If you want a good example of how Thomas Frank’s Tottenham Hotspur are an unusual team, having an unusual season, try this simple experiment. Take their nine Premier League games so far and rank them in order, from best to worst.
At the top you will probably have the 2-0 win at Manchester City and Sunday’s 3-0 win at Everton. Then the wins at West Ham United and Leeds United. At the bottom would be the defeat to Bournemouth, then the defeat to Aston Villa and the 1-1 draw with Wolverhampton Wanderers, although you may want to switch the order of those two around.
But the pattern would be clear. The best three or four games would all be away from home. The worst three, certainly, would all be at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.
Now, you may argue here that it is too early in the season to draw big conclusions. The samples are too small. The fixture computer has too much weight. Maybe that is right. In the Champions League, Spurs have won their one home game (Villarreal) and drawn both away (Bodo/Glimt and Monaco). In the League Cup they breezed past Doncaster at home and then lost 2-0 away to Newcastle United on Wednesday night.
But take a step back and you can see that this is a real trend. And not one that just started this summer either. Look back over the last year and Tottenham’s home record in the league is pitiful. Over the last year — a run starting with the 4-1 win over Aston Villa on 3 November 2024 — Spurs have played 19 home league games. They have won just four of them: Villa, Manchester United and Southampton under Ange Postecoglou, and Burnley under Frank at the start of this season. They have drawn four and lost 11, meaning they have taken 16 points from 57 available at home.
You can compare this record with the other 16 teams who have been in the Premier League both this and last season. Over the last year, Spurs average 0.84 points per home league game. Only West Ham United, with 0.78, average less (by way of comparison, every other team averages at least one point per home game, six teams average at least two, and Liverpool average 2.42). Tottenham’s home win rate of 21 per cent is the second worst, only ahead of West Ham on 17 per cent. And only 33 per cent (four out of 12) of Spurs’ league wins in the last year have come at home. The only other team with such a low percentage is, of course, West Ham.
If Spurs are to achieve anything this season, this has to change. They have been carried so far this season by their away form: four wins and one draw, the best away record in the league by a distance. And as luck would have it, their three remaining games before the November international break are all at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. Chelsea this Saturday evening. FC Copenhagen in the Champions League on Tuesday night. And then Manchester United next Saturday lunchtime.
Who knows, they could finish with three rousing wins, and then all of this will look like worrying about nothing. But what if they continue in this way? Trying to build a competitive team who rarely ever win home games is an impossible job. You might as well be trying to build a car without wheels.
The fascinating question is why. Tottenham have the best stadium in the country. How can it possibly be one of the easiest grounds to go and play at? The only Premier League ground easier to win at is West Ham’s London Stadium, which as we all know was built to host the 2012 London Olympics, where it is nearly impossible to generate an atmosphere, and where some fans are so far from the action they may as well bring binoculars.
But the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium was meant to be different, and better than everyone else’s home. The club spent roughly £1.2billion building it. They moved to Wembley for a season and a half to make it possible. This is a stadium with every technological advantage, big bright screens and deafening loudspeakers. It has a famously steep south stand, modelled on Borussia Dortmund’s ‘Yellow Wall’. It is visually spectacular, lit up on a dark night. And yet increasingly, teams know they can just show up there and turn Spurs over.
You could look for a footballing explanation. Tottenham’s league record over the last year has not been especially good overall, the result mainly of Postecoglou prioritising the Europa League from the halfway point of last season. His gamble paid off, but it came at a price: 22 league defeats, 17th place, and his dismissal as manager in June.
More specifically, Tottenham have not played a brand of football over the last year conducive to dominating games at home. ‘Angeball’ was effectively wound down last Christmas and replaced with a more conservative game. Frank’s football has its strengths but it is essentially reactive. It is no coincidence that Spurs are much better this year away from home when they are not expected to have the ball.
But the football explanations cannot tell the whole story. You would still expect, over the course of a year, Tottenham’s higher quality of player to tell. It feels as if there is something specific to the stadium itself that makes it easier to play in, that does not intimidate the visiting team like it should. Perhaps it is the plush quality of the facilities. Visiting teams remark that the away dressing room at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium is the biggest and best in the league. That in itself does not explain everything, but there is a sense that the stadium is so modern, so comfortable, so forward-looking, that it lacks some of the competitive edge and tension that old grounds — not least White Hart Lane — had in spades.
The sad fact is that there is a problem with the atmosphere at the stadium. That has been true for some time but it feels like it is getting worse rather than better. Almost six and a half years since moving in, the stadium has yet to fully find its voice. There have been some great nights along the way — Manchester City in the Champions League in 2019, Arsenal in 2022 as the two teams hunted for fourth place, Bodo/Glimt in the Europa League semi-finals last season — but they have been few and far between. Even in recent home games when Spurs have taken an early lead — Villarreal and Aston Villa — the atmosphere has then gone flat.
There is certainly a ‘chicken and egg’ element to this question. The team would be better if the atmosphere was better, and the atmosphere would be better if the team was better. Frank knows this himself. Before the Aston Villa game, he said that he wanted the stadium to be “a fortress” but knew that both the team and the crowd had to work together.
“It cannot only be the team, it cannot only be the fans,” Frank said in a press conference. “It needs to be both. We need to bring energy to each other. We need to work unbelievably hard, perform well, try to be positive — but also need a little bit of help. Every game goes a little bit up and down. You have good spells, bad spells. We need the fans, especially in the tough moments. The better they can be behind the team, the better it will be.”
One theory is that for so much of last season the atmosphere was defined by negativity, as fans voiced their opposition to Daniel Levy, and to the combination of high ticket prices and perceived lack of ambition for the team. The anti-Levy songs were more widespread than ever, and the protest marches better attended than anything seen at Spurs for years. But Levy was dismissed as chairman last month, and now there is a widespread sense of waiting to see what happens next. Given the profound change at the top of the club, many fans are willing to see what happens in the next transfer window, or with next season’s ticket prices, before making up their minds.
The club is certainly aware of the need to improve the atmosphere, and has been working with the Fan Advisory Board to do so. An Atmosphere Working Group has been set up so club staff can discuss ideas with fan representatives. One idea that is frequently pushed for is a ‘singing section’ at the new ground, to bring fans who want to be vocal together. This was trialled against Roma in the Europa League league phase last season and there are talks about trying it again this season, although it will always face the challenge of requiring existing season ticket holders to be relocated.
There are still other things that can be done. ‘Can’t Smile Without You’ is now always played before kick-off, along with a new video about the club’s history narrated by Sir Kenneth Branagh. Going into this Saturday’s game against Chelsea, there is renewed initiative from both the club and the fans. There will be pitchside ‘pyros’ emitting flames before the kick-off, and perhaps more importantly, the club will turn off the music inside the stadium five and a half minutes before kick-off, giving the fans a chance to make the atmosphere themselves. On Thursday afternoon fans announced online a new campaign — ‘Park Lane for Vocal Fans’ — to bring fans together to make more noise.
There is an acceptance on all sides that the atmosphere must improve, and a hope that if it does then the home form might follow. Four home wins in a year was clearly not the plan when this shining metal bowl was unveiled in 2019. And maybe Chelsea on Saturday, a fixture Spurs have struggled with in recent years, is the right place to start.