For months, Tottenham Hotspur fans felt a very specific fear, one even worse than the thought of relegation itself. And that was the prospect of getting relegated at Stamford Bridge.
Spurs’ penultimate Premier League game of this season being Chelsea away stuck out like a rusty nail on the fixture list. Of all the possible places to be banished from the top division of English football, only Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium would be as painful as it happening at Stamford Bridge.
It almost felt like an inevitability, a scenario so awful that it would be impossible to change course away from it.
Well, Tottenham have avoided it. Whatever happens in that match in west London tonight (Tuesday), they cannot go down because of that result. And after West Ham United lost at Newcastle United on Sunday evening, Spurs are now in pole position to stay up. If they can take a single point from their final two games, the other being Sunday’s visit from Everton, they will be safe.
And yet the fact of this huge game, this game of games, being at Chelsea gives it even more weight, even more pressure, than if it were anywhere else. Because there has been something about this fixture, especially when played at Stamford Bridge, that has exerted a painful hold over the Tottenham psyche in recent years.
Of course, Spurs’ biggest needle matches are against near neighbours Arsenal, and those are still — and will be for as long as they are both in the top flight — the games that the fans look for first when the fixtures are released each summer. But it feels as if Tottenham’s fortunes in the past few seasons have been far more determined by meetings with their other main London rivals, Chelsea.
Spurs have a miserable recent record against both teams.
They have lost seven and drawn one of their last eight north London derbies. But not many of those games have had ramifications beyond themselves, as bad as they have been. The last time there was a north London derby with distinctive stakes was in May 2022, when Antonio Conte’s Spurs beat Arsenal 3-0 to move towards fourth place. At the time, it felt important. But Tottenham have not beaten their arch rivals— or even been within 23 points of them in the end-of-season table — since.
But Tottenham’s recent games against Chelsea have carried more weight. Seasons and trophies have been determined by them. And it has started to feel, more and more by the year, that Chelsea had a profound psychological grip over Spurs.
Arsenal would beat them because they were better. But Chelsea would beat them because they were Chelsea.
On top of that, Chelsea would win these games in ways that nobody would expect. Strange things would happen, things from outside the course of normal football events. No wonder that so many Tottenham fans feared that their relegation from the Premier League was destined to be confirmed on Tuesday night.
So you can look at the numbers — the simple facts about how bad Spurs’ record against Chelsea is.
Tottenham have won just once at Stamford Bridge in the last 36 years in any competition. That was in April 2018, back when Dele Alli and Christian Eriksen could still decide games by themselves, and when Conte’s time at Chelsea was coming to an insipid end. But that was a one-off, an aberration, a coming together of historical forces.
For the 28 years before that, and the eight years since, Spurs’ trips to Chelsea have been utterly barren. Which has been both cause and consequence of the psychological weight of this game.
Everyone will have their own starting point with this.
Tottenham infamously didn’t win a league game against Chelsea for 16 years up to 2006. That was an era when Spurs were patiently building a young team under Martin Jol, only for Roman Abramovich’s Chelsea to change the game from underneath them (Abramovich, it was reported in 2019 book The Club, had briefly considered buying Spurs instead, but drove through Tottenham once in his Mercedes and declared that part of London “worse than Omsk” — a city in Siberia).
Spurs did at least beat Avram Grant’s Chelsea to lift the 2008 League Cup, a clear blow in the other direction.
Perhaps the next best place to start is when Harry Redknapp’s Spurs went to Chelsea in April 2011, chasing a top-four finish and a return to the Champions League. Sandro put them 1-0 up but the home side equalised with a Frank Lampard shot that Heurelho Gomes appeared to claw away before it crossed the line, before a Salomon Kalou winner that looked offside. Unusual or unfortunate, perhaps, but not unique.
Stranger things happened the following year.
Redknapp’s Tottenham met Chelsea in the FA Cup semi-finals at Wembley. Chelsea were 1-0 up when a Juan Mata shot was blocked on the line by Ledley King. It was clearly not a goal — far clearer than the Lampard one the year before — and yet referee Martin Atkinson gave it anyway (remember, this was an era before goal-line technology). Chelsea ran out 5-1 winners. It felt like a random freak occurrence. But there was another one just a few weeks later.
Spurs finished that Premier League season in fourth, which under normal circumstances would have been enough to secure Champions League football in 2012-13, for just the second time in their history.
The only thing that could stop them was Chelsea, under caretaker manager Roberto Di Matteo after the March sacking of Andre Villas-Boas, winning the Champions League. And they went and did just that, in the most remarkable way possible. They knocked out Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona in the semi-finals, even with John Terry sent off in the second leg at the Camp Nou, as Lionel Messi missed a penalty. And then in the final, with a patched-up team, they beat Bayern Munich, in Munich, on penalties after a 1-1 draw.
Chelsea, who finished sixth domestically, were back in the Champions League as its title holders. Tottenham were not. They had to regroup with the aforementioned Villas-Boas replacing Redknapp that summer.
Two years later, Mauricio Pochettino came in to launch another new era. And even then, Tottenham’s hopes of winning a trophy kept coming up against Chelsea. In Pochettino’s first season, they reached the League Cup final, Spurs’ first in any competition since 2009, only to be well beaten, 2-0, by a far more experienced Chelsea side managed by Jose Mourinho.
More pain was to come the following year.
Perhaps the most significant game between these two teams came at Stamford Bridge on May 2, 2016, just over 10 years ago. Pochettino’s men were desperately trying to cling on in the race for the Premier League title. Leicester City had a decisive lead and the only way Spurs could stay alive was by winning all three of their remaining games. So the pressure was on.
Despite this, Tottenham were 2-0 up at half-time. But there was a febrile atmosphere at Stamford Bridge that night, with Chelsea fans and players desperate to ruin Spurs’ last remaining hope.
Tottenham tried to ride that wave but it eventually got the better of them. Pochettino’s players got so involved in scraps and fights with Chelsea that they lost control of the game. Nine were booked, setting a Premier League record, and Mousa Dembele got a six-game ban for poking opposition striker Diego Costa in the eye.
Amid the chaos, Chelsea clawed it back to finish as a 2-2 draw, handing Leicester the title.
The next year, Chelsea managed to complete the hat-trick, beating Spurs in another FA Cup semi-final at Wembley. That was a difficult time for Tottenham, coming just days after the sudden passing of popular academy coach Ugo Ehiogu. They played excellently for long spells and had Chelsea pinned back but every decisive moment was won by Conte’s side, who came out on top, 4-2.
“We played better than Chelsea,” Pochettino wrote in Brave New World, a book about his time at Tottenham, “but it was one of those games that we just weren’t destined to win, whatever we did.” Spurs never won a trophy under the Argentinian.
Even in the past few years, these games have continued to haunt Tottenham. Signing two high-profile managers who won the league with Chelsea — Mourinho and Conte — did nothing to break the curse.
The league meeting in north London in November 2023 is one of the most significant of the decade so far.
Spurs were top of the league and on top of the world coming into it, with eight wins and two draws from their first 10 league games under new head coach Ange Postecoglou. When they went 1-0 up — and then had a second disallowed — they looked unstoppable. Then their world collapsed. Cristian Romero and Destiny Udogie were both sent off, James Maddison and Micky van de Ven got serious injuries, and Tottenham ended up losing 4-1.
Things were never the same again under Postecoglou, even if Spurs ended up finishing a creditable fifth, and then won the Europa League the following season. But you can draw a clear line before and after that 4-1 defeat.
When Tottenham sacked Postecoglou in June of last year, they even pointed to the league record since that game (66 games, 78 points) as justification for making a change. It is almost three years now since that magical early start for the Australian, and Spurs have never been that consistent or good since.
Any hope of getting back to that level the following season was snuffed out again when hosting Chelsea.
Tottenham went 2-0 up early on but lost Van de Ven and Romero to injuries — both were making swift returns to the team — and lost 4-3. Again, Spurs spiralled in the league and finished 17th.
When they went to Stamford Bridge in the April, Postecoglou was barracked by the travelling fans for bringing on Pape Matar Sarr for Lucas Bergvall. After Sarr banged in what appeared to be an equaliser, Postecoglou cupped his ear to the away end. The goal was then disallowed.
A small incident, perhaps, but a sign that when Spurs face Chelsea, anything that can go wrong often does.
That is the weight of history Tottenham are facing tonight.