The New York Times

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.

It was billed as the game neither side could afford to lose — and Tottenham Hotspur lost it. Badly.

A meeting of the teams in 16th and 17th place in the Premier League was always going to be wracked by tension at this stage of the season, but it was Nottingham Forest who held their nerve to secure a precious 3-0 victory that plunged Spurs even deeper into trouble.

They remain outside the bottom three courtesy of West Ham’s defeat at Aston Villa, but with daunting games to come and with no league win in 2026, Spurs’ top-flight status and Igor Tudor’s position as interim manager is in severe jeopardy.

We analyse the main talking points.

Is Tudor's time up?

There were people hanging from lamp posts and sitting on the roofs of bus stops when Tottenham's team coach arrived at the stadium. Thousands of fans lined the streets to show the players their support and smoke from flares wafted through the air, while inside the ground the South Stand was transformed into a sea of flags and banners.

It felt like Spurs were about to play a cup final — and the fans certainly did their bit. Unfortunately for Tottenham, once the football started it all fell apart in depressingly familiar fashion.

After two positive performances against Liverpool and Atletico Madrid, when expectations were low, interim head coach Igor Tudor will now come under huge scrutiny again. Spurs started the game positively, with Mathys Tel a constant threat, but they never recovered from Igor Jesus’s header just before half-time.

Tudor reacted by bringing on Lucas Bergvall and Destiny Udogie for Micky van de Ven and Djed Spence, but the changes did not work. Bergvall was, understandably, slightly sluggish on his second appearance since recovering from ankle surgery, while Udogie looked threatening going forward but was sloppy when defending.

Ultimately, Tudor made a huge mistake with his team selection. Xavi Simons, who scored twice against Atletico and has been one of Spurs’ best players in the last few months, was left on the bench and did not appear until the 67th minute, shortly after Morgan Gibbs-White had extended Forest’s lead.

Spurs do not play another game until April 12, after which they have seven games to save their Premier League status and avoid a first relegation since 1977. If they are going to roll the dice again, now is the time to do it.

Jay Harris

How did Gibbs-White haunt Spurs?

When the traveling Forest fans began chanting the name of their club's owner Evangelos Marinakis with just over an hour gone, it was very much inspired by the man who had just put them 2-0 in front.

Back in the summer, Marinakis had flown out to Forest's training camp in Portugal in an effort to personally persuade Morgan Gibbs-White to reject the advances of Tottenham and sign a new deal with Forest. Tottenham believed they had activated a release clause in Gibbs-White’s contract but Forest were determined not to lose one of the most talismanic figures in their squad.

Gibbs-White stayed and, eight months later, of course it was he who forced home the second goal to in effect seal Forest's triumph in a game that could have a huge influence on the fight to avoid relegation.

Persuading Gibbs-White to stay had held significance long before this afternoon, with the Forest captain having contributed by far the most Premier League goals this season.

This was Gibbs-White’s ninth top-flight goal of a campaign in which no other player has contributed more than three league goals. None has been more vital than this one, which actually came amid a relatively quiet afternoon for the Forest No 10.

But the 26-year-old stepped up when it mattered, to leave Spurs wondering what might have been.

Paul Taylor

How did Forest finally fire from a set piece?

Not only did Igor Jesus find a good time to score his third Premier League goal, but Forest found a good time to rediscover their threat from set pieces.

Jesus has scored 13 goals since his £16million summer move from Botafogo, but has struggled to find the net in the top flight, having scored just twice before today. But a slight shift in Forest’s corner routine helped Vitor Pereira’s side to make the breakthrough in north London.

Jesus himself won a second corner in quick succession when his acrobatic shot was saved in equally acrobatic fashion by Guglielmo Vicario, and when Neco Williams delivered an enticing ball to the far post, Jesus was well positioned to head home in simple but emphatic fashion.

Elliot Anderson is Forest’s regular corner taker, but the Wales international showed quality in his delivery to carve out the opportunity.

Forest had also posed a threat from corners against Midtjylland in Thursday's Europa League tie, where Dilane Bakwa had looked the part. But while the winger was back on the bench at Tottenham, it was Williams who stepped up to be the catalyst for the vital first goal in this relegation battle.

Even now, Forest's record is hardly prolific. No team has scored fewer from set pieces this season and, while they have fared a little better from corners, there is still significant scope to improvement.

With work still to do in the relegation battle, this may be the template for Forest to follow.

Paul Taylor

Why was Xavi Simons left out?

It took a while for Xavi Simons to settle at Spurs after he joined from RB Leipzig towards the end of the summer transfer window. Then head coach Thomas Frank rotated the 22-year-old between the left wing and central attacking midfield. His technical quality has never been in question, but he has struggled to cope with the physicality of English football.

Since he scored his first goal for Spurs in a 2-0 victory over Brentford in December, which is the last time they won a league game at home, Simons has been a rare bright spark. The only person who seems to doubt his ability is Tudor — and it had dire consequences against Forest.

Tudor’s job when he replaced Frank was to boost the squad’s confidence, but he clearly does not have a lot of faith in Simons. The Netherlands international started Tudor’s first two league games in charge and has been forced to accept cameos from the bench in their three matches since then.

Spurs have nobody to connect the midfield and attack when he does not start. They become over reliant on Mathys Tel. The pair were excellent against Atletico, so why did Tudor not reunite them for Forest?

The whole stadium applauded when Simons came on as a substitute in the 63rd minute. He drew a few fouls and drove Spurs forward, but the damage was done. Whatever happens going forward, he has to be an integral part of the starting XI.

Jay Harris

What next for Spurs?

Sunday, April 12: Sunderland (Away), Premier League, 2pm UK, 9am ET

What next for Forest?

The Carabao Cup final may be the showpiece event on Sunday, but there is also a crucial battle at the bottom of the Premier League as Tottenham Hotspur host Nottingham Forest earlier in the day.

Both sides have changed head coaches this season (Forest are on their fourth) and both have disappointed, finding themselves in a relegation battle neither had expected.

With Igor Tudor and Vitor Pereira desperate to find the first league wins of their tenures, our Tottenham writer, Elias Burke, and his Forest counterpart, Paul Taylor, discuss the game.

How big is this match for your club’s manager? Is their position in doubt?

Elias: Before Tottenham came to life against Atletico Madrid on Tuesday, I would have struggled to see how Tudor could keep his job if they failed to beat Forest on Sunday. Until last weekend’s draw against Liverpool — Spurs’ only point from Tudor’s four league matches — there was little evidence to suggest he had made a positive impact of any kind.

Then there’s the international break, which follows the Forest game, offering a potential replacement some time on the training ground to implement his methods, though many players will be away representing their nations. If Tottenham are beaten handily on Sunday, the board may be forced into a change, but Tudor has finally built some momentum. Fans and players appear to be responding well to his recent tactical changes.

Paul: This match is not going to decide Pereira’s future at Forest, but his fate might walk hand in hand with the club’s Premier League status.

The Portuguese coach was appointed because of the job he did in keeping Wolverhampton Wanderers in the Premier League last season. If he cannot stage a repeat of that in Forest’s eight remaining games, his position will be scrutinised when Evangelos Marinakis stages his usual summer appraisal of the season.

It does, though, feel as though this match might have a significant say in how the relegation battle turns out.

What recent positives have you seen that can give fans confidence?

Elias: It was all very miserable until Tottenham’s battling performance at Anfield last weekend, which has restored some hope that they could have enough to beat the drop.

If Tottenham can match that fight and hunger against Forest and add the sprinkling of quality in possession and the final third that they demonstrated against Atletico on Tuesday, they will have a decent chance of a first home league win since beating Brentford 2-0 on December 6.

Paul: Forest’s performances have, generally, been better. Pereira has given them more identity and more freedom to attack than they had under Sean Dyche.

Thursday’s performance in Denmark, where Forest became the first side to beat Midtjylland on home soil this season, underlined the improvement, as they secured a quarter-final tie against Porto via a 2-1 victory on the night and subsequent 3-0 success in a penalty shootout.

Goals remain a problem — Forest have scored only two goals in their last seven home games in the top flight — but the one source of encouragement is that they are creating chances. Against Fulham, Ola Aina was only denied by the bar, Dan Ndoye had a goal chalked off for possibly the tightest VAR call that has been conjured up yet and Taiwo Awoniyi and Elliot Anderson spurned decent chances.

As they showed against Midtjylland — when Nico Dominguez and Ryan Yates both netted in impressive fashion — if they keep creating opportunities, the goals will surely come.

What has been the lowest point of the season?

Elias: How to choose? The misery and creeping recognition that Spurs could really struggle this season began after the 1-0 home defeat against Chelsea that could, and probably should, have been three or four. The 4-1 defeats, home and away, in the north London derby. The reverse of this weekend’s fixture, when Spurs were played off the park in a 3-0 loss at the City Ground. They’d all be fitting answers. But for how it completely deflated a fanbase, the 3-1 home loss to Crystal Palace this month might just be the worst.

Paul: There have been a few… the 0-0 draw with Wolves that sealed Dyche’s fate or the 1-0 defeat at Braga that was one of the flattest Forest performances in years — a game that they lost without the home side mustering a shot on target.

But the lowest point in terms of the ramifications that followed was August’s 3-0 home defeat to West Ham United. Not just because of the performance, but because it proved to be Nuno Espirito Santo’s final game in charge and the end of a memorable era. Nuno’s tenure unravelled as much off the pitch as on it, but when the final whistle blew on that game, it felt like a landmark moment — and the point at which things began to really unravel.

How damaging would relegation be?

Elias: Hugely. Over the past 15 years, Tottenham established themselves as part of the Premier League’s ‘Big Six’, a title considered more financial than merit-based, though they have typically warranted the label since their fourth-placed finish in 2009-10. Should they suffer relegation, they would lose hundreds of millions of pounds of revenue from commercial and television deals, and would likely have to sell many of their star players at cut prices. Sections of the fanbase have called for a new era at Spurs for years, but it would take years to rebound from this reset.

Paul: Forest fought for 23 years for a return to the top flight. This time last year, three seasons after promotion, it felt as though the club had established itself as a regular face in the Premier League.

Having secured a return to European competition via the Europa League, this was not the way this campaign was meant to turn out. What was meant to be an adventure has become a nightmare. Relegation would be a hammer blow, not just because of the financial implications and the prospect of losing at least some of their key players, but because it would feel like an unexpected backward step following a few years of remarkable progress.

Match predictions

Elias: Analyse Tottenham’s form and recent performances in the league, and there’s no real justification to suggest they will win their first league match of the year. But they were excellent against Atletico on Tuesday, and much stranger things have happened than 16th beating 17th at home. I’m optimistically predicting a strangely comfortable 2-0 win for Spurs.

Taylor: Tottenham sit bottom of the Premier League form table with only one point from their last six games — but Forest are immediately above them, having collected three points from three draws.

But confidence at Forest has not completely eroded. In fact, it will have been boosted significantly in Denmark. Forest to secure a narrow and entirely nervy 1-0 win.

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For large parts of this season, it has felt like the whole of football has been rubbernecking in Tottenham Hotspur’s direction.

A point above the relegation places with eight games left and without a Premier League win since the turn of the year, Tottenham are in genuine danger of dropping out of England’s top division for the first time since 1977. Will they scramble to safety over the next two months? Or will they pay the ultimate price for what is, in the words of one senior executive from a fellow Champions League team, “incompetence of the highest order”?

The Athletic has been gathering the views of a variety of leading figures within the sport — club officials, boardroom decision-makers, analysts, agents and coaches — to establish what they think has brought Spurs to this position.

As well as approaching various people from around the Premier League, we have also widened the scope to other countries to see what they make of the Tottenham crisis. The Bundesliga, for example.

“We saw this here (in Germany), with a few big clubs getting relegated, and it was always a long time coming,” says a boardroom figure at one leading Bundesliga side. “Lots of decisions were wrong over many years, and it looks like the same situation (with Tottenham). I would worry (if I were working at Spurs). There are some very big German clubs that assumed (after relegation) that promotion would be natural, but it never is. Hamburg spent seven years in our second division.”

For context, everyone we have approached has been given the opportunity to remain anonymous so they can speak with freedom and not have to worry about damaging relationships with the Tottenham hierarchy. All of those quoted in this article are currently working in football.

It is also important to note that some of them talked to us before the 3-2 Champions League win against Atletico Madrid on Wednesday which suggested Spurs might have overcome their worst form. The 1-1 draw at Liverpool last weekend, featuring a 90th-minute equaliser from Richarlison, was another encouraging result.

On the flipside, the 5-2 first-leg defeat to Atletico last week was startling in all sorts of ways and led, ultimately, to Tottenham being eliminated from the Champions League, losing that round-of-16 tie 7-5 on aggregate. Igor Tudor’s position as head coach remains the subject of scrutiny and, among all the people we have spoken to, not one was willing to speak up for the Croatian, or support the reasons for hiring him just over a month ago after the sacking of summer appointment Thomas Frank.

Others have questioned whether the players have taken enough responsibility. “There are so many who are in the business for themselves,” says one high-ranking executive. “It’s all that shrugging and pointing — ‘It’s not my fault!’ — like watching a kids’ team.”

One agent who spoke to The Athletic claimed it is openly known that some of Tottenham’s regular starters want to leave, and pointed to reports that England midfielder Conor Gallagher had become the club’s highest wage-earner after joining from Atletico in January as another potential problem.

“Daniel Levy (the long-time club chairman fired last September) would not have done that deal on those wages, but they panicked,” he said. “So if he (Gallagher) is the highest-earning player at the club, you’ve probably got (Micky) Van de Ven, (Cristian) Romero and others saying, ‘Hold on a f***ing second…’.”

Mostly, though, almost everyone has noted Spurs’ plight is not just about one decision but more a culmination of events at a time when the club have become a financial juggernaut.

They are widely regarded as having one of the best stadiums in Europe, one where non-football activities such as concerts, NFL games and boxing events helped the club post record revenues last year of £528.4million, up 152 per cent from 2016, the year before their old White Hart Lane home was demolished. Their training complex, opened in 2012, is also considered among the finest in the country.

“It starts with the expectations of the fans, which are much higher than they should be,” says one high-ranking Premier League executive. “That’s not because Tottenham aren’t a big club and don’t have the resources to compete, it’s simply because other clubs are further ahead in that journey of being elite.

“There has been a focus, rightly, on infrastructure: get the stadium built, drive up the revenues, give yourself the best chance of competing on the field through the financial power you have created, and then make sure you have the training facilities. The problem is, having generated those revenues, they haven’t invested in the right way, at the right time, with the right players, so they have ended up with a squad that looks unbalanced. As a consequence, successive managers have struggled to get performance levels to meet the fans’ expectations.

“Have they had the right management over the last decade? The answer is probably no, and when I say ‘management’, I mean sporting directors, chief executives and people around the club who really know and understand football.

“They have appointed a coach (Tudor) who has never played or coached in the Premier League, has only ever been at clubs for 12 months at a time, and immediately the fans have taken against him because they look at his record and say, ‘What the hell?’

“So, you’ve got this combination of events over many years that have led to this point. There is a toxicity around the club and a sense that this (relegation) is almost inevitable now.

“If it happens, it could be good for the club in the sense that it might create the watershed moment for everyone to wake up (and realise) the focus now needs to be on football – not NFL games, pop concerts or the racetrack under the stadium, but football. In order for that to happen, they need people in there who know football from back to front.”

The inference, plainly, is that is not the case at the moment.

Others say the same, citing the club’s recruitment as being high among the list of failures.

“I think, fundamentally, Spurs don’t know what they are,” says one club chairman. “They can’t do what Bournemouth and Brighton do. They can’t even do what Crystal Palace do. Then they can’t sign the players that Arsenal, Chelsea and the rest (of the big spenders) do, because those clubs have always had a solid structure in terms of financial stability and they (Tottenham) are also just not attractive enough.

“When you look at who they have signed, the personalities just don’t make sense. They have signed really badly in general, but they have also had the classic problem that a lot of clubs experience: they have had a lot of different coaches with different styles, and a lot of different sporting directors, employing different ways of building a squad, and they have ended up with this Frankenstein’s monster of all sorts of different types of players, personality-wise, style-wise and age-wise. It’s just incoherent.”

Inevitably, Levy’s name has come up a lot. Tottenham’s former chairman was sacked early this season by the Lewis family, the majority shareholders, after running the club for them for 24 years.

Would Spurs be in this mess if he was still overseeing business as their highest-ranked executive? It is a question that will polarise opinion among Tottenham’s supporters, many of whom protested against Levy’s leadership and will doubtless point out that many of the decisions that backfired in recent years were made by him. But it is clear that, within the sport, his departure is regarded as a big factor in this slide into trouble.

“He was never the problem,” says one Premier League executive, matter-of-factly.

“This will probably upset a lot of Spurs fans,” adds an agent, “but the biggest issue is the departure of Daniel Levy. If Daniel was there now, there is no way they would be in this mess. It’s been horribly mismanaged.”

“You cannot underestimate the seismic change in the boardroom and how that has impacted things,” says another executive, from one of England’s leading clubs. “Levy ran everything for 20-odd years. Now, they’re looking inexperienced. You only have to look at other big clubs who have struggled or been relegated — there’s been chaos and change in the boardroom.

“Change was needed at the start of the season and they looked at Frank (hired away from a smaller Premier League club, Brentford) as that guy. When Frank was sacked there was no obvious replacement but, sometimes, it’s so clear that there’s no way back for a manager.

“What’s happened since is not surprising, because of the lack of options to lead the club forward. They hired the only person in Europe who would take the career risk of relegating a Super League club. I still think they’ll get out of it, but it’s going to be much tighter than I previously thought.”

More will become clear at the weekend, when Tottenham, in 16th position, play at home on Sunday against a Nottingham Forest side one place below them. West Ham, level on points with Forest, go to Aston Villa in a game kicking off at the same time and are currently showing the best survival spirit among the endangered teams. Spurs, meanwhile, have not won a league game at home since December 6.

“When you analyse their performances, there isn’t really any identity,” says a leading club analyst. “Thomas Frank’s Brentford team were a great example of a team with a very clear identity who knew exactly what they wanted to do, with and without the ball. But that didn’t translate to Spurs at all.

“There was none of the defensive structure you saw under (Antonio) Conte and none of the front-foot play you saw under (Ange) Postecoglou. They were trying to combine both, but ended up doing neither.”

The nadir for Spurs came in that tragicomedy in Madrid last week, when they were 4-0 down after 21 minutes and their 23-year-old goalkeeper, Antonin Kinsky, making only his third start of the season, was substituted in the 17th minute having given away two of the first three goals with mistakes.

“That was a mess,” says the analyst. “He (Kinsky) looked out of his depth and, although it was horrible, I could see why they took him off. But I don’t rate (the usual first-choice Guglielmo) Vicario either.

“Romero, Van de Ven, (Dejan) Kulusevski, (Pedro) Porro, (Dominic) Solanke, (James) Maddison, (Mohammed) Kudus… they’ve got all these players who look great when they first arrive, but they don’t sustain it.

“They have been a poor team for two years. I don’t think they’re bad players, but it looks like the culture and environment are poor. Postecoglou was appointed because they wanted to change the style, Frank was appointed because they wanted to change the culture, but under the new guy (Tudor), it’s all about trying to stay up at any cost. It’s all very confused, and it shows on the pitch.”

Incompetence of the highest order? The boardroom figure who used those words is willing to elaborate.

“They have everything they should need to succeed,” he says. “To have that infrastructure and not exploit it to its maximum by making poor football decisions, that is absolutely unacceptable.”

Will Spurs stay up? That, of course, is the key question and, despite everything, most of the replies we got to it were yes.

But then what?

“Whatever happens next, they have years of work ahead of them,” says one Premier League executive. “They have so many average players they need to get out, as well as spending the money to get new players in, and that’s going to be a massive challenge.”

Welcome to week 31 of The Athletic’s Premier League predictions challenge, where I’m hoping Max Dowman’s dramatic late goal for Arsenal has reignited the title race that really matters.

Arsenal’s 2-0 home win against Everton, secured in stoppage time by 16-year-old substitute Dowman, was one of two correct scoreline predictions for me last week, taking me back to within eight points of the top of the table after my recent slump.

The subscribers are still leading the way, just one point ahead of six-year-old Wilfred, but last week gave me hope that it’s not over yet.

I got eight results wrong, but two correct scorelines, plus a bonus point for each — and in this stupid game, in which I have found myself outwitted by a child and by our wonderful subscribers, that has offered me a lifeline.

Each week since the season began in August, four of us — young Wilfred, a guest subscriber on rotation, an algorithm and I — have been predicting the Premier League scores with varying degrees of success.

We are awarding three points for a correct scoreline and one point for a correct result. We are also offering a bonus for any “unique” correct predictions, so for example, I got four points for Arsenal beating Everton 2-0 (cheers, Max!) and another four for Manchester United’s 3-1 win against Aston Villa. On the same basis, Liverpool fan Tim, from New York, picked up a bonus point for the subscribers as he was the only one to back Newcastle to come out on top away to Chelsea.

Overall, it was a low-scoring week: four points apiece for Wilfred, the subscribers and the algorithm … and a rather flattering eight for me.

That leaves the subscribers’ slender one-point lead over Wilfred intact. The algorithm, pleasingly, is languishing in last place.

There are only eight Premier League games this week, with those involving Manchester City and Arsenal (against Crystal Palace and Wolverhampton Wanderers respectively) being rearranged due to their meeting in the Carabao Cup final on Sunday. Arsenal’s game at Wolves was played last month — a crazy 2-2 draw, which none of us predicted — but City vs Palace is yet to be rescheduled.

This week’s guest subscriber is Elizabeth, a 42-year-old Newcastle United supporter from San Francisco. Good luck, Elizabeth!

Our subscriber’s match of the week

Tottenham vs Nottingham Forest, Sunday, 2.15pm UK/10.15am ET

Elizabeth says: “With both Tottenham and Forest hovering dangerously close to the relegation zone, expect a scrap. Neither Vitor Pereira nor Igor Tudor has any league wins. Can Spurs leverage home advantage and get the win, or will it get away again? Grab the popcorn!”

Tottenham 1-2 Nottingham Forest

Oli says: “This is such a huge game, which promises to boost one team’s survival hopes significantly while plunging the other towards the abyss. My feeling at the start of the week was that I would go for a Forest win; as encouraging as Tottenham’s 1-1 draw at Liverpool was, I still felt Forest were showing more application, togetherness and their stomach for the fight.

“The way Tottenham rallied to beat Atletico Madrid on Wednesday has prompted a dramatic rethink. That, plus an extra day to recover from their European exertions, with Forest also going to extra time and penalties in Denmark on Thursday, leads me to switch to a home win. I know I should stick to my instinct — not least to help The Athletic’s design team, who will have to redo the graphic — but for once this season, I’m going for a Spurs victory."

Tottenham 2-1 Nottingham Forest

Oli’s other predictions

Bournemouth vs Manchester United

Bournemouth are unbeaten in five meetings with Manchester United (two wins, three draws; 13 goals scored, only seven conceded), so going for an away win in Friday's fixture feels a bit lazy. Maybe it is, but I just feel United have more firepower and, in Bruno Fernandes, they have the Premier League’s most in-form player.

Bournemouth 1-2 Manchester United

Brighton vs Liverpool

Sorry, but this one comes into the same category as Bournemouth vs Manchester United: so many reasons to think the team from the south coast have the quality to make life very difficult for their opponents, but also a lazy fallback assumption that the underperforming heavyweights from the north-west will prevail on account of their superior attacking resources and their greater need. Liverpool’s performance against Galatasaray on Wednesday showed what they’re capable of when they’re on song. That just hasn’t happened anything like often enough this season.

Brighton 1-2 Liverpool

Fulham vs Burnley

I get why Marco Silva appears in no rush to extend his Fulham contract, which expires at the end of the season. But whatever the frustrations of life at Craven Cottage, can he be sure the grass would be greener elsewhere? Evangelos Marinakis is a long-term admirer, but nobody seems to retain the Forest owner’s favour for long once they are actually working for him. There have been murmurs of interest from Tottenham, but how much does that role appeal these days? Managing Fulham isn’t the biggest, most prestigious or most lucrative job, but it’s a more stable club than the one Burnley counterpart Scott Parker remembers from his time in charge there.

Fulham 2-0 Burnley

Everton vs Chelsea

I don’t remotely trust this Chelsea team, whose flaws I have written about many times. That 8-2 aggregate defeat by Paris Saint-Germain should be a wake-up-and-smell-the-coffee moment for those owners and executives who have spent the past few years congratulating themselves on a recruitment strategy that increasingly has the look of a social experiment. But even though Chelsea have won just 13 of their 30 Premier League games this season, I look at a fixture like this and the image that comes into my mind is Pedro Neto setting up Joao Pedro for a goal on the counter-attack. Maybe it’s because they’ve won more away matches (seven) than Everton have won home ones (five) this season.

Everton 1-2 Chelsea

Leeds vs Brentford

Leeds need wins as they try to avoid an instant return to the Championship. Everyone can see how well they have acquitted themselves over the past few months, but the goals and victories have dried up — five games without a win, three without a goal — which puts a lot of pressure on for Saturday. They’ve also lost their last two at Elland Road, but I like the look of their next four home matches (this, then Wolves, Burnley and Brighton). Winning here would offer some much-needed breathing space.

Leeds 1-0 Brentford

Newcastle vs Sunderland

Newcastle have not won a Tyne-Wear derby in the league since August 2011 (“Ryan Taylor, over the wall”) and, while that includes a nine-year hiatus when these two were in different divisions, it still equates to a run of seven Sunderland wins and three draws in 10 league meetings. I confidently predicted a Sunderland victory in December's reverse fixture and my feeling at the start of the week was that I would cautiously back Newcastle to get their revenge on Sunday. That feeling has been shaken by the chastening nature of their defeat in Barcelona on Wednesday — so much energy expended over the two legs, such a brutal scoreline (7-2) at the Camp Nou ultimately — but, unlike with the Spurs vs Forest game a few hours later, I’ll stick to my initial instinct, with a raucous St James’ Park atmosphere a factor.

Newcastle 2-1 Sunderland

Aston Villa vs West Ham

Villa’s 3-2 win at the London Stadium in the reverse fixture in December came during that period when they were outperforming their xG (expected goals) metrics to a wild extent, summed up by Morgan Rogers’ spectacular long-range winner. Their xG overperformance has eventually caught up with them, while West Ham have had a curious relationship with xG in recent weeks: drawing games they dominated, a harsh 5-2 defeat at Liverpool and a battling 1-1 draw with Manchester City last Saturday when Konstantinos Mavropanos scored with their only attempt of the 90 minutes. Hard to predict, then. I expect others will go for a tight Villa win, so I’ll go for a cheeky draw to take West Ham another point closer to survival before the international break.

Aston Villa 1-1 West Ham

On the vertical scale of popularity within the Tottenham Hotspur fanbase — stretching from Archie Gray at the pinnacle down to whomever you deem most accountable for their current position — Micky van de Ven, for the first time in his career, is nowhere near the top.

His descent from Europa League final saviour to his current status, viewed by some as symbolic of the blase attitude that has led to Tottenham being in a relegation scrap for the first time since the 1990s, is well documented. It started with the moment shared between him, Djed Spence and Thomas Frank after the 1-0 home defeat to Chelsea, with both defenders ignoring the then-head coach’s command to applaud the support and heading for the tunnel.

His last Premier League outing ended similarly. In a critical match for Tottenham’s survival hopes, Van de Ven was sent trudging off the pitch for a penalty-box foul on Ismaila Sarr in the 38th minute, his first red card for the club. With club captain Cristian Romero also unavailable due to suspension, Spurs collapsed with 10 men and were 3-1 down before half-time.

In their absence, Tottenham battled their way to an uplifting 1-1 draw with Liverpool on Sunday. Dropping Kevin Danso to make way for Van de Ven and Romero feels unfair and may prove unwise. On Sunday against Nottingham Forest, the club’s most important game since the Europa League final, characters like Danso are the ones you want to lean on.

But Igor Tudor will know Tottenham are a better team when Van de Ven plays well. He was the club’s player of the season in his first season, arguably the standout performer in Bilbao, and has already scored seven goals in all competitions this term, the best return of his career. For his part, he strongly rejected any suggestion that he or his team-mates had downed tools in a press conference before the Atletico Madrid Champions League tie on Tuesday, stating he will “always give 100 per cent to the club”. Right now, the club needs him more at left-back than in central defence.

Having stuck to the 3-4-2-1 system that brought initial success at Juventus and Marseille over his first four games at Tottenham, Tudor abandoned his customary formation for a 4-4-2 against Liverpool and Atletico, where Tottenham were much improved. It would make little sense to abandon a structure where Spurs found some defensive stability and attacking threat, having displayed neither in his previous games in charge. It’s expected Romero will come back into the side, and Danso’s credentials had long been established before being rubber-stamped against Liverpool. For Van de Ven, that may only leave left-back: a problem spot for Tottenham for over a year and the position he plays for the Netherlands.

Spence started the season excellently in that position, and by the time he had won his third England cap in October against Latvia, he looked like a player in line to travel with his national team to the World Cup this summer. Recently, however, his form has been patchier, and it seems unlikely he will make Thomas Tuchel’s England squad for the March internationals. Without a left-footed wide forward, Tottenham have often looked imbalanced in attack when Spence plays, an unfortunate consequence of a defender occupying a role on his weaker side.

Destiny Udogie has transformed Spurs’ offensive threat from left back when fit and should be available for the squad on Sunday having made his return from the bench against Atletico, but it’ll be his first Premier League match since February 7. With just eight league starts this term, Tudor may be wise to allow Udogie the international break to return to full fitness — particularly with an alternative like Van de Ven available.

While he’s more established at left-back for his country, it’s not an entirely unfamiliar position at club level. Van de Ven started eight games across two seasons in the German Bundesliga for Wolfsburg, even registering an assist in a 2-2 draw against eventual champions Bayern Munich in the 2021-22 season. And in the final week of his first season at Tottenham, he started at left-back in a 2-0 loss to Manchester City and a 3-0 win against Sheffield United, having shifted into that position a few weeks before against Burnley, where he scored the winning goal.

With Tottenham pushing to score, Rodrigo Bentancur finds James Maddison between the Burnley lines. Van de Ven is positioned just behind him in a central area, and after Maddison receives it, turns and darts towards the Burnley defensive line, creating an angle to receive a pass.

Van de Ven receives it in his stride before shifting wide, opening his body and finishing past Arijanet Muric in the Burnley goal.

While Van de Ven may have more opportunity to display his finishing prowess at left-back, the most compelling reason for the positional shift is providing balance to the attack. Mathys Tel is most likely to play on the left wing on Sunday, having impressed since Tudor brought him back into the starting line-up. With Van de Ven’s world-class pace on the outside, defenders will have to pay extra attention to the flanks, allowing space for Tel to move inside and create or shoot from inside-left positions.

It could also facilitate Xavi Simons’ re-inclusion. He has not started in the league since the 2-1 away defeat to Fulham on March 1, Tudor’s first game in charge, but was outstanding on Tuesday against Atletico, scoring twice, and Tudor would be remiss to overlook his quality in the final third for the final eight games of the season. Simons often operates as a No 10 for the Netherlands but naturally drifts towards the left wing, where he links up with Cody Gakpo and Van de Ven. Like Tel, Gakpo tends to move into shooting positions in central areas, allowing Van de Ven to push high and wide, where Simons can find him with through passes.

Here’s a good example of this working in practice for the Netherlands, as Simons plays Van de Ven down the line, with the defender crossing to assist for Donyell Malen.

And another instance, with the pass coming from floating striker Memphis Depay. While it does not end in a goal, he does well to get to the ball and cross into a dangerous area.

Defensively, the positional shift should work to his greatest strengths. He is an excellent one-v-one defender with supreme recovery pace, and wide forwards will think twice before attacking him directly. It also adds another tall, athletic body in the box for set pieces, and Tudor will not want to discard a player who has proven effective from dead-ball situations.

So, despite the current disconnect between him and sections of the fanbase, Van de Ven will remain an important player and leader as Spurs enter the business end of the season. At least until Udogie reaches full fitness, left-back may be the position from where he can help the team most.

When Xavi Simons joined Tottenham Hotspur at the end of last summer, the hope was that he could star on nights like tonight.

A Champions League last-16 second leg, at home under lights, against Atletico Madrid, is a huge occasion by any measure. When Simons signed for Tottenham from RB Leipzig for £51.8million ($70m at the time), it felt as if both parties might have an eye on something like this six months down the line.

For Simons, it was a chance to show the world he was as good as his reputation suggested. Simons had reached this stage of the Champions League with Leipzig in 2024, when they were knocked out by eventual champions Real Madrid. He featured in Leipzig’s miserable Champions League campaign the following year, too, when they lost seven of their eight league-phase games. But every player wants to shine in this competition and at Spurs, he would have another chance.

For Tottenham, Simons offered the high-quality creative talent that was needed as James Maddison and Dejan Kulusevski faced lengthy lay-offs. Everyone knew that Spurs needed a bit of stardust, a bit of magic, and Simons was seen as the man to deliver it.

And yet this season has taken Tottenham in directions that no one could have expected. This week, they have one historically significant game and one comparatively trivial one. Their bizarre reality is that the one that really matters is against Nottingham Forest in the Premier League, 16th against 17th in the table. To call Sunday’s game a ‘six-pointer’ barely does it justice.

The only thing that matters for Spurs over the next two months is staying in the top flight. In recent weeks, Simons has found himself less integral than many expected to their scrap to stay up.

Simons has not started any of Tottenham’s last three games — the chaotic defeats to Crystal Palace and Atletico Madrid or the creditable draw at Anfield. He has gone from being the leading light of the team at the turn of the year to the fringes again. It is enough to make you wonder what head coach Igor Tudor does or does not see in him, for the team to be seemingly lacking in technical quality and for Simons, the most technically gifted of their fit and available players, to be back on the bench.

This is why Wednesday’s game against Atletico could be significant, just not in the way that anyone would have thought. If Tudor decides he wants to rest and rotate, to protect his most important players for the Forest game, then that could mean Simons comes back in. It would be his first start since he was hooked one hour into the 2-1 defeat at Fulham on March 1. Even if Spurs’ slim chances of progress to the quarter-finals are no longer at the forefront of everyone’s minds, it could still be a chance for Simons to remind everyone how good he can be.

This is an unusual position for a talented player with a glistening reputation. Even more curiously, during the final weeks of Thomas Frank’s tenure, Simons appeared to be settling into this team and into English football. Amid all the misery of January and February, he was probably Spurs’ best player.

No one would dispute that Simons started the season slowly. He was in and out of the team in the opening months. He did not play a full 90 minutes in the Premier League until December, Spurs’ 2-0 win against Brentford, when he also scored his first goal for the club. That was Spurs’ last home league win.

It felt like something had clicked for Simons. He started four games on the spin, a run that ended with an unfortunate red card against Liverpool. After his suspension, he came back into the team and started the next 11 games in a row, generally playing as the No 10 in Frank’s 4-2-3-1 system.

It was during the course of that run that Simons’ hard work finally seemed to be paying off. He came to England with a sizeable entourage, including a strength and conditioning coach who even moved in with him, a personal trainer, a mindset coach and a video analyst. He had been working hard in the gym to equip himself for the physical challenge.

Simons’ favourite film is Interstellar and before every game, would listen to Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack to get himself in the zone. At the start of this year, there were moments when it felt like an apt choice; that one man’s heroic against-the-odds quest to save humanity might inspire Simons’ heroic against-the-odds quest to save Spurs.

Simons had been improving, running the game in January’s 2-0 win against Borussia Dortmund. And when Manchester City came to Tottenham on February 1, Simons was electric. Spurs were 2-0 down at the break but Simons dragged them back into it almost by himself, making Dominic Solanke’s first goal, creating chances for others, and scrapping for every loose ball, always willing to put his body on the line. Suddenly the physical demands of the English game no longer looked beyond him. The crowd responded well to Simons’ attitude and his team-mates did too.

But Simons was the best player on a dysfunctional team and 10 days after that game, Frank was sacked. Initially, it seemed Tudor, with his focus on fitness and discipline, might be good for Simons, and he started Tudor’s first two games, against Arsenal and Fulham. But Simons has been on the bench for the next three, getting 17 minutes against Crystal Palace and just eight against Atletico Madrid.

Before the trip to Liverpool, Tudor was asked about benching Simons and explained that he chooses what he thinks “is best for the club”, and insisted that Simons was “a good player, an important player”. But Simons was on the bench again, with Tudor preferring the legs of Mathys Tel and Souza out wide in his 4-4-2. It felt like a significant decision, given that this was only Souza’s second start for Spurs. Simons got the last 35 minutes, looking initially rusty, then growing into the game late on.

But if Tudor has landed on a system and a style, a direct physical 4-4-2 approach, then where does that leave Simons? If his priority is speed out wide and selfless running, does he think he can get more of that than other people? There are still eight huge league games left and Simons will certainly have a role. He can do things no other fit Spurs player can do.

It might be that on Wednesday night in the Champions League, Simons gets to make his case again. If he can replicate how he played against Dortmund, it could still be a good night for him. The real challenge will be getting back into the team for the Forest game on Sunday — a scenario few of us saw panning out back when Simons arrived.

After a week of speculation that Tottenham Hotspur were considering ending Igor Tudor’s spell as head coach and looking to a Premier League specialist, such as Sean Dyche, anyone who watched their 1-1 draw at Liverpool on Sunday could have been forgiven for thinking that switch had been made.

If Dyche had been appointed, this was exactly what you would expect: 4-4-2, deep defending, quick counter-attacking, long balls, set pieces. And thanks to Richarlison’s late equaliser, job done. Tottenham, using a compact system (below) and with players understanding their roles, looked much better.

It would be charitable to say Tottenham actually played well. Even their equaliser came after a period when Liverpool seemed more likely to double their one-goal advantage on the break.

But at this stage, it’s not about playing well. It’s about getting results. And the 4-4-2 system Tudor used at least demonstrated that he understands the basics of his short-term job.

Tudor was an unusual appointment as an interim head coach. He represents the most outside-the-box choice since Manchester United went for Ralf Rangnick. Tudor at least has more recent managerial experience, but he was similarly unfamiliar with the club, the players and the Premier League.

Being an interim manager is a somewhat contradictory experience. You’re generally walking into a desperately underperforming club, yet you don’t have time to try something different. Rangnick was seemingly tasked with overhauling the playing style. Such a thing simply isn’t possible when the manager has a limited shelf life.

Spurs’ opening performance under Tudor, a 4-1 defeat against Arsenal, was worrying because he asked his players to play a completely different style of football, involving strict man-marking and a higher defensive line. Tottenham were torn apart by Viktor Gyokeres, Bukayo Saka and Eberechi Eze, players whose displays have been inconsistent all season.

The three-man defence also failed miserably in a 3-1 home defeat against Crystal Palace. In particular, the double substitution after Micky van de Ven’s 38th-minute red card seemed to leave the players unsure of their positions. By half-time, Spurs had conceded three and were out of the game.

On Tuesday, Tudor’s decision to drop Guglielmo Vicario in favour of Antonin Kinsky backfired spectacularly in Madrid. All this points to him simply trying too much. Tottenham need simplicity.

So Tudor, channelling his inner Dyche, went back to basics. Granted, Tudor used this system at Fulham, bringing a poor performance and a 2-1 defeat, but it was a radically different line-up at Anfield. The entire midfield quartet was different. Two defenders were different. Dominic Solanke was partnered by Richarlison this time, with Randal Kolo Muani on the bench.

That is surely the right approach. Kolo Muani has struggled for form and has one Premier League goal in his career. Solanke has 41. Richarlison now has 73. This is all very basic. But that’s the point.

Using this simplistic approach, Spurs attacked rather well. This early move (below), which featured a long ball and a Solanke flick-on to prompt an exchange with Richarlison, effectively moved their attack beyond Liverpool’s defence. Tottenham have two strikers who can compete in the air and run in behind. Solanke’s cutback should have been followed by Souza to break in off the right and open the scoring.

Two proper strikers, clearly, gave Tottenham options in the box. When Mathys Tel received the ball on the left and looked up, he had two big centre-forwards to aim for. Richarlison reached for the ball, but nodded wide.

A notable feature of Tottenham’s plan was Vicario’s long passes, a contrast from how he played last season under Ange Postecoglou, and there’s an obvious link with Kinsky’s problems.

Vicario also went long regularly in that previous 4-4-2 game against Fulham. The difference, this time, was that Tottenham made more of his long balls. Look at the number of complete long passes — five green passes into the opposition half yesterday, compared to none against Fulham.

Sometimes, you don’t even need to win the aerial ball. You just need your opponent not to.

The below situation, with Vicario going long to Solanke, worked out well precisely because Solanke didn’t get a touch on the ball: Virgil van Dijk was trying to play Richarlison offside, and couldn’t get back goalside to prevent the Brazilian from getting a shot away. Alisson saved and palmed the ball to the side. Had he parried it back out, Solanke might have tucked home into an empty net.

Later, Tudor brought on Kolo Muani down the right, giving Tottenham three aerial targets when the ball was on the left. Here, Archie Gray crossed into the six-yard box, Richarlison flung himself at the ball, but couldn’t quite make contact.

And then, in the 90th minute, Tottenham finally scored their equaliser.

Again, there was a Vicario long ball. Again, it wasn’t about Tottenham winning the first aerial, but making sure they were quick to the second ball. Solanke was looking to feed off the scraps, but Kolo Muani got there first and slipped in Richarlison for a late equaliser.

Richarlison has experience of scoring crucial goals to help Everton avoid relegation, and he seems well-suited to Tottenham’s task for the rest of this season.

It remains to be seen whether Tudor stays in his job, or whether Tottenham press the panic button and plump for someone like Dyche. Either way, a back-to-basics approach seems Tottenham’s best bet of avoiding relegation.

“We also struggle to keep clean sheets. We haven’t had as many as you would want if you want to go higher up in the table. That is a bad combination to pick up as many points as we want.”

Liverpool chairman Tom Werner, visiting from the United States, was in the directors’ box and won’t have enjoyed what he witnessed.

This wasn’t a tale of Liverpool simply not being ruthless enough in the final third. Yes, they edged it on xG (1.6-1.2) but they had fewer shots on target (four versus seven) and created fewer big chances as defined by Opta (one to two) — despite having 63 per cent of the possession.

What was truly alarming was the sight of the same old issues which have dogged Liverpool all season. There’s a lack of conviction and composure in all departments. They allow games to drift. Midfielder Alexis Mac Allister won just two of his 12 duels. Once again, Liverpool failed to score from open play. Once again, they conceded a truly dreadful goal.

It was so avoidable, with goalkeeper Guglielmo Vicario’s long punt not dealt with by Andy Robertson before captain Virgil van Dijk failed to halt Randal Kolo Muani. Joe Gomez, inexplicably, got drawn across and left Richarlison unmarked to score. There’s a glaring fragility to Liverpool and they have now conceded eight Premier League goals in the 90th minute or later in 2025-26 — their most in the competition in a single campaign.

No manager can legislate for senior pros making mistakes like those but the problem for Slot is that, approaching the business end of the season, there’s little sign of him galvanising the talent at his disposal. Their reign as champions has been so stop-start. Every time they seem to generate some momentum, they stumble and let themselves down. Lessons just aren’t being learned.

There are some mitigating circumstances for these struggles, from the tragic death of Diogo Jota, to recruitment decisions made above Slot’s pay grade, signings needing time to adjust to new surroundings, key personnel losing their way and the injury issues which have hampered the team’s progress.

But the biggest reason why Slot is haemorrhaging support among match-going fans is the stale brand of football Liverpool are playing. There’s so little to excite. So little to emotionally invest in. Teenager Rio Ngumoha was a breath of fresh air on his full league debut yesterday with his positivity and directness, but the hosts got considerably worse in the final half-hour after he was subbed off.

Where Klopp provided the chaos, Slot was all about control last season. But even that seems beyond him currently. When Liverpool really needed to take the sting out of this contest in the second half and ideally build on their 1-0 lead, it got fraught and panic set in. Game management was non-existent.

“Because we were not able to score the second goal — that would immediately damage the momentum of the other team,” Slot added. “When it’s still 1-0, it’s normal that the subs the other manager makes, going even more offensive and direct, taking more risks, that can lead to them creating chances but them also being very open for counter-attacks. We didn’t concede chances by being too open or too offensive or being outplayed through midfield. It was from playing balls over the press into our last line.

“All the chances we had in the second half were from when we picked up second balls and counter-attacked them. But the three, four, five times they picked up the second ball, they were a threat. That is probably the belief teams have now when they play against us, and we might be a bit anxious towards the end. That’s normal to start to feel like that when it’s happened so many times.”

When Liverpool signed off 2025 with four straight wins across the Premier League and Europe, there was a belief that they had finally turned a corner after the dark days of autumn. It turned out to be a false dawn. This calendar year, they have won just four of 12 league games, including taking only one point out of the past six on offer against last-placed Wolverhampton Wanderers and struggling Spurs.

Galatasaray, who will be holding a 1-0 first-leg lead when they arrive on Wednesday to decide a Champions League last-16 tie, will fancy their chances of advancing to the quarter-finals on this evidence.

Asked about the growing sense of unrest in the stands, Slot added: “I think it is understandable for fans to be frustrated because it has happened already so many times — the home team not picking up the points they expected and us conceding goals in the last minute. It’s up to me and the players to take that frustration into Wednesday evening and give the fans the kind of performance and the result they deserve because the fans have been so supportive throughout the season.”

Liverpool still have two routes to silverware this season in the FA Cup (they visit Manchester City in the quarter-finals on April 4) and Europe and do now occupy fifth place in the Premier League, which is almost certain to be enough to secure Champions League football next season, thanks to this point. All is not lost.

But the sight of fans leaving in their droves, both at 1-0 up deep into normal time and after Spurs equalised at the start of stoppage time, was damning. They had seen enough and you could hardly blame them, given the paucity of what they had witnessed.

Slot hasn’t reached the point of no return. He could still turn this around, but the clock is ticking.

Liverpool can’t afford another shambles like this one.