The sense of shame never really goes away.
“It’s the embarrassment of: ‘You’ve taken this club down’,” Ashley Westwood says. “That’s the hardest thing and that’ll always be in the records, that we got Aston Villa relegated, which is hurtful even to this day.”
It is a decade ago that Villa slipped into the Championship, ending a 29-year stay in English football’s top flight.
“From Rotterdam to Rotherham?” read a banner in the away end at Old Trafford on the day that Villa’s fate was sealed — a reference to the scene of their famous European Cup triumph against Bayern Munich in 1982, and the prospect of a trip to one of the second tier’s less salubrious outposts 34 years later.
Remarkably, Tottenham Hotspur, the Europa League holders, find themselves in danger of treading a similar path, from Bilbao to Lincoln in their case – and in the space of only 12 months.
“Tottenham away, ole ole!” chanted supporters of Lincoln City, the table-topping League One club, earlier this month.
Beaten 3-0 at home by Nottingham Forest, Spurs are now one place and one point above the drop zone.
The last time Spurs were relegated was 1977.
Financially, there is no precedent in the modern era for a club of Tottenham’s size — the ninth-wealthiest in the world, according to Deloitte, with revenue of €672.6million (£581m, $773m) in 2024-25 — slipping into England’s second tier. Playing Champions League and Championship football in the same calendar year just doesn’t happen.
There are, however, several examples of what you might describe as big and established Premier League clubs suffering relegation after prolonged stays in the top flight – Villa (2016), Newcastle (2009) and Leeds (2004) all spring to mind — and revisiting their experiences takes you on a journey Spurs will be desperate to avoid.
“It’s almost like, ‘Oh, they’ll be alright, they’re Aston Villa, they’re big enough’. But it doesn’t matter who you are if you’re not performing as players,” Westwood, the 35-year–old former Villa midfielder who now plays for Charlotte FC in Major League Soccer, says.
Matthew Kilgallon nods. “That was the saying, wasn’t it? ‘Leeds United are too good to go down? People think, ‘We’ve got (Mark) Viduka, we’ve got (Alan) Smith’.
“But no confidence, losing, not sure what’s happening with your career… it spiralled and just got worse and worse.”
Kilgallon was breaking through as a young centre-back at Leeds in 2004, at a time when the club were in financial trouble. That was a different era, when social media was not a thing.
“I’m not on my phone anymore. I’m completely done with it. Only family and stuff,” Micky van de Ven, the Spurs centre-back, told the Dutch broadcaster Ziggo Sport in the wake of the 5-2 Champions League defeat at Atletico Madrid last week.
“When you’re losing every week, it ain’t easy,” Westwood says. “The scrutiny… I feel for those (Spurs) boys because I’ve been in it. It was Twitter back in my day, and you’re looking at the abuse — my wife was looking for it, you go searching for it. I would get in from games and I’d have a drink, and all of a sudden I’d be sinking a bottle of red wine on the sofa because you can’t go out. You get yourself into a hole.
“I remember even the postman would come to the door and say, ‘What’s going on at the weekend, mate?'”
Westwood, who is talking on a video call from the United States, shakes his head as the memories come back.
“But it’s not only yourself that’s affected by it all, it’s the family as well. So then life becomes miserable, and a footballer that’s unhappy doesn’t perform.
“As I’m looking back at it now, it’s like a nightmare.”
When Leeds were relegated in 2004, after five successive top-five finishes between 1998 and 2002 and only three years after playing in a Champions League semi-final, their downfall was a story of reckless spending and financial mismanagement under the chairmanship of Peter Ridsdale, leading to a firesale of players and the threat of administration.
That, Eirik Bakke points out, marks a huge difference — night and day — between the plight of Leeds and Tottenham, who publicly admitted this season they need to increase their wage bill to be more competitive.
“But this you can compare to Tottenham,” Bakke, the 48-year-old former Leeds midfielder, goes on to say. “When you are at a big club and there are big expectations, the crowd goes against you a little bit (when results are poor) because they’re used to higher standards — and we feel that as players as well. So that is similar to Spurs.
“I have been there myself when I don’t want the ball. You are hiding out on the pitch because it’s like a burden on your shoulders to play there, and when it starts to go against you, it’s so much tougher than playing for some other teams who have everything to gain. At the end, it felt like we had everything to lose.”
Injured and back home in Norway for the birth of his son, Bakke watched Leeds lose their Premier League status on a television set in a maternity ward. Beaten 4-1 at Bolton Wanderers, Leeds were effectively relegated to the second tier with two games remaining because of their vastly inferior goal difference.
“I can remember the bus journey home from that game — horrendous,” Kilgallon, now 42, says. “You could hear a pin drop.”
The abiding image for many people who were watching that day was when the cameras homed in on a young boy who had his shirt off, ‘Leeds Til I Die” written across his chest in black capital letters and tears streaming down his face. Ricky Allman’s heart was broken.
“For the last 10 minutes, the Bolton fans were singing, ‘You’re going down in a minute’. I knew it was just a matter of time and the reality of relegation was hitting home. For an 11-year-old, it was the worst possible feeling,” Allman told The Athletic many years later.
Kilgallon was on the bench that day. “You look at the fans and what it means and you go, ‘Oh my God’,” he says. “People spend fortunes following Leeds home and away. Then you start thinking about people who work at the stadium and the ones they have to let go, and it just gets worse and worse.”
Westwood agrees. “You’re fighting for the chef’s career, you’re fighting for the kitman’s career. Relegation ruins everything, so you’ve got the added weight of other staff members as well, who will be struggling to pay mortgages if relegation hits.”
But is everyone really fighting in this scenario? Or are some players already talking to their agent about exit plans?
The Athletic reported last week that one Spurs player has expressed to his team-mates that he is not too concerned by the possibility of relegation because he knows he can — and believes he will — leave the club this summer. That kind of thing is not uncommon.
“You get a sense of when you’re in there, lads start thinking, ‘If we go down, I’ll be alright, I’ll get out’ — and that’s the biggest worry,” Westwood says.
“I got booed. But I turned up every week and I gave my all because that club made me who I am today by taking a chance on me. Whereas I don’t know if some people can ask themselves the same question.”
At Villa Park, the atmosphere turned mutinous. Randy Lerner, Villa’s American then-owner, had lost interest and put the club up for sale in 2014. Perennial relegation strugglers at that point, Villa were circling the Premier League plughole. Player recruitment was muddled, managerial appointments flawed (Remi Garde lasted 147 days in that relegation season) and the team underperformed. Cue a disconnect with the fans.
“I remember at home there were big arrows pointing to the goal because we hadn’t scored in ages,” Westwood says.
“It was just a toxic environment and so hard to play in.”
In February, after a 6-0 home defeat against Liverpool, defender Joleon Lescott tweeted — accidentally, he said — a picture of an expensive car. A couple of months later, when relegation was confirmed at Old Trafford with four games remaining, Lescott described it as a “weight off the shoulders”. The supporters went berserk.
The wider fallout at Villa was predictable. Relegation, combined with Lerner’s desire to get the club off his hands, led to a redundancy programme being set up to reduce the workforce by around a third. Steve Hollis, the chairman, was left astonished after some of the staff told him they would be willing to work for nothing because they loved the club so much.
As for the players, their contracts had relegation clauses, and Westwood had no complaints about that.
“If you’ve taken the club down, you’ve lost a load of money — and rightly so,” he says.
The closest comparison to Spurs in the Premier League era is probably Newcastle’s relegation in 2009.
Newcastle’s form in the second half of that season was woeful, there were red cards aplenty, including three in the last four games, and an alarming lack of spirit and fight (the kind of fight you need, not head loss and ill-discipline) in a squad that should never have found itself in the bottom three.
“We had a good team, easily good enough to be challenging for the Europa League,” their former left-back Jose Enrique told The Athletic in 2020. “But football is such a mentality-based game. By the time Alan took over, so many players were already broken.”
Alan is Alan Shearer, the hometown hero who was brought in with eight matches remaining to try to clear up a mess that was entirely of Newcastle’s own making, and due in no small part to the club’s owner at the time Mike Ashley, whose erratic decision-making led to baffling appointments at all levels.
A chaotic season started with Kevin Keegan resigning as manager after three games, citing constructive dismissal (he was later awarded £2million, $2.7m at current exchange rates) after claiming he had no control of transfer dealings.
Joe Kinnear was Keegan’s replacement — a curious choice, to say the least — and famously turned the air blue at his opening press conference because of reports that he had given the players a day off on his first day in charge.
“It is none of your f***ing business. What the f*** are you going to do? You ain’t got the balls to be a f***ing manager,” Kinnear said, introducing himself to the journalists who cover the club.
Ryan Taylor arrived from Wigan Athletic at the end of that window as part of a swap deal with French winger Charles N’Zogbia. His first game was at West Bromwich Albion, where Kinnear was taken ill at the team hotel, leading to Chris Hughton being placed in temporary charge. Newcastle won 3-2, but that was one of only two victories until the end of the season.
“Something very similar was going on with us to Tottenham now — you just can’t see the next win,” Taylor says. “It was painful and it was tough.
“To be honest, we had players who, effectively, were out of contract (in the summer) and didn’t want to be there, so we were up against it. But put all that to one side and we just didn’t have any form.”
Taylor does not name any names, but one of the players out of contract at the end of that season was Michael Owen, who joined Manchester United after Newcastle were relegated.
In later years, Owen claimed he put his “body on the line” for Newcastle in the closing stages of that campaign when he was suffering with a groin problem (he missed the penultimate game against Fulham and came on as a substitute on the final day at Villa Park).
Paul Ferris, who was brought in by Shearer to oversee the medical department during that eight-game spell, tells a different story in his book The Boy on the Shed. A close confidant of Shearer, Ferris writes that he asked Owen if he would be fit to play against Fulham in “the most important game of the season”.
He continues: “Michael (then) placed his hand over his groin. ‘Not sure, to be honest. It doesn’t feel too bad. But I’m out of contract at the end of the season. What if I rip my groin on Saturday? I’ll not get a contract at another club if I’m injured’.”
Newcastle, minus Owen and the suspended Joey Barton, who had been sent off at Liverpool and clashed with Shearer in the dressing room afterwards, were beaten at home by Fulham. Another 1-0 defeat at Villa, where the home supporters basked in Newcastle’s misery — nobody does schadenfreude quite like football fans — ended the club’s 16-year stay in the top flight.
“It kind of summed it up — a big deflection off Damien Duff and you go, ‘Jesus Christ, is that the goal that has sent us down?'” Taylor, 41, says.
“It was a horrible day because you feel like you’ve let down a city, not just a club.”
Typically, the road to redemption begins with an exodus. “Damien Duff openly said he didn’t want to play in the Championship, which is absolutely fine,” Taylor says. “He wanted to stay in the highest league possible, which is not a problem because what we didn’t want on board was lads who didn’t want to be here.”
That was spelled out in no uncertain terms at a players-only meeting in late July, 48 hours after Newcastle had suffered a humiliating pre-season defeat against Leyton Orient.
Taylor explains: “That (meeting) got led by the senior players: ‘Listen, whoever doesn’t want to be here, there’s the door, get onto your agents because this football club needs to be back in the Premier League, so we can’t carry people’.”
Some signalled their intention to move on. Others committed to being part of a Newcastle team that returned to the Premier League at the first attempt.
Elsewhere, it was a different story. Leeds took 16 years to get back to the Premier League, and things initially got worse before they got better at Villa, who won only one of their first 12 matches in the Championship, leading to Roberto Di Matteo being sacked after just 124 days.
Westwood, who spent the first half of that season with Villa before joining Burnley in the January transfer window, talks about playing with “a big target on your back” in the Championship.
“Did teams try harder against us? It certainly felt like that,” he says.
Lincoln, in the nicest possible way, is not where Spurs need to be going anytime soon.
