Following on from last season’s Europa League final victory being coupled with their worst-ever Premier League campaign, Tottenham Hotspur are once again football’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
One game remains to determine whether they will run directly through to the round of 16 of the Champions League in March or return to action in the play-off round next month, but owing to their excellent home form, Tottenham are guaranteed to play at least another two matches in European football’s biggest competition after they visit Eintracht Frankfurt on Wednesday evening. Fans should savour the glamour of intercontinental trips, however, as, barring a minor miracle, Spurs’ fixture list will be significantly less glitzy next term.
At this stage, second-tier slogs to Preston North End, Derby County or Stoke City in 2026-27 appear more likely than this season’s jaunts to Paris to play PSG or the French Riviera to take on Monaco. After collecting just three points from a possible 15 this calendar year against Brentford, Sunderland, Bournemouth, West Ham United and Burnley, the fixture list is about to become far more daunting.
So are Spurs — a club with an incredible 62,000-seater stadium, a state-of-the-art training ground, a European trophy to their name in the past 12 months, and who have just been named the ninth-richest club in the world by Deloitte’s Football Money League report — really in danger of slipping into a top-flight survival scrap?
There have famously been Premier League sides that were “too good to go down”, but Spurs ending this season in the bottom three would be an entirely different thought. The idea a side captained by Cristian Romero, who is expected to play an important part in defending the World Cup with champions Argentina this summer, and including talents such as Micky van de Ven and Xavi Simons, could be relegated sounds ludicrous.
Opta supports that point, with its data model predicting just a 1.53 per cent chance that Tottenham will be playing Championship football next season (the same model gives them a 0.54 per cent chance of returning to the Europa League, and a 0.11 per cent chance of surging back into the Champions League).
With 28 points from their 23 Premier League matches so far, Spurs are currently on course to finish with around 46 points, which would surely see them avoid the drop comfortably.
But there have been teams who have started this ‘well’ and still fallen through the Premier League’s trap door. Sunderland in 1997, Wimbledon in 2000, and Blackpool in 2011 all went down after taking the same number of points from their first 23 games as this Tottenham team have. These are the exceptions that prove the rule, with Blackpool’s final tally of 39 points having been enough for survival in every season since, but Spurs are preparing to run a fixture gauntlet.
Over the next 10 matches, they have the toughest schedule in the Premier League, according to Opta’s Power Rankings.
February kicks off with the visit of Manchester City on Sunday — opposition Spurs fans justifiably look forward to facing, having beaten them in three of their past four meetings but, regardless, a tough test against title challengers. Then it’s a trip to a seemingly rejuvenated Manchester United, before hosting Newcastle United and Arsenal.
Judging from their league form in January, it’s a run of fixtures that could result in Crystal Palace, Leeds United and Nottingham Forest swiftly catching them up in the table, with just a three-point gap between Spurs and the latter in 17th place. However, sometimes the reduced pressure of facing favoured opponents can help a side get back on track.
“The game you didn’t want this week was Burnley away off the back of beating Dortmund because everyone thinks you’re going to win,” former Tottenham manager Harry Redknapp tells The Athletic. “You’d rather have gone to Liverpool or somewhere. Those games, you’ll find the players raise their game, and there’s probably more chance of getting results.”
Redknapp was in current Tottenham head coach Thomas Frank’s position several times over his 34-year career in management.
When he replaced Juande Ramos at Spurs in October 2008, they were bottom of the league and winless in eight matches. He had an immediate impact, taking 10 points from the first available 12, and improving the side in the January window. By enhancing Tottenham’s strengths and minimising their weaknesses, Redknapp steered them well away from relegation threat and into European contention, eventually finishing eighth that season.
“I was trying to find results,” says Redknapp. “The glory days go, and Spurs haven’t got the same players. People think you’re always going to play this wonderful football, but if you haven’t got the players, you can’t do it. At the end of the day, fans want to see winning football. However you win, if you’re at the top, you’re not going to be bothered about the style. Who wants to see fantastic football if you’re getting beaten every week? It’s a result-driven business, and you can’t sit there worrying about what people want to see.”
Frank is facing growing pressure, with a combination of poor results and performances allowing the seeds of discontent to flower within the fanbase. While there has been an improvement in style in recent weeks (perhaps a consequence of the comparatively weaker opposition), Tottenham remain ineffective at breaking down opponents consistently in the league through attractive patterns of play, relying heavily on goals from set pieces.
That a quarter of their goals this season have been scored by centre-backs, with Van de Ven and Romero both netting in the 2-2 draw away to second-bottom Burnley on Saturday, speaks to this team’s over-reliance on dead-ball situations.
Yves Bissouma’s reintroduction after the Africa Cup of Nations has brought composure and quality in midfield, but his conduct off the field in recent seasons suggests he is not a player to be relied upon.
In the absence of a dependable ball-progressor, continuing to emphasise set pieces and effective front-footed defending, like in the 2-0 win against City in the August reverse fixture, may be Frank’s best route to getting much-needed points on the board.
“Frank doesn’t have (Luka) Modric pulling the strings for him in midfield,” says Redknapp. “We (his Spurs side) could play because Modric had 100 touches a game and gave it away once. They haven’t got a fantastic playmaker in midfield to control a match, so it’s about working out a system to get results. But Frank needs to win games, it doesn’t matter how scrappy they are. He can’t be doing another 17th-in-the-league job.”
Perhaps surprisingly, Tottenham are the league’s outstanding finishers, with an expected goals overperformance of around eight since the start of the season — a trend that seems unlikely to persist for the remainder of the campaign, considering the lack of natural goalscorers available. Not since Nuno Espirito Santo’s brief tenure in 2021 has Spurs’ game-to-game expected goals tally been so frequently under one.
And when the underlying numbers are persistently concerning, Frank’s positivity in press conferences has jarred with supporters. If Tottenham are to unite across the board and pull away from a relegation fight that feels absurd to entertain but could become ever more daunting, ensuring communication is coherent with fan sentiment is important.
“It’s no good Frank coming out and saying, ‘We played fantastic football today. We were so good, how did we get beaten?’,” says Redknapp. “The fans are not bothered about that. They know one thing: the result at the final whistle. When you win, fans aren’t coming out talking about, ‘Oh, we didn’t pass the ball well enough’. They want to see the team win.
“You only get the fans on side when you’re winning matches. They won’t love you if you’re getting beaten all the time.”
Now, in a competition where Spurs are thriving, there’s a great chance to secure a place in the knockout stage proper against already-eliminated opponents in Frankfurt. But, to avoid this season and the club’s future descending into further absurdity, wins on the board in the league are significantly more important.