The most remarkable thing about Sunday at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium is how much it felt like this time last year.
There was no open-top bus parade, but just after 2pm there were thousands of Spurs fans climbing lamp posts and bus stops, letting off blue and white smoke, children on their fathers’ shoulders, desperate to give the team the most encouraging welcome they could.
There was no trophy on the pitch at the end, but every Spurs fan stayed in the stands to cheer and sing after the final whistle. Manager, staff and players were moved to tears by their achievement and by the communal love from the crowd.
There have not been many moments since this stadium opened in 2019 when it has been as happy, positive and unified as this. The fans reserved their loudest cheers for the manager, Roberto De Zerbi, who looked almost overwhelmed as he stood in front of the South Stand, a sea of white, and the waves of love came down towards him. He is the positive face of this club now, the indispensable man as they plan for next season.
Because everyone here knows that it is De Zerbi who saved Tottenham from relegation. Taking 11 points from their last six games, given the issues of confidence and injuries, is nothing short of a managerial triumph. He is the man who has brought this club back together, through the strength of his personality, his ideas, and his radical optimism when things were at their bleakest. And who has permitted Tottenham, for the first time all year, to come together and look forward again. He said on Sunday night it was the best achievement of his managerial career.
You could power the floodlights here for next season on the strength of the feeling of relief. The great existential crisis has been avoided. For months, everyone associated with Tottenham would wake up in the middle of the night thinking about relegation. About the damage to club finances, about player sales, about trips to Lincoln, Preston and Wrexham next season. But above all about the abject humiliation that relegation would have represented. When De Zerbi said earlier this week that the club’s “dignity” was at risk, it was a stark warning of the stakes, and how shaming it would have been for this club to wake up in the second tier.
Tottenham won the Europa League last year. They finished fifth in the Premier League the year before that. They had Harry Kane until 2023. They finished fourth in 2021-22. They reached the Champions League final in 2019. According to a UEFA report released in February, they have the fifth-biggest revenues in England and the ninth-biggest in all of Europe. They play in the best new stadium in Europe. For Tottenham to get relegated would have been a stain on the careers of everyone associated with it.
That particular fear is over now. Tottenham will still be playing Premier League football next season. Things that have been taken for granted for a generation — north London derbies, the chance to qualify for Europe, being on Match of the Day — will be part of Spurs’ season in 2026-27. The worry about the devastating impact relegation would have on broadcast, ticketing and commercial revenue can be filed away for now.
But there should be no question about it: this was still a disastrous season for Spurs. Being in a relegation fight in the middle of May is a terrible situation. Relying on West Ham United losing three of their last four to stay up is profoundly embarrassing. Losing 17 league games for the second season in a row makes another mockery of Tottenham’s resources and traditions. Playing in that stadium, charging those prices, and winning just three home league games is nothing short of a joke.
Because this was still a season when years of mismanagement and drift caught up with Spurs. This was still a season when the ownership upended the running of the club and had to desperately piece it all back together again. This was still a season when every constituent part of the club — ownership, board, managers, players, fans — at times felt at odds with the other. It was still a season when the club did not get the positive leadership it needed until the arrival of De Zerbi at the end of March. It was still a season when the club too often looked like it was falling apart.
The irony of the scenes at the end on Sunday is that this was, in fact, meant to be the season when everything was different.
Even though Tottenham won the Europa League last season, the theme of the summer was regeneration. The club embarked on another reset, another relaunch. Their aim was to make sure that the 17th-place finish of last May was not repeated. (Who could have imagined that repeating that finish would be such cause for celebration in May?) Ange Postecoglou was out, replaced by Brentford’s Thomas Frank, a coach whose pragmatism and flexibility were seen as the perfect antidote to his predecessor’s brittle ideology.
The logic was that by appointing a safety-first head coach, Spurs would become defensively sound and hard to beat, just like Frank’s Brentford were. The problem was that by turning away from Postecoglou’s positive football, an idea that the players all believed in, they removed the binding identity of the whole club. It was to be the last and worst of all of Daniel Levy’s managerial appointments.
There were even more profound changes away from the pitch.
The Lewis family knew that Tottenham had been underperforming in recent years, on and off the pitch. They had commissioned management consultants Gibb River to come in and review operations earlier in 2025. This led to the appointment of the first CEO since ENIC, the investment group the Lewises own 70 per cent of, took control of the club in 2001 — Vinai Venkatesham. He arrived at the start of the summer, hoping to bring some transparency, optimism and positivity to Spurs.
At the start, it all felt very unified. Levy and Venkatesham recorded a video for the club’s YouTube channel, in which the new CEO said he and the chairman were “joined at the hip”. Venkatesham and Frank also spoke the same language, talking about culture and communication. The mood swings of the past few years would be replaced by something more patient and process-led. It felt as if Venkatesham, Frank and technical director Johan Lange were all cut from the same cloth, all three of them routinely described by insiders as some of the nicest people in football.
But changing the culture at Spurs was hard. Brentford are one of the most culture-led clubs in the country. Everyone in the building pulls in the same direction. The Tottenham squad Frank inherited was very different. It contained some challenging personalities, players who thought that if they performed on the pitch, their lax attitude to training would be excused. Discipline and lateness were significant issues. And if Frank was to succeed, he would need to get the players to buy into his standards. Which he was fatally unable to do.
The other issue with the squad was that it was simply not very good. Kane left after the 2022-23 season and Son Heung-min departed last summer. Spurs had no world-class players left. The squad had deteriorated after years of under-investment. No club in the top four divisions spent a smaller proportion of their revenues on wages than Tottenham, with a ratio for last season of just 45 per cent. Yes, they had started to spend more on fees, but had seen very little return for it. Knee operations for long-term casualties Dejan Kulusevski in May and James Maddison in August left them even shorter on attacking quality. The pressure for big signings was immense.
Levy pushed for Antoine Semenyo, Morgan Gibbs-White and Eberechi Eze, but could not secure any of them. Tottenham were forced to look further down their lists. They bought Mohammed Kudus from West Ham United and Xavi Simons from RB Leipzig. Joao Palhinha joined on loan from Bayern Munich.
The scrutiny was not on Venkatesham or Lange but on Levy. He was blamed by the fans, especially for failing to sign Eze, who instead joined arch-rivals Arsenal.
Levy was desperately scrambling around at the end of the window to improve the squad, eventually landing a loan deal for Randal Kolo Muani. But nobody expected the shock that landed a couple of days later on September 4, not least Levy himself.
Were it not for their May 24 victory over Manchester United in Bilbao, the most historically significant event of Spurs’ 2025 would have come eight months ago.
That was the day when Levy, after almost 25 years running Tottenham as if he owned the club, building them into what they are today, was told that his time was over. Out of his job, off the board, not welcome back on the premises, and with his belongings gathered up and sent to him in a van.
It is impossible to overstate, even with the benefit of hindsight, what a sudden rupture this was. Even though the Lewis family had been considering it through much of last year. It is the single biggest decision they have made since owning Spurs, and the one with the most profound consequences.
Over the course of Levy’s 24-year chairmanship, running the club on behalf of the Lewis family, he accumulated so much power that sources often said it was run like an owner-operated business, or even like a family firm.
Levy was across every little detail at the club, from hiring coaches to signing players to finance and debt to the finest details of the design of the stadium. He was more powerful than any other figure at any other club in the Premier League. The strategy, identity, culture and governance of Tottenham Hotspur, for better or worse, all came back to Levy himself. The Lewis family had been too relaxed about leaving him to it. Now the buck stopped with them.
The Lewis family hoped that removing Levy would allow them to bring the club into the modern era, with a glistening new governance structure. Centralisation was out. Empowerment was in. And the hope was that after recent years of losing money and losing their way on the pitch, this was the way to compete again.
But it was a huge risk. Levy was so powerful, so integral to Tottenham, that removing him meant destabilising the whole enterprise. For all his misjudgments over the years, his blind spots and missteps, he was still the glue that held the whole thing together.
Tottenham Hotspur without Levy was effectively a new football club. Venkatesham recorded a video at the training ground after Levy’s sacking, telling the world it was “business as usual”. But the reality was very different. The whole club, post-Levy, had to be reorganised almost from scratch. As Venkatesham often said privately, it was like rebuilding a plane while keeping it in the air.
Venkatesham was himself at the heart of that rebuilding project. As CEO, he was no longer underneath Levy but now reporting into the new non-executive chairman, private-banking veteran Peter Charrington, who had first joined the board in March, representing the Lewis family. Charrington chaired the first post-Levy board meeting on September 26. No member of the Lewis family joined the board, but one month later, a fifth member was added to it, U.S. aviation executive Eric Hinson, who had run pilot simulator training companies in Florida.
In this brave new world, Venkatesham would be empowered to run the club through the Executive Leadership Team he was putting together. New appointments were made over the course of the season to join this group. In October, the football structure was changed too, with Fabio Paratici, one of Levy’s closest advisors over the years, returning as one of two sporting directors, alongside the promoted Lange.
It was the most radical structural transformation imaginable. Tottenham went from being a club where all power was concentrated in one person to one where it was diffused between many. The talk was all about empowerment and co-operation. But some staff thought that it had become effectively run by committee, with too many decision-makers. Between Venkatesham, the two sporting directors, the board and the Lewises, it was not as clear as it used to be where the power and responsibility lay. It left people wondering: how would this new-look Tottenham fare if faced with a crisis?
Everyone at Spurs had wanted Frank to succeed. He was popular, polite, and personable, going out of his way to get to know everyone he worked with. He was deeply committed to coaching his new team, working 16-hour days in his attempts to instil that Brentford culture. And nobody wanted him to achieve that more than the Tottenham hierarchy. This was their chance to prove that this new era would be different.
But after a good start, things soon turned sour. In a series of miserable home performances in the autumn — Bournemouth (0.19 xG), Wolves (0.87), Aston Villa (0.80), Chelsea (0.10), Fulham (0.86) — Spurs looked miles away from the team their fans wanted them to be.
They had no ideas or imagination in possession. Opponents came away shocked at how easy Spurs were to predict and how easy they were to stop. Every move was the same: centre-back, full-back, winger, repeat. Fans and players lost faith quickly. One player remarked in private that Frank’s approach was more suited to a “smaller team”, and that he only felt he could play at “10 per cent” of his potential because of the restrictive tactics.
What Tottenham needed was positive leadership to get them through. Postecoglou had always known that he had to project strength as head coach, to stick up for the club in public, something that nobody else ever did. His willingness to stick his neck out kept the players on board during difficult times. But Frank, as intelligent and thoughtful as he was, did not seem to have the same understanding of the demands of being the public face of a big club. The players knew this as well as anyone, and some felt that Frank did not have the strength of personality for such a high-profile job.
So much of the focus had been on culture, unity and standards. But there was no positive leadership from the players either. Under Frank, according to one training-ground source, they did not train with the same intensity they brought to sessions with Postecoglou. When Djed Spence and Micky Van de Ven walked straight past Frank after the Chelsea defeat in early November, ignoring his requests that they applaud the fans, it was one small moment that said a lot about the players’ lack of respect for their head coach (lateness remained a persistent issue under Frank), and their lack of respect for the supporters.
The defining theme of the next few months — even more than the miserable football — was rancour. The fans turned on the players, booing goalkeeper Guglielmo Vicario’s kicking against Fulham. The players were increasingly turned against the fans, Van de Ven rowing with the away end after a defeat at Bournemouth in early January. And the fans turned on Frank, booing him personally and directly throughout that month. The whole club was falling apart.
After a home defeat to West Ham United on January 17, the hierarchy had a decision to make. The fans had clearly made up their minds. So too had Paratici, who had concluded as early as November that Frank was not the man for the job and that he needed to be replaced (Paratici himself made a swift departure to Fiorentina in his native Italy at the end of the winter transfer window).
There is little question that Levy would not have allowed this situation to drift had he not been sacked. He knew that it was better to fire someone too soon than too late, an insight that sadly appeared to leave the building with him.
But at the moment when Spurs needed decisive leadership to change course, they hesitated. Frank stayed in post.
During that winter window, Tottenham made one big signing, breaking their restrictive wage policies to get Conor Gallagher from Atletico Madrid. It turned out to be a valuable signing in the end, with Gallagher excellent under De Zerbi. But they were not moving fast enough to plug the gaps in an injury-ravaged squad, especially in attack.
When Lange said there was no point in making “stress purchases”, it felt as if the hierarchy thought they were playing with a stronger hand than they actually held.
After a home defeat to Newcastle United on February 10, though, Venkatesham and Lange had no option but to act. They called Frank in for a meeting, but he knew what was coming. He was gone, unable to deliver any of the changes, football or cultural, that he was brought in to deliver. Someone else would have to try to repair the sinking ship.
The day Tottenham sacked Frank, Marseille decided to part company with Roberto De Zerbi. Paratici had been making a case internally for De Zerbi for some time. But in February, it was just too soon for his compatriot to jump straight into the Spurs job. Devoid of alternatives, Tottenham ended up implementing another plan Paratici had been pushing for a while: a short-term deal for Igor Tudor. (Paratici had already left for Fiorentina by this point, but his ideas clearly still held sway.)
The logic was that Tudor, even with no experience of English football, was at least a specialist firefighter. He ran the players hard in training and delivered some home truths. But injuries had decimated an already-patchy squad. Maddison, Kulusevski, Kudus, Wilson Odobert and Rodrigo Bentancur did not play one single minute for him.
It never looked like working. Whenever anything went against Spurs, they collapsed, with defeats to Crystal Palace, Atletico Madrid and Nottingham Forest. Five crucial league games were wasted under Tudor, who made even less of an impression on the club than Frank. And the misstep of appointing him further underlined the fear that the hierarchy did not grasp how much water they had taken on.
After so much failure, the damage to the players’ confidence was profound. The lack of leadership in the squad, according to a source close to one player, meant that there was nobody to pick them up or reset the mood after a defeat. During the Tudor period, The Athletic reported that one player had told team-mates he was not too worried about relegation, because he was confident of getting a move in the summer. And it was this total collapse in leadership, unity — but above all belief, more than anything — that was dragging Tottenham down.
Something needed to be done. Venkatesham knew that what Spurs needed was a ‘one-club mentality’, a reminder that everyone is pulling in the same direction. This had been a focus for a while. In January, during the final weeks of Frank’s reign, he had introduced a coffee and cake stand at the reception of the training ground to encourage the players to mingle and chat.
In March, the pressure to finally find that much-needed sense of unity and confidence was more urgent than ever. Venkatesham told a meeting of the Fans Advisory Board on March 3, in which he detailed the many long-standing issues with the running of the club, that his job was to “stay positive”.
Before the Palace game on March 5, Venkatesham wrote a letter to all staff acknowledging the “anxiety” caused by Spurs’ league position but also attempting to strike an encouraging note. “Let’s be all in together,” he wrote. “Let’s continue to stay calm in the moment, confident in how we navigate it, and know that we will come through it. Stronger together.”
A whiteboard was put up in Lilywhite House, the club’s offices, on which staff were asked to write encouraging messages to the players. While some players appreciated the gesture, staff were less than enthusiastic about this, given it was the players’ underperformance that had led to this crisis.
In the end, the only thing that could save Spurs was a new manager. And in March, they went back to De Zerbi again. They were prepared to give him a long-term contract and one of the best salaries in the Premier League. They hoped to have him in place for the Forest game on March 22, the final fixture before an international break, but eventually secured him at the end of the month. He only took his first training session on April 3.
His first and most important job, the necessary first step to keeping Spurs up, was to clear the mental block that had stopped Spurs from playing. By recognising that the players initially needed a “brother or father” rather than a coach, De Zerbi was able to undo the spell that had Spurs in its grip.
It was immediately clear that De Zerbi, the last roll of the dice from the hierarchy, was the only man capable of delivering what Spurs had been missing all season. The playing identity they had lacked since Postecoglou. The positive message people could rally behind. The clear sense of mission and purpose that lifted the players. No one else could have delivered this.
Even the 2-2 draw with Brighton, as painful as it was, felt like a turning point in terms of positive intent. And the courage, organisation, unity and belief Spurs showed in wins against Wolves, Aston Villa and Everton were unlike anything they had summoned before in this miserable season.
De Zerbi saved Tottenham at the last possible moment. He alone deserves the credit. Everyone else needs to ensure this never happens again.