“Last year was the best year ever on reflection,” Andy Rogers, managing director of women’s football at Tottenham Hotspur, tells The Athletic on a sunny, November Friday. He pauses, ventures a wry smile. “Living it was the worst. Obviously.”
That’s the funny thing about crucibles. Knowing it all ends OK requires making it through those hot, putrid flames.
And the flames in the case of Spurs’ women are recent enough that the memories stalk back into the room as he speaks: Rogers as the only member of technical staff on a double-decker coach with the squad in January, riding home after an FA Cup fourth-round defeat at Everton, “six or seven players,” Rogers says, lining up outside a makeshift office on its lower tier voicing angst that something was unravelling; the team then plummeting into a 10-match winless malaise to finish their Women’s Super League campaign — relegation avoided by virtue of Crystal Palace having as good as beaten them to it as early as February.
Sources close to the situation — who asked not to be named to protect relationships — speak of the players losing faith in Robert Vilahamn, the head coach who a year earlier had been the hero of a historic run to the team’s first FA Cup final.
Rogers’ office transformed into a centre of counsel, and he leaned heavily on striker and captain Bethany England to maintain group morale until the end of the season.
Finally, there was the last day of the WSL season, back at Everton, when the full-time whistle blew on a 1-1 draw and players and staff were allowed to collapse. Spurs had finished second-bottom. Tears came, belated and exorcising.
Eight matches into the new campaign, Spurs are fifth in the table, level on 15 points with north London rivals Arsenal, who visit Brisbane Road on Sunday, courtesy of five wins and three losses under Vilahamn’s replacement Martin Ho.
Few, if any, predicted this level of renaissance so quickly.
“People probably predicted we’d have four points by this point,” quips Ho, an Englishman who joined in July after two years in the same role with the women’s team at Norwegian club Brann. “Maybe.”
Ho, too, is smiling, but the journey has not been a fickle twist of fate.
Rather, this is a result of patience and a leadership restructure, most notably the appointment of former Arsenal chief executive Vinai Venkatesham to the same position at Tottenham in April and the hiring of former Everton and Manchester United assistant Ho.
But above all, it has been a journey of gnarled resilience.
Between January and May, the team went into self-preservation mode, says Rogers. Publicly, Spurs backed Vilahamn but Rogers says he knew change was necessary and imminent. The modus operandi was to survive a volatile season, and hope nothing imploded in the process.
At first, Ho thought his agent was kidding.
Nearly two months had passed since Tottenham parted ways with Vilahamn. Given the date was June 29, pre-season was already underway in his mind. But his agent was firm: Spurs wanted to speak. Permission was requested from Brann for them to do so.
Rogers had kept tabs on Ho for over a year. Glowing reviews from players who worked under him while he was at United, as well as former colleagues and competitors, painted a compelling portrait.
There was praise for the 35-year-old Liverpudlian’s blend of tactical nous, commitment to player development and unwavering standards on and off the pitch. The football is front-footed but not dogmatic. “Obsessive” was an adjective used often, endearingly. Defeats came with a post-match ritual: a scribbling of initial thoughts, followed by the game being watched back not once in full but twice. First, non-stop with the commentary on, then with a critical, punctilious eye.
But there was mostly an unyielding respect for Ho’s ability to imbue his players and staff with confidence, even when reading the riot act.
A call from Ho’s former United boss Casey Stoney, now head coach of Canada’s women’s national team, tipped the scales in his favour among the 12 finalists.
“She said, ‘I know Martin’s on your shortlist, and I’m just telling you, from my perspective, he’s simply outstanding’,” Rogers says. “Casey doesn’t give too many references to anyone. I went back to Vinai and said, ‘Even if we were wondering whether Martin was the right candidate — which we did — to get this recommendation from someone like Casey is pretty significant’.”
Put simply: There is no rejuvenation at Tottenham Women without Venkatesham.
His appointment in April was widely viewed as evidence that the club’s vision for a better future included their women’s setup, as one of Venkatesham’s greatest legacies was his influence on Arsenal’s women’s team, having restructured facilities and added a new building at the training ground, while the metered full-time move to playing home games at the Emirates Stadium helped them grow into one of the most successful teams in the world.
The new CEO officially began work in the summer, taking responsibility for all operational matters on and off the field. The women’s team were high on his agenda.
Rogers says Venkatesham’s greatest asset is his understanding and experience in the women’s game itself. “That’s not derogatory to previous leadership,” says Rogers. “Things can move a lot quicker, rather than spending six months explaining what a decision means and why.”
After Brann gave permission for Ho to speak to Spurs, he travelled to London. Four days of talk bled into each other as Ho, his agent, his family, Rogers, Venkatesham, Spurs’ then chairman Daniel Levy and other members of the board thrashed out details and expectations. The intensity and level of granular detail were a baptism for Ho.
Then the calls came.
News of Ho’s appointment broke on The Athletic as toasts were being made over dinner, the club still 24 hours from officially announcing the news. Rogers’ phone rang. Manchester United and England midfielder Grace Clinton, who spent the 2023-24 season on loan at Spurs, was on the other end, asking if the rumours were true.
A full-time technical team was assembled around Ho, with first-team coach Adam Jeffrey joining from the women’s team at London neighbours West Ham United, Ho’s former colleague Lawrence Shamieh coming south from Manchester United as assistant coach and the addition of a new head of analysis in Sara Cullis from Manchester City.
But the scale of the project made itself quickly evident during pre-season. The vestiges of 2024-25 clung on stubbornly. Last season, Tottenham relied on counter-attacks and low blocks. In initial training sessions under Ho, shoulders visibly dropped upon conceding a goal, players subconsciously slipping into timid defensive shapes to avoid letting in more.
“Before, we’d concede a goal and we didn’t show any personality or any character,” Ho says. “You could even see it statistically. Once we’d go one down, our possession stats and entrances into the opposition half and attacking third, they were basically zero last year. But I was like, ‘I’d rather lose 6-0 going on the front foot than not’.”
Ho held conversations with staff, emphasising the need to push players into “a different realm of thinking and confidence”, according to the goalkeeping coach Chris Williams.
“It was all about not going into matches against Chelsea, Arsenal, Manchester United or Manchester City with fear,” Williams says. “We had to make a real shift technically and tactically, but also mentally.”
Ho chipped away at his players, his efforts eventually manifesting in a pre-season friendly away to Arsenal in August. Three times that day, Spurs hit back after conceding a goal, eventually emerging with a 4-3 win over the new European champions.
“I think everybody after that game looked at each other and said, ‘Oh, we can really build something special here in this group’,” says Olivia Holdt, who signed with Spurs in January but managed only one goal and a single assist in 11 WSL appearances last season. In her eight league matches so far in this one, the 24-year-old Denmark international has already scored more (two goals) and surpassed her 2024-25 shot-creating actions (19 to 17).
“It’s not like we’re a whole new squad, but we played more individually (last season) because we were so broken down as individual players,” Holdt says. “Martin’s come in with a lot of new energy, trying to build our confidence, putting high standards in. It’s been a huge difference.”
But Ho is not a magic elixir. Process requires time on task.
Despite again showing resilience to come from a goal down to 2-1 against visitors Liverpool at the start of this month, defensive lapses against London City Lionesses last weekend saw them suffer a 4-2 away defeat. Defensive naivety, as well as a contrast in individual player quality, exposed them against Manchester City, who they lost 5-1 to at home in September, and reigning champions Chelsea in last month’s 1-0 away defeat.
Recruitment remains a constant conversation point.
Only 19-year-old Japan international centre-back Toko Koga and deadline-day signing Cathinka Tandberg, 21, were brought in over the summer.
Both deals broke the club’s transfer record of £250,000 (set when England joined from Chelsea in January 2023) and have vindicated their price tags. Forward Tandberg, a Norway international signed from Sweden’s Hammarby, has scored four goals and assisted another in eight matches, while Koga has shown herself to be one of the WSL’s best young defenders.
Koga had agreed to join Spurs from Dutch side Feyenoord early last season, but that torrid final 10-match winless run led her to reconsider. When Rogers made a Hail Mary call, he says Koga was already moved into a players’ shared house with another London club. But he and Ho were firm in their sell. By the end of the week, Koga was moving her belongings back out of that house and undergoing a medical with Tottenham.
The January transfer window is expected to be busy, with Rogers keen to ensure there is competition for every position. Another club record transfer fee will likely be paid.
More academy personnel are expected to join over the next year, while long-term stadium plans are being mooted.
Where previous leadership preferred a “one-club” model for marketing and commercial purposes, specific staff members are set to be appointed solely for the women’s team to avoid friction in priorities, Rogers says.
It is not lost on Rogers that Spurs’ women have been here before.
Three years after becoming a full-time setup in 2020, they were staving off WSL relegation on the penultimate day of the season. Twelve months on from reaching the FA Cup final for the first time in 2024, they slumped to finish 11th out of 12, and were on their way to a third managerial appointment in less than five years.
But this time, a three-year plan to break into the Champions League spots is spoken about aloud.
It perhaps explains why the spectre of Sunday’s north London derby at Brisbane Road is not being greeted with the usual whispered anguish — in the 16 previous competitive matches against Arsenal across all competitions, Tottenham have lost 14, drawn one and won one, that 1-0 WSL victory coming in this fixture in December 2023.
“I’m not delusional, we aren’t the finished article,” says Ho. “We’re miles away from where we need to be. But we’ve changed mentality. We’ve changed the competitive edge in the team.
“The thing wrapping all of this up is optimism. It’s my job to make sure we can maintain that from a culture perspective. But that’s a really big thing for me that people can already see where we’re going and where we want to go.”
