Tottenham Hotspur go to Wolverhampton Wanderers this weekend with their season and future on a knife-edge.
Win this afternoon (Saturday) and Spurs could end the day outside the bottom three, depending on results elsewhere, bringing a renewed sense of optimism. Lose away to already-relegated opposition, combined with the possibility of West Ham United beating visitors Everton in a match happening at the same time, and the writing of the north London club’s first relegation since the 1976-77 season is on the wall.
It means yet another game watched through their fingers or from behind the sofa for the millions of Tottenham fans unable to make the trip to Molineux, as relegation to the Championship becomes an ever more likely prospect.
“All of a sudden, the fate being so disastrous has made games not even including Spurs incredibly stressful. Like, unbelievably stressful,” says Adam, 38, who has been a season-ticket holder for 20 years.
“On Monday night (when West Ham got a point from a 0-0 draw at Crystal Palace), I was on the floor, practically hyperventilating, watching the (West Ham attacking) corner at the end. From a physiological perspective, the lack of sleep… During the Sunderland game (a 1-0 away defeat two weeks ago), I ended up with a massive migraine. I had a friend around to watch it, but we didn’t speak for about 40 minutes after we conceded. We were in a haze.”
Off the back of ending a 17-year trophy drought by winning the Europa League last May, many Tottenham fans went into this season with excitement.
While they missed out on influential creative midfielders including Morgan Gibbs-White and Eberechi Eze in the transfer market, which has undoubtedly contributed to their calamitous season, Spurs strengthened their attacking ranks with Mohammed Kudus and Xavi Simons, and began life under new head coach Thomas Frank with back-to-back league wins, beating Burnley at home before an impressive 2-0 win away at serial champions Manchester City.
But after that decent start, their form collapsed. Tottenham have picked up just two league wins from 24 league matches since the start of November, and are yet to record one this calendar year. Frank was sacked after a 2-1 home defeat to Newcastle United on February 10, with match-going fans having long grown tired of the continued poor performances and results.
“It was towards the end of the Thomas Frank period when I really just tuned away from football,” says Gary, 26, who now only watches Spurs’ fixtures. “Partly because it’s hard to watch other teams do well, and the other part is that even thinking about football was getting me in a bad mood. I just wanted to get away from it all, really.
“During the international break that just came up, I didn’t watch any of the England games. Then I didn’t watch any of the FA Cup quarter-finals weekend after it. So it was nearly a month off football. Those three weeks were bliss — not thinking about Spurs, not thinking about football, just getting on with life.
“I watch every Spurs game with my dad, but since we’re not watching any other football, I’m not spending time with him. I go out for lunch on the weekends with my mum, because I see it as free now. I’m going to the gym more — it’s probably having quite a positive impact on my life. It’s made me realise there’s more to life than football, and how much football has impacted my life.”
While Gary has been able to extricate himself from following every Spurs-related game or update, some fellow fans, including Ben, 45, who has had a season ticket since 1989, have been consumed by the team’s protracted slide in recent seasons and struggle to escape from thinking about it.
“I’m a pessimist,” says Ben. “I’ve seen this slippery slope coming. Every single week, hoping for a lucky win, but it’s just been bad luck — injury after injury. Every Saturday night or Sunday, I’m in a vile mood, trying to get a Monday off work, because of the Arsenal, Chelsea, and West Ham fans. It’s just been playing on my mind all the time.
“I haven’t got kids, Spurs are everything in my life. I’m Spurs-mad. I’m turning Twitter off next week; I’ve already planned when Instagram and Facebook are going off. I’m meeting a Spurs fan today who was at the last relegation in the ’70s, and it’s affecting him massively. He said his wife is struggling to handle his emotions right now.
“It’s making me feel physically sick. I’ve got a few days’ holiday held back if I need to take it. I’m due for a sabbatical and was thinking whether this is a good time…”
Tottenham saw no new-manager bounce when Frank was replaced with Igor Tudor, and the Croatian was sacked after just 44 days in charge without delivering a single win. Performances have improved under Tudor’s successor Roberto De Zerbi, and the Italian’s upbeat messaging has encouraged the fanbase, but Spurs cannot hope to stay up unless they can win some matches. This wait for a first Premier League victory in 2026 has become one of the run-in’s biggest stories, making the topic even harder for their fans to avoid.
“It’s such a bizarre situation to find a club of our stature in a relegation fight that everyone wants to talk about it,” says Gary. “It’s not just after the game when you get banter from your friends. If the game’s on Saturday and I see friends on Sunday, they’ll speak about it. I go to work on Monday, and people want to speak about it.
“By the time people stop speaking about the game from the Saturday before, we lose again on the Saturday after — rinse and repeat. It’s in almost every aspect of my life at the moment. People want to talk about the situation, and I don’t blame them, because obviously, it’s a big talking point for everyone, but it means that it’s so hard to get away from.”
For some Tottenham fans, the prospect of relegation was so ludicrous that they would entertain thoughts and conversations about it.
Spurs were 12 points ahead of third-bottom West Ham on New Year’s Day, and even if rumblings and fears about tumbling out of the Premier League were starting to spread online and through the terraces, few actually believed it was a possibility.
“Initially, it was a perverse mix of wanting to experience it without actually wishing to experience it,” says Darryl, 38, whose father bought him a Tottenham season ticket before he was born, and has had one ever since. “You’re peering through the looking glass and wondering what would happen if we did go down. ‘Could they? Would they have financial issues with the stadium debt? How many players would leave? Could it even be a good thing?’. Like wondering what would happen if I were the last person alive. ‘What would I do?’. ‘Oh, it would actually be really grim’. And it would be a grim reality to go down. It could be a hell of a long time before we get back to where we would want to be.”
The majority of Spurs fans will have no memory of relegation, and it is an entirely different prospect these days than it was in 1977. At that time, it was not uncommon for clubs to win promotion from the Second Division and be immediately competitive at the top end of the First Division, as the domestic elite was then known.
Derby County, for example, won the title in 1971-72, two seasons after being promoted. Brian Clough went one better with Nottingham Forest in 1977-78, winning the league and then the European Cup with Derby’s East Midlands neighbours and arch-rivals immediately upon earning promotion.
Now, those stories are far more uncommon. Leicester City achieved a similar feat 10 years ago, but that’s considered the greatest shock in modern football history. Wolves, who immediately finished in the Europa League places in 2019 after a six-season spell away from the top flight, offer a more realistic target.
Having no reference point for their own club, however, is a primary driver of the anxiety for Tottenham supporters.
“It’ll be very hard to feel that connection with them again, because I see this relegation as the ultimate betrayal,” says Adam. “To allow themselves to be in this situation is categorically unacceptable. I think the reason I’m so angry and stressed about it is that it feels like our relationship with the club and that thing that we’ve always loved doing, and the thing that you do with your mates, and you talk to everybody about — my dad calls me about it after every final whistle — will change negatively forever, and it’ll never be the same again.”
“It’s the fear and stress of that, the anxiety of everybody looking at you slightly differently because you no longer support Spurs, this big club that you can be proud of; you now support this national embarrassment, who have gone through probably the worst thing that any club of our size will ever go through. That will forever tarnish us, and our children will be tarnished by that.”
For other fans, it’s the worry of having to wait longer for the ninth-richest club in the world to fulfil their great promise.
“I’m an optimist at heart, and the most disappointing thing about a potential relegation for me is that I see the potential with Spurs,” says Gary. “I see how we could challenge for the very top honours, and I see how we could become an elite football club. A potential relegation puts that back so many years.
“I don’t really care what other people say. I’ve always hated the ‘Big Six’ label. I don’t think it does anything for us. If anything, it brings more negative eyes on us than anything else. For me, the thing that keeps me up at night is thinking we could be great, and us being relegated sets us back so many years. I’m quite optimistic about where we can go if we stay up, and going down muddies that vision so much.”
One thing almost every Spurs fan can agree on is that today’s game at Wolves will have a significant bearing on their Great Escape prospects.
Should a win lead to them avoiding the drop, Tottenham have the ability to bounce back from all this next season with a clean bill of health and aspire to qualify for Europe — though few will be surprised if they struggle again. If they do get relegated this season, the implications will be sizeable. However, it may also finally provide some solace, allowing fans to process the reality without the hope of survival.
“If it actually happens, it will be a huge relief,” says Adam. “I don’t think it will be that stressful. It’ll be upsetting for a couple of days, but I think we’ll move on pretty quickly.
“And when you think that this has been an emotional struggle every day for the last three or four months, it will be a huge relief not to be going through that anymore, because it’ll be done one way or another.”