four head coaches (Marco Rose, Edin Terzic, Nuri Sahin and Niko Kovac) across Kehl’s four years, and supporters have frequently bemoaned the club’s transfer policy and a perceived loss of technical identity.

Are those criticisms fair?

Yes and no. There have been some significant recruiting misses. Dortmund came close to signing Rayan Cherki in January 2025, only to fail in a late bid. In addition, moves this season for Jobe Bellingham and Yan Couto are yet to pay off. At the same time, Kehl has moved quite well through the market: the signing of wing-back Daniel Svensson, initially on loan last season, has proven extremely smart and big money purchases of Serhou Guirassy, Felix Nmecha and Nico Schlotterbeck have all been relative successes.

The wider context matters, too. Kehl was sporting director at Dortmund during a period of significant political upheaval. In 2024, Lars Ricken, formerly the club’s head of academy, was promoted into a newly created sporting CEO role, in preparation for the departure of Hans-Joachim Watzke, who had been CEO since 2006.

It was a role that Kehl wanted, but which he was overlooked for. The resulting dynamic between him and Ricken was tricky. Externally, it was never quite clear who held ultimate authority for recruitment, and while the club always denied that there was any friction between the two, stories about the relationship were regularly published in the German media.

Kehl’s departure from Dortmund, while abrupt, had long felt politically inevitable, even if no fair assessment of his role can ever be truly binary.

Roberto De Zerbi had a clear message to Tottenham Hotspur’s players after Saturday’s 2-2 draw with Brighton & Hove Albion: if they didn’t come to training on Monday with a smile on their face, they would be sent home.

“I have no time to see sad players or sad assistants,” said De Zerbi in his post-match press conference, having just seen his team pegged back by a 95th-minute equaliser. “We are lucky because we are working at a big club. We have the qualities to win the game (against Wolves), so we have to be positive because I don’t like the people who cry and think in a negative way.”

“We have another five games,” said De Zerbi. “Everyone of us knows it’s a tough moment, a difficult situation. But we have another five games, for 15 points. And this team is able to win five games in a row.”

Two points behind 17th-place West Ham United, Spurs’ remaining matches are against Wolverhampton Wanderers, Aston Villa, Leeds United, Chelsea and Everton, and they will need as many of those 15 points as possible to ensure their survival in the Premier League.

Here, The Athletic breaks down five tactical points which Tottenham should look out for in their upcoming run of fixtures.

Spurs’ first test on the road to survival is against recently relegated Wolves, who, despite losing 3-0 against Leeds last weekend, have gradually improved under Rob Edwards.

It took Edwards a couple of weeks before Wolves’ performances got better at the turn of the year, drawing away at Old Trafford in December, before beating Villa and Liverpool at Molineux in the last couple of months.

Wolves’ pressing and intensity off the ball have been a feature of the side in recent matches, as illustrated in the below graph, which is a 10-game rolling average of their passes per defensive action (PPDA) in the Premier League since 2022-23.

With the pressure of a relegation battle now gone, Wolves have nothing to lose in their match next Saturday. An aggressive display without the ball will play to the demands of the home fans.

De Zerbi’s side need to be patient in possession and try to entice Wolves’ press before combining to play through it. Tottenham’s performances on the ball against Brighton and Sunderland weren’t encouraging, but there were brief moments in De Zerbi’s first match where they cut through the opponent’s block.

Besides, if there’s one man to coach a team to beat a high press, it’s De Zerbi.

Another area where Tottenham can hurt Wolves is on the transition. Edwards’ side have looked vulnerable on defensive transitions in their defeats against Leeds and West Ham this month.

Being quick and sharp on the counter-attack will also be important in Tottenham’s following match against Villa. Unai Emery’s side have been found wanting on defensive transitions this season, which is visible in the number of direct attacks they are conceding.

These are defined as possessions that start in a team’s own half and result in either a shot or a touch inside the opposition’s penalty area within 15 seconds. In other words, a counter-attack.

Villa’s rate of 2.7 direct attacks conceded per 90 in the Premier League this season is the joint-sixth worst in the league — the highest figure under Emery.

Villa threw away a 3-1 lead against Sunderland on Sunday because of their sloppiness on the ball and porous structure on the transition, before Emi Martinez saved a Habib Diarra effort on the counter-attack and Tammy Abraham scored the winner in added time.

On the other hand, Spurs need to watch out for Ollie Watkins, who is returning to his normal level of form, with six goals in his last five games in all competitions.

Another England centre-forward to be worried about in this run-in is Dominic Calvert-Lewin, who Tottenham will face when they host Leeds on May 11.

Calvert-Lewin has scored 11 goals in the Premier League this campaign, with Daniel Farke’s mid-season switch to a back-three system helping the striker.

De Zerbi’s side needs to be aware of Calvert-Lewin’s movement inside the penalty area, especially when defending crosses from Leeds’ wing-backs, Gabriel Gudmundsson and Jayden Bogle.

Calvert-Lewin is also Leeds’ main outlet when going direct and fighting for the second balls. Spurs need to focus on winning the duels against Leeds, before facing a different test in their next game…

Tottenham’s penultimate match is away to Chelsea, who are enduring their own turmoil after losing five consecutive Premier League games without scoring a single goal, a run which has resulted in Liam Rosenior being sacked.

Even if the match is at Stamford Bridge, Spurs need to smother Chelsea’s build-up and force them into mistakes, as Lucas Bergvall did in the lead-up to Xavi Simons’ goal against Brighton on Saturday.

This season, Chelsea have lost the ball in their defensive third at a rate of 4.4 times per game — the joint third-worst rate in the Premier League after Villa (4.7) and Tottenham (4.9).

On the defensive side, Chelsea’s back-post threat needs to be accounted for. In the Premier League this season, they have created the most back-post chances (37), scored the most goals (12) and accumulated the highest xG (11.3) from these situations.

Tottenham’s last opponent in this Premier League campaign are Everton, who also pose a threat from attacking the back-post area. Only Manchester United (seven) and Chelsea (12) have scored more back-post goals than Everton (six) in the Premier League this season.

Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall’s runs into the left half-space, before playing the ball towards the back post for Thierno Barry, Beto or Everton’s right-winger has been a feature of David Moyes’ side in 2025-26, as seen in their most recent goal in the 2-1 defeat against Liverpool last weekend.

It is an aspect of Everton’s attack that Tottenham’s players need to be wary of, considering one goal could be the difference between relegation and survival in the final Premier League match this season.

Before the tactics and technicalities, though, Spurs need to have the right mindset and emotional stability because — as De Zerbi knows —succeeding in the former isn’t possible without the latter.

Burnley’s defeat at home to Manchester City on Wednesday sent Pep Guardiola’s side top of the Premier League, but it also sealed the home side’s fate as they were relegated to the Championship.

Scott Parker’s side join Wolverhampton Wanderers, who had their demotion confirmed at the weekend, which leaves one relegation spot remaining.

It looks like a shootout between four clubs, with Tottenham Hotspur 18th on 31 points, West Ham United a place and two points above, Nottingham Forest on 36 points in 16th and Leeds United on 39 points in 15th.

We asked some of The Athletic’s writers who they feel will end up completing the relegation places (and their views were almost universal…)

Let us know who you think will go down.

Team to go down: Tottenham

Spurs’ decline feels terminal. It might have been averted at various points, had a better replacement for Thomas Frank been sourced, for example, but the eventual arrival of Roberto De Zerbi could be too late given West Ham’s upturn.

Four of the five teams they face in their run-in have something to play for, and moments like Brighton’s late equaliser on Saturday will further erode already paper-thin belief. Dreams of a superstar saviour like Xavi Simons springing late to salvage the cause linger, and they have the best squad of all the strugglers, but upward momentum remains out of reach.

Greg O’Keeffe

Team to go down: West Ham

Tottenham could get away with this disastrous season without relegation. If they beat Wolves this Saturday and West Ham don’t beat Everton, they will escape the relegation zone on goal difference. Then it’s four games to go. In their away games, Tottenham have Aston Villa, sandwiched between Villa’s Europa League semi-final ties, and Chelsea, who are in the worst form in the league.

Leeds and Everton aren’t easy home games, but the Brighton match showed hope. They were boosted by the returns of Rodrigo Bentancur to the starting XI and James Maddison to the bench. Spurs haven’t won a league game in 2026, and escape may seem to go against logic, but all they can rely on is hope.

Eduardo Tansley

Team to go down: Tottenham

All season long, I’ve thought Tottenham would turn it around, but at some point, you have to pick up some results, and they simply haven’t been able to. No matter the manager, no matter the starting line-up, Spurs just can’t get any positive momentum going.

A combination of an open defence and an attack that lacks potency is never a good recipe for success. It also feels like both West Ham and Nottingham Forest have turned the corner over the last four or five weeks, while Leeds United have been on the up for a while now.

Aaron Catterson-Reid

Team to go down: Tottenham

Spurs have the worst points tally and, by a considerable margin, the worst form of any of the teams battling for survival. They must now deal only in victories, an achievement which has eluded them for four months and 16 domestic games.

Even two wins from their final five is unlikely to be enough should West Ham and Forest, as expected, continue gathering points. Players look emotionally exhausted and detached from their current status, with Brighton’s last-gasp goal on Saturday another untimely blow. Anything other than beating Wolves — followed by four tricky fixtures — is unthinkable if they are to escape.

Colin Millar

Team to go down: Tottenham

Even if Spurs do put a few good results together, it feels like the teams above them will still manage to put more points on the board in the final few weeks. That might sound basic, but things really are that simple when teams are fighting for survival.

Leeds have a favourable fixture list coming up, so they feel safe — leaving Forest and West Ham. Forest are unbeaten in five league games, and West Ham have only lost once in that same period. Spurs have given themselves so much to do that they are relying on help from elsewhere — and it does not look like they will get it.

Mark Carey

Team to go down: Tottenham

I’ve continued to convince myself that Tottenham will stay up until I watched them against Brighton & Hove Albion. They did everything right and then conceded an equaliser in added time. Simply, they’ve forgotten how to win.

They’ve got some winnable games, even with their flaws, but their issue is that Forest and West Ham do too — and they’re in better form.

Their relegation rivals’ recent results suggest they have players capable of dealing with the pressure a relegation battle provides and their managers have the experience of navigating their teams to safety in this league. Tottenham, well, do they have either?

Andy Jones

Tottenham Hotspur were never supposed to be anywhere near a relegation scrap this season. Yet, as the betting markets now see it, they are heading for the 2026-27 Championship.

If Leicester City’s title win 10 years ago remains the ultimate Premier League fairytale, then Spurs are threatening to deliver a twisted mirror image. Under Claudio Ranieri, Leicester defied 5,000/1 odds to lift the trophy in that 2015-16 season. Tottenham, by contrast, are drifting towards a relegation outcome that once seemed almost as improbable.

At the start of the season, they were available at 94/1 to go down, according to Betfair Exchange odds. By mid-September, as they lost just once from their opening six games under new head coach Thomas Frank, that number ballooned to 479/1. Those odds implied barely a 0.2 per cent chance of losing their top-flight status at season’s end, and what has followed since is a collapse few could have anticipated.

Managerial instability has been central to the downturn as the tenures of Frank and his short-lived successor Igor Tudor failed to halt the slide. Their relegation price has now dropped to 8/11, flipping Spurs from extreme outsiders to odds-on for relegation in a matter of months. Now it is Roberto De Zerbi tasked with guiding them to survival at a time when they are favourites to join Wolverhampton Wanderers and Burnley in the Championship come August.

This weekend, Spurs travel to Wolves needing a positive result to ignite any credible fightback over the final four matches. On paper, it might look like an opportunity, with Wolves’ relegation already confirmed. Yet recent form complicates that narrative. Wolves are unbeaten in three home league games, with wins against outgoing champions Liverpool and Champions League qualification chasers Aston Villa and a draw with table-topping Arsenal. Tottenham, meanwhile, have not managed a top-flight away victory since December 28 — a narrow 1-0 defeat of Crystal Palace.

Monday night’s draw for West Ham United at Palace widened the gap between Spurs and the safety of 17th-place to two points. West Ham are now 5/4 to be relegated, while Nottingham Forest, who are 16th, sit at 9/1.

For Tottenham, what once felt unthinkable is fast becoming one of the most remarkable collapses the 34-year Premier League era has seen.

There has been a lot of focus on Kevin Danso’s actions in the build-up to Georginio Rutter’s agonising stoppage-time equaliser for Brighton & Hove Albion last weekend.

Danso, who had been booked earlier in the second half for a foul on Kaoru Mitoma, made the right decision not to wildly slash at Yankuba Minteh’s cross with Jan Paul van Hecke was lurking behind him. It is easy to blame Danso for what happened next but the alternative had he rashly brought down Van Hecke — a penalty and a second yellow card — would have had far more serious consequences for Tottenham Hotspur’s fight to avoid relegation, given he will be Micky van de Ven’s centre-back partner for the rest of the season following Cristian Romero’s knee injury.

The critics quickly forgot Danso’s contributions earlier in the game. In the 48th minute, Minteh dispossessed Destiny Udogie and drilled a low cross into the box. Danny Welbeck seemed destined to reach the ball first and slam a shot past Antonin Kinsky until Danso sprang across to clear. The 27-year-old was wiped out by Welbeck in the process.

Around 60 seconds later, Danso came to the rescue again. After Conor Gallagher blocked Yasin Ayari’s shot and the ball dropped around the edge of the box, Danso threw his body in the way of Mitoma’s effort. When Welbeck cracked a second-half free kick straight into Danso, Radu Dragusin applauded his team-mate’s efforts from the sidelines.

The Austrian dropped to the floor after Spurs failed to beat Brighton in what would have been a first Premier League win since December. He had to be picked up and consoled by Van de Ven. Several members of Tottenham’s squad have been accused of not caring enough about the team’s dire situation this season. Danso does not fall into that category. There is a reason why he is one of the only players whose name has been sung by the supporters throughout this miserable campaign.

However, in the aftermath of Saturday’s 2-2 draw with Brighton, he was allegedly racially abused on social media. Spurs released a statement saying that would be “reporting all identified content to the Metropolitan Police and to the appropriate authorities in the country where perpetrators reside” and that they would “push for the strongest possible action against each and every person we identify.”

Danso responded to the comments via an Instagram post. “The racist abuse has no place in this game or anywhere,” he said. “But it doesn’t define me, and it won’t distract me from what is important. I know who I am, what I stand for, and why I play.”

Danso is a fantastic defender but he is so much more than that. He can speak multiple languages, including English, German and French, which allows him to connect with his team-mates on a deeper level. Danso looked after Mohammed Kudus following the winger’s summer move from West Ham United. Having been born in Austria to Ghanaian parents, he was able to speak with Ghana international Kudus in the country’s dialect, Twi.

During Tottenham’s pre-season tour of South Korea and Hong Kong, Danso embraced local culture. He visited the statue of King Sejong at Yeouido Park in the centre of Seoul with Guglielmo Vicario. They wore traditional Korean clothing, despite the humid conditions and hundreds of noisy cicadas buzzing around nearby. Danso was draped in a blue hanbok, which represented the kingsman’s garb, while Vicario modelled the king’s dress. It perfectly encapsulated Danso’s habit of putting his body on the line to protect his team-mates and prevent the opposition from scoring.

Then head coach Thomas Frank called him “a fantastic character and personality” following a 3-0 away victory over Everton in October. Frank jokingly called him “magnet head” for his fearlessness in competing for balls in the box before adding “that every coach would love to have him.”

In January, Jun’ai Byfield made his senior debut as a substitute in a 2-0 victory over Borussia Dortmund. Danso guided the 17-year-old defender through the final half an hour but his influence extends far beyond the pitch. “Kevin Danso has been brilliant with me the whole time I’ve been with the first team,” Byfield said in an interview on the club’s website. “I just knew going into the game that he was going to help me and he was really good with me tonight.”

In August, he became an ambassador for the homelessness charity Passage. He volunteered in their kitchen, helping to prepare and serve lunch which included cauliflower stew, chicken, rice and peas. Danso became involved with the charity after a friend highlighted the work that they do and he decided to help out. Danso hopes to be more active with Passage in the future. He has visited food banks in Tottenham and Enfield on multiple occasions and runs a foundation in Austria which provides children with learning opportunities.

There was a point in his childhood when Danso preferred watching films to playing football, and he idolised action stars Jackie Chan and Jean-Claude Van Damme. Last month, he attended the premiere of the Netflix-produced film Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man at Birmingham’s Symphony Hall and wore one of the iconic flat caps from the series. The defender was also spotted at the premiere of Oscar-winning film Sinners when it was released in the United Kingdom last year.

During the March international break, Danso celebrated a special moment with his family when Austria played against Ghana in a friendly. It was just a shame he could not share the pitch with his Spurs team-mate Kudus, who was ruled out through injury.

The defender has started 12 league games, adding up to a total of 1,041 minutes, which is only marginally more than Udogie (1,008) and Dominic Solanke (960) who have missed significant chunks of the season through injury. Yet he is an integral member of the squad.

Danso might not possess Van de Ven’s speed or the passing range of Romero but his versatility is crucial. He can cover the left or right side of central defence and is comfortable in a back three. He played the entire 90 minutes next to Dragusin in March’s 1-1 draw with Liverpool at Anfield.

He was named player of the match in December’s 1-0 victory over Crystal Palace for how he restricted Jean-Philippe Mateta. He was booked in the fifth minute but remained in control of their duel. Danso has only been sent off four times during his career and the last time he received a red card was in May 2023 for bringing down Folarin Balogun in Lens’ 2-1 victory over Stade Reims. Van de Ven and Romero have both been sent off in the last couple of months as they struggle to deal with the emotion and pressure of sliding down the table.

In the summer, Danso will switch his focus from providing cover for Romero to trying to beat him as Austria face the holders Argentina in their second group-stage match at the World Cup. This is Austria’s first appearance at the competition since 1998, when they failed to progress beyond the group stage. Danso will be integral to their chances of emerging from a group which also contains Africa Cup of Nations quarter-finalists Algeria and Asia Cup runners-up Jordan.

For now, though, Danso’s attention will be on this weekend’s fixture against Wolverhampton Wanderers — the side he nearly joined last February before Spurs swooped in at the last minute. Spurs were struggling under then head coach Ange Postecoglou but they were 10 points above Wolves and in the knockout stages of the Europa League. Wolves were hovering in 17th place, two points above the relegation zone. Wolves went on to finish above Spurs but Danso lifted the Europa League trophy in Bilbao in May.

Danso picked Spurs over Wolves to avoid the prospect of relegation but is now at the centre of Tottenham’s fight to avoid dropping down into the Championship. Everything he does on and off the pitch suggests he is exactly the type of character they need for their high-pressure final five fixtures.

Bottled water sales were through the roof outside the Etihad Stadium on Sunday afternoon. Not so much because Manchester City fans were particularly concerned with staying hydrated while watching their side take on league-leading visitors Arsenal, but because the bottles were labelled with the north London side’s crest.

Arsenal bottles. Arsenal bottlers.

The meme potential has been obvious since City dismantled Chelsea 3-0 this month, 24 hours after Arsenal lost against Bournemouth, and the Sky Sports television cameras lingered on a City fan sipping from an Arsenal-branded water bottle in mock celebration. Rival fans shared it on social media to poke fun at Arsenal supporters, the jibe stinging even more given their team finished second in the Premier League three seasons running.

It’s not just City fans who are (understandably, given their position in the table) transfixed by Arsenal’s apparent inability to get over the line. The rest of the football world also seems unable to look away, watching for Arsenal’s results almost as keenly as those of the teams they support.

It’s a similar story elsewhere in the capital, where Tottenham Hotspur’s nightmare season threatens to end in a first relegation since 1977.

Who can look away when a club of that stature is spiralling towards the unthinkable?

Taking pleasure in a rival’s misfortune is nothing new, especially in football. It’s often allied with the universal human emotion, schadenfreude, from the German words Schaden (“damage/harm”) and Freude (“joy”).

“It has been described as the most amoral of all emotions,” says Dr Matt Butler, a research fellow at King’s College London who studies neuropsychiatry and published a scientific paper on the behavioural neuroscience of football. “But there’s something quite delicious about it as a football fan.”

He explains that studies of football fans have detailed how the same areas of the brain that show activity when a person sees their team win also light up when rival sides do badly. “These are the pleasure centres of the brain, so it’s inherently a rewarding, even joyful experience sometimes,” says Butler. “And there’s some evidence that suggests that in football fans, it’s more prominent after their own team has lost or is going through a bad patch. So it can be seen as an emotion to remedy the sadness or disappointment of loss.”

The joy at seeing a rival lose can sometimes be powerful enough to override the feeling of one’s own team winning.

In May 1995, many Liverpool fans were torn over the possibility that a final-day-of-the-season victory for their side over title-chasing Blackburn Rovers could hand the league title to their fierce rivals, Manchester United. In the event, Liverpool did win but Manchester United could only draw at West Ham United, meaning Blackburn topped the table regardless: the celebrations at Anfield when news that Manchester United had fallen short were just as throaty as those that had greeted Liverpool’s two goals that afternoon.

Last year, the notion that some — maybe even most — Tottenham fans would have been happy to see their side lose to Manchester City to help deny Arsenal the league title infuriated then Spurs head coach Ange Postecoglou.

“I don’t understand it, I never will,” Postecoglou told a press conference. “I understand rivalry — I was part of one of the biggest ones in the world in the last couple of years with (Scottish sides) Celtic and Rangers — but I’ve never and will never understand if someone wants their own team to lose.”

Yet the feeling is real.

In 2017, a team of Harvard social psychologists asked fans of rival Major League Baseball teams — the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox — how much they would pay to produce either their own team’s win versus the rival’s loss. The study found that, overall, people were willing to pay more for the other team’s defeat.

That can be driven by various factors, including envy, moral values and the bonding power of seeing a rival do badly, says Butler: “We’re a cooperative species, but we also have it in us to feel envious when a rival does well. Seeing them do badly can remedy that.”

If there is a sense that the rival team deserve their misfortune, the feelings can intensify. “Just seeing someone bad fail can inherently feel good,” Butler explains.

Some research also shows that schadenfreude can bind people together, particularly when one’s own team is not doing so well. “So much of football fandom is about collective group identity,” says Butler, “so schadenfreude has this collective social dimension whereby it strengthens the group in response, particularly to defeat — that social cohesion is really important in football fans.”

Inequality and status also play important roles, says Dr Mark Doidge, reader in sociology of sport at Loughborough University. “We define ourselves based on our perceived equals or power imbalances,” he explains. “Football is the perfect example of a hierarchy and rivals. It is a league table, with historic and geographic rivalries.”

Desecrating your rival is one way to assert status, he adds. This could be through the actual violence of fan hooliganism, but also through symbolic violence, such as removing stickers depicting your rivals, singing songs about them or laughing at their on-pitch demise.

When it comes to the current examples of fans of rival teams ‘rubbernecking’ at what’s happening on both the red and white sides of north London, Doidge puts it partly down to status.

“Arsenal and Spurs both consider themselves to be in the ‘Big Six’, which is why they wanted to form the European Super League,” he says. “They are seen to have big stadiums and lots of money, which automatically puts them outside the majority of football teams in the UK.

“You also have the fact they are both in north London, which is seen as a wealthy part of London, and by extension, the UK. Add in a pronounced anti-London bias from some sections of the media and politicians, and this infuses a rivalry against London clubs, but also wealthy clubs.”

There may well have been an element of that at play with City fans unfurling a banner reading ‘Panic on the Streets of London’ — a nod to the song by the Manchester-based band The Smiths — at full time of Arsenal’s 2-1 defeat on Sunday.

Tottenham may be one of the more deprived areas of London but for Doidge, the club’s wealth — they posted record revenues of £565.3million ($742m) in their most recent accounts, even if the wider picture was not so rosy — is particularly pertinent to how people are reacting to them.

He believes that those taking pleasure in their difficulties this season would be doing the same if it were happening to Manchester United, Manchester City, Chelsea, Arsenal or Liverpool: “Seeing big clubs being brought down to size is a great leveller in sport. We all want to see our club succeed, we also want to see billionaire clubs who are distorting the football pyramid being relegated.”

Is any of this new or different from any other time in the history of the game?

“I’m not sure,” says John Williams, who is associate professor of sociology at the University of Leicester and has spent his working life examining British football’s history and the game’s cultural and social impact. “You can be sure when Sir Alex Ferguson was in his pomp at (Manchester) United or Bob Paisley was in charge at Liverpool, rival fans were doing something similar.”

What has changed, points out Williams, is social media and the “fan blog-o-sphere”, plus the 24/7 coverage of the game and everything around it. There are, to put it bluntly, many more ways to ‘hate-watch’ a rival team’s downfall (or listen to them discuss it on a podcast) than in the past.

“Intense support for a club is like an extension of the self — and not wanting others to succeed at our cost is a typical response,” says Williams. “There is so much coverage (and much of it negative), it is hard to escape the seduction of seeing a close rival fail. Was it like this when Spurs and Chelsea were relegated in the 1970s? Partly, yes, but then not everyone could join in.”

How much, if anything, does this pleasure in other teams’ failings tell us about human nature in general?

Butler is reluctant to be “too conclusive” but says that football does “co-opt psychological and emotional phenomena that we evolved to have, so it’s not like something gets created out of nothing”.

In many ways, though, it is artificial. Football is not the same thing as real life, however much it might sometimes feel that way. There are parallels in “the way that people behave in groups”, according to Butler. “The way that people identify with something a little bit abstract, like a football team, but also even a nation state.

“It does give us some fascinating insights into the possibilities of what we can understand about human behaviours through something like football. It’s a bit less contentious than it would be for nations to compete with each other, for example.”

In the Portuguese evening heat last July, Morgan Gibbs-White posed for a picture by the side of a pitch with Nottingham Forest owner Evangelos Marinakis.

The Greek shipping magnate had flown to Forest’s pre-season training camp and successfully persuaded the No 10 to reject Tottenham Hotspur’s advances and sign a new contract with Forest.

At the time, Forest saw it as a significant victory, a symbol of their growing stature as a Premier League club. Nine months on, it feels like it was a seismic moment for both clubs.

On Sunday, there was Gibbs-White posing for photographers, again by the side of a pitch, this time holding the match ball and the man-of-the-match award after netting a 15-minute hat-trick that helped Vitor Pereira’s side beat Burnley 4-1 to take a big step towards Premier League safety, playing a key role in putting Forest close to a fifth consecutive season of top-flight football.

Not for the first time this season, when Forest needed him most, their captain stood tall and delivered a performance that transformed the mood and the outlook at the City Ground.

At half-time, Forest trailed Burnley 1-0 and looked devoid of inspiration and ideas. There was a sense of impending doom on the banks of the River Trent — a feeling that Tottenham will be more than familiar with in north London after a terrible run of results this year that has seen them spiral into the relegation zone.

In early July, Tottenham felt they had activated a confidential £60million ($81m) release clause in Gibbs-White’s contract, leading to a tense stand-off. Marinakis, the Forest owner, spent 30 minutes persuading Gibbs-White to stay, enticing him to sign a club-record contract.

In 15 minutes here, he scored three goals that would have left any watching Tottenham fans wondering what if. There is a real chance the Premier League status of a Gibbs-White-inspired Forest could come at Tottenham’s expense. If West Ham win at Crystal Palace, Roberto De Zerbi’s side would find themselves four points adrift in the bottom three with five games left to play.

Gibbs-White has proven to be Forest’s talisman at a time when Tottenham have needed one more than ever. Had that transfer gone through, it is not hard to make a case that the two clubs’ situations could both have been different.

The former Wolves player has now scored 12 Premier League goals this season, his most in a league campaign (excluding Football League play-offs). Since the start of March, no top-flight player has scored more goals in all competitions than the 26-year-old.

Since the start of March, Gibbs-White’s goals have helped secure a 2-2 draw at Manchester City, a 3-0 win at Tottenham, and a 1-0 victory over Porto that helped them into the semi-final of the Europa League. The three he scored against Burnley felt as significant as any of those goals.

A tactical tweak from Pereira at half-time was the catalyst, as he asked Gibbs-White to move into the left-hand channel — playing wide when Forest were defending, and trying to find pockets of space inside when they were in possession. All three of his goals came from that area.

The first came in the 62nd minute as a Nikola Milenkovic header was flicked on by former Forest loanee James Ward-Prowse into the penalty area, where Gibbs-White took a single touch at the far post before guiding a precise, emphatic finish into the bottom corner.

Given that Gibbs-White had just missed a similar opportunity from an almost identical position, it was a moment of impressive composure.

Seven minutes later, Omari Hutchinson found the space to deliver a cross from the right, picking out Gibbs-White in an almost identical position — with an identical outcome. This time, it was with an instant sweep of the right boot that Gibbs-White found the back of the net to increase the decibels again.

When the unlikely figure of substitute Ryan Yates found himself cast in the role of winger on the right flank, he did brilliantly to find half a yard to deliver a cross to the left side, where Gibbs-White was again arriving with impeccable timing to send a looping header beyond the reach of goalkeeper Martin Dubravka.

Not quite the perfect hat-trick, but it will have felt that way to thousands in the City Ground. It will certainly have for Gibbs-White, as it was the first professional hat-trick of his career.

The hat-trick will also surely have given Thomas Tuchel food for thought at a time when a few of his other No 10 options for England, such as Phil Foden and Cole Palmer, have not been in peak form

“He deserves that. This is just my opinion, but if I can give that, I think he deserves it, because he has the quality, he has the qualities of a leader,” said Pereira in his post-match press conference.

“When things are not happening in the way that you want, when the team is struggling in the game… a lot of players could prefer to hide themselves, they do not want the ball. But Morgan wants the ball, he wants the responsibility, he wants to score goals, he wants to assist.

“When I told him that, when we are attacking, I wanted him to play in the pocket, but when we defend, he must defend on the side, it was not a problem for him. He understands the game. He has the spirit.”

It came seven months before his appointment, but Forest winning the fight to keep Gibbs-White could prove to be a landmark moment for Pereira and, in a different sense, for Tottenham, too.

Welcome to The Briefing, where every Monday during this season, The Athletic will discuss the biggest questions from the weekend’s football.

This was the weekend when Manchester City blew the title race open with victory over Arsenal, Virgil van Dijk scored a dramatic stoppage-time winner to settle the first Merseyside derby at Everton’s new stadium, the pressure mounted on Newcastle United’s Eddie Howe after yet another home defeat, and Leeds United took a significant step towards Premier League safety.

Here, we ask if this has become Manchester City’s title to lose, whether everything is unravelling at Chelsea on and off the field, what damage it would do to Tottenham Hotspur’s survival hopes should West Ham United win at Crystal Palace tonight, and if Daniel Farke has proved that he is a Premier League manager after all.

Are Manchester City favourites for the title?

Pep Guardiola would scoff at that question. “It gives us hope, that’s all,” the Manchester City manager said when asked about the significance of their 2-1 victory over Arsenal. “Who is top of the league? We’re not. Whose goal difference is better? They are. It’s step by step, that’s it. But we have hope.”

Factually, Guardiola is right, of course. But City have more than hope — they have momentum, too, and to many observers, they will now be the favourites to win their fifth Premier League title in six seasons, partly because of their track record under Guardiola but also because of the contrasting form of both teams.

City have won their last four matches in all competitions, including two victories over Arsenal, first in the Carabao Cup final and now in the Premier League.

Good luck finding anyone who doesn’t expect it to be five straight victories come Wednesday night, when City travel to second-from-bottom Burnley, knowing that three points will knock Arsenal off the summit.

Mikel Arteta’s side have been enjoying the view at the top since the start of October, and it would be intriguing to see how they respond to the challenge of City overhauling them, especially as the gap was nine points a little over a week ago.

Are Arsenal psychologically damaged by a run of four defeats from their past six matches, or can they take solace from the way they played at City?

Roy Keane didn’t see it that way on Sky Sports on Sunday, when the pundit and former Manchester United midfielder said it’s “about points and not plaudits”. But that overlooks the fact that Arsenal, who have faced plenty of criticism for their style of play this season, gave as good as they got against City and on another day, could easily have taken something from the game.

Their attack-minded approach — evident in Arteta’s team selection as well as the performance — could be crucial over the next five league matches, bearing in mind there is a real possibility that the title could be decided by goal difference this season.

Pressing aggressively, in the way that Arsenal did at the Etihad, won’t work every week because few teams will be as wedded to playing out from the back as City — something that was to the home side’s detriment on Sunday, when Gianluigi Donnarumma conceded a farcical goal. But the positive mindset that Arsenal demonstrated at City, in particular a desire to commit more players forward and to play with far greater freedom, is exactly what they will need to show in the weeks to come.

“They are now more convinced,” Arteta said when asked how his Arsenal players were feeling after losing at City. “They were talking about it in the dressing room. It’s a new league now. They have a game in hand. We have a three-point advantage and five games to play. Everything is still to play for. We know how much we want it and we’re not going to stop. We’re going to go again, that’s for sure.”

For the neutrals among us, it sets up a fascinating finale to the season. Who doesn’t, for example, want to see two teams not just being under pressure to win matches but to outscore their title rivals in the process?

The mind goes back to the sight of Luis Suarez putting Liverpool 3-0 up at Selhurst Park 12 years ago and rushing to retrieve the ball from the back of the net only for — and apologies to the Liverpool supporters among you for taking you down this path again — Crystal Palace coming back to draw 3-3 in one of the Premier League’s most memorable matches.

Over to you, City.

Chelsea isn’t working, is it?

Protests outside the ground, boos inside. All is not well at Stamford Bridge. A run of four straight league defeats without a goal for the first time since 1912 raises serious questions about Chelsea’s direction of travel under owner BlueCo and head coach Liam Rosenior.

Chelsea are drifting dangerously in the Premier League, at serious risk of missing out on European football altogether, never mind qualification for the Champions League, with seven points separating them from Liverpool in fifth place, and Brentford, Bournemouth, Brighton & Hove Albion and Everton all within a point at most.

Anger is building among the fanbase about the way the club is being run, and the players look increasingly dejected, too. As for Rosenior, it’s hard to escape the feeling that this job has come too soon for him. Chelsea have lost six of their past seven matches, while two of their three victories in the past 11 fixtures were against Wrexham (a Championship club) and Port Vale (League One).

How much immediate pressure Rosenior is under is hard to know. But there seems to be a lot of ‘thinking’ going on behind the scenes about whether everything will work out.

“We’ve had a tough past five, six matches, but I think we’re behind Liam. Of course, it’s a results business, but we think he can be successful long term.”

That was Behdad Eghbali speaking at CAA’s World Congress of Sports conference in Los Angeles on Thursday, when Chelsea’s co-owner admitted that mistakes had been made at the club and that their player-trading model, which has such a strong emphasis on youth, needed to be tweaked.

Some of the more experienced players (and there aren’t many, which is a big part of the problem) had worked that out already. In a candid interview with The Athletic a couple of weeks ago, Marc Cucurella explained how he felt “discouraged” by the manner of Chelsea’s chastening Champions League exit against Paris Saint-Germain.

“We have a good core of players,” Cucurella said. “The foundations are there. But to fight for major trophies such as the Premier League or the Champions League, you need more. Signing young players only might complicate achieving those goals. Against PSG, we lacked players who had gone through situations like that.”

Cucurella for sporting director, anyone?

Aged 27, the Spaniard was Chelsea’s oldest outfield player against Manchester United on Saturday, in a game where the visitors had one shot on target and scored. I guess you could call that lucky. You might also call it clinical — which isn’t a word anyone would use to describe Chelsea’s attack. Not even a makeshift United defence could be breached.

Liam Delap has gone 20 games without scoring, it’s been more than six weeks since Cole Palmer shivered in celebration, Pedro Neto’s goal drought in the league extends even longer, and then there is the curious case of Alejandro Garnacho, who last found the net in the Premier League in October.

On as an early substitute for the injured Estevao, the Argentinian’s final act of the game was a mishit cross that, unfortunately, summed up his night and his Chelsea career so far. If signing Garnacho was the answer last summer, what was the question?

It feels like there’s an awful lot to fix at Chelsea, which is a strange thing to say about a club that has spent more than £1.8billion on players in four years. How much are the experienced footballers going to cost to take, in the words of Eghbali, Chelsea to “the next level”, and will they want to come to Stamford Bridge without Champions League football?

Will the gap get too big for Spurs?

As if conceding a stoppage-time equaliser on Saturday night wasn’t bad enough for Spurs fans, they had to endure the sight of Morgan Gibbs-White — the one who got away last summer — scoring a second-half hat-trick to haul Nottingham Forest further from the relegation zone.

Trailing 1-0 at home against Burnley at half-time, Forest turned things around in the second half on Sunday, courtesy of an exceptional individual performance from Gibbs-White, who was on the verge of joining Spurs last July before a last-minute U-turn. The midfielder scored three times for Forest in 17 minutes.

Spurs are now firmly playing catch-up, five points behind Forest, eight adrift of Leeds, who beat Wolves 3-0 on Saturday, and will trail West Ham by four if Nuno Espirito Santo’s team can follow up their emphatic 4-0 win over Wolverhampton Wanderers with another victory at Selhurst Park tonight.

Psychologically, a gap that size would strike a real blow to Spurs, given they would go into Saturday’s match at bottom-of-the-table Wolves knowing they would remain in the relegation zone even if they win in the league for the first time since the end of December. Would this Spurs squad have the mental strength to deal with that sort of scenario?

Roberto De Zerbi said after the 2-2 draw against Brighton, which featured an outstanding goal from Xavi Simons, that he believes his team can win all five of their remaining fixtures. Realistically, two wins and a couple of draws are likely to be more than enough, but that’s still a tall order for a team that has been struggling for form and confidence for so long.

The good news for Spurs fans is that there has been an improvement in performance levels since De Zerbi took over, even if that has only translated to one point from the matches against Sunderland and Brighton. Encouragement can also be taken from the way that Simons showed against Brighton that he can produce moments that change matches.

The bad news is that their fate is out of their hands and that the teams around them won on the weekend. The sight of West Ham doing the same at Palace would crank up the pressure on Spurs, who simply have to get three points at Wolves to give themselves the shot in the arm their season so badly needs.

Has Farke proved a few of us wrong?

Farke is a Championship specialist but not a Premier League manager — that was the narrative at the start of the season, and it was the narrative long before that.

His record in the Premier League with Norwich City was 49 games, six wins, eight draws and 35 losses (0.53 points per game), leading to one relegation, in the 2019-20 season, and a sacking 11 matches into the 2021-22 campaign. In fact, there were even doubts about whether Farke would be kept on after winning promotion with Leeds.

A short and not particularly sweet stint in the top flight with Leeds was on the cards, all the more so when the crowd turned on him in November. After losing 2-1 at home against Aston Villa, in what was a fourth defeat in five matches, a section of Leeds fans chanted: “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

“It’s not very enjoyable at the moment, we’re getting a lot of stick,” Farke told reporters after the Villa game. “But I don’t need to hide. I was aware of how passionate this club is from the first day here. If you can’t handle the heat, don’t become manager of Leeds United. I never expected this season to be an easy ride.”

Cue a turnaround that few could have imagined, aided by a tactical change to the formation that suggests Farke knows what he’s doing after all.

Leeds have lost only four of their 20 Premier League matches since the start of December, picking up 28 points in the process. In a league where it’s notoriously easy for promoted teams to get into a cycle of losing, Leeds have been remarkably difficult to beat.

Saturday’s win over Wolves completed the best week of the season for Leeds and Farke. A 2-1 triumph against Manchester United — Leeds’ first victory at Old Trafford since 1981 — was followed by a 3-0 victory over Wolves five days later.

With 39 points on the board, Leeds are within touching distance of survival. They also have an FA Cup semi-final at home against Chelsea to look forward to on Sunday. Not bad for a manager who was written off by plenty of us before a ball had been kicked.

Coming up

The challenge for Tottenham Hotspur this week, if they want to give themselves any chance of staying up, is simple — or at least it is simple to write down in words on a laptop from a distance.

They must expel the painful memories of Georginio Rutter’s 95th-minute equaliser, the goal that shattered hearts and denied them what would have been their first Premier League win of 2026.

Spurs must somehow move on from the palpable devastation that left Kevin Danso on the floor, needing to be pulled up by his team-mates, and other players looking utterly crestfallen at the final whistle.

When the players return to training on Monday afternoon, Roberto De Zerbi will have no time for anyone dwelling on their sadness or disappointment. He said that he wants to see everyone showing up with a smile, and that anyone who does not will be sent home immediately. He did not sound as if he was joking. “I have no time to see negative people,” he said. “To see sad players or sad assistants. I don’t like people who cry, who think negatively.”

Maybe that will work. But there is no avoiding the reality of how much this hurt. The game was into the fifth of eight added minutes when Rutter made it 2-2.

During the 18 minutes when Tottenham were ahead, it was impossible not to think of the future, of the potentially transformative power of the first league win since December, of the relative riches of being on 33 points, of the huge mood-change that would represent. It is only human to get a bit carried away, to project what you see into happier times to come.

It has certainly felt recently that Spurs just needed one win, somehow, a win that could remove their mental block, break the spell and allow them to be themselves again. Right up until Rutter’s goal, it felt as if they would finally have it.

The first challenge for De Zerbi is psychological. Since he arrived at Spurs, he has spoken about his job being to work on the players’ minds. Last week, he described how he had to be a “brother” and a “father” to the players more than a coach. So much of what he has been doing so far — even down to taking the players out for dinner last week — has been to that end.

This is a big job. Removing Spurs’ mental block is like cleaning the Augean stables. Under marginally different circumstances, in a world where Spurs won, the job might be done. But De Zerbi will have to go and lift the players again, and convince them all is not lost. His press conference on Saturday evening felt like the start of that.

De Zerbi has certainly earned the right to be heard. And while Spurs’ path to safety is narrower than ever, they at least look like they know how to put one foot in front of the other again. Even ending as painfully as it did, this game was Spurs’ best and most positive league performance of the season.

They had a game plan which they stuck to. They ran as hard as they could from the first whistle to the last. They pressed aggressively and selflessly, turning over the ball in dangerous positions, creating both goals. They went direct to Dominic Solanke and played off him. They had a solid base in midfield thanks to the returning Rodrigo Bentancur and Yves Bissouma. And they got Xavi Simons on the ball in pockets where he could hurt the opposition. Round pegs found round holes all over the pitch.

Perhaps none of this should be a surprise. This was not alchemy, it was just good players playing back at their natural level again. It was not De Zerbi casting a spell, but rather removing one. Spurs simply looked like themselves again. Maybe De Zerbi’s work is already paying off and the mentality is starting to change.

It is no solace, and besides the point, but if Spurs had played like this all season, they would need a telescope to see 18th place. The boardroom decision-makers do not deserve sympathy — this is the problem when you only find the right manager during the March international break.

Tempting as it is, there is nothing to be gained from imagining a world in which De Zerbi had more time with these players, the football they might have played, the teams they might have beaten, the games they might have won.

Instead, we have to take the world as it is. The world in which Spurs are in the relegation zone with five games left. There is only one treacherous path to Premier League survival next season, and it starts with winning at Molineux on Saturday. Then they need to win at Villa Park, too, and never look back.

It has to start with the display, performing as well as they did on Saturday, with the same commitment, unity and character. De Zerbi said afterwards that they played “with the right blood”. They have to keep getting on the ball and moving it forward, even if that exposes them to risk.

Performance alone can only ever be a necessary factor, rather than a sufficient one. Football at this end of the table is profoundly random. Spurs need to be lucky too, with injuries, decisions, deflections and little details — precisely the things that have gone against them for so long.

Despite all the churn, the drama, and the improvement on Saturday, they are still ultimately in the same position they have been for months, under multiple managers: desperately needing a win to ignite a move up the table. And time is running out.