In the coming days and weeks, as they try to avoid being swallowed up by the relegation quicksands, maybe the relevant people can get round to answering an intriguing question.
It is the one that is surely being asked already in the boardrooms of Tottenham Hotspur, Nottingham Forest and West Ham United, given the jarring reality that one of those three clubs is likely to drop out of the Premier League and be playing in the Championship next season.
The relevant question: where did it go wrong?
We could follow that up by asking how each club respond to the charge that their positions in the table reflect how they are run as much as being a story of coaching failure.
Are they willing to accept some hard truths and understand that, in football, it is one thing to achieve passing success but quite another to sustain it?
If they are truthful, there would be an acknowledgement from each team that it has been an exercise in self-inflicted damage, that the complaints against them are entirely justified and that, in all three cases, a wonderful opportunity may have been spurned.
For whichever of these sides remain in England’s top division, more fool them if they think staying up should negate the requirement for a period of hard reflection when everything is finally settled.
The “champions of Europe” ensemble, we could call them, bearing in mind the supporters of all three can sing that song, and often do. Historically, in Forest’s case. More recently, for Tottenham and West Ham, albeit via the lesser UEFA competitions.
And didn’t they have fun?
Tottenham’s victory in the Europa League final last year propelled them into this season’s Champions League.
West Ham won the UEFA Conference League in 2023 and, briefly, tried to convince themselves it was the first sighting of a brighter future.
Forest qualified for Europe for the first time in 30 years last May and made such a favourable impression under Nuno Espirito Santo that the BBC asked an entirely different question midway through that season: are they going to win the league?
Yet there is no misfortune, or flukiness, attached to the fact that these are the clubs occupying the Premier League’s 16th, 17th and 18th positions.
West Ham are in most peril of the three, directly above Burnley and Wolverhampton Wanderers in the relegation zone. Forest are one spot higher, but play at title-chasing Manchester City tonight (Wednesday). Tottenham have a little space to breathe, tucked in two points behind Leeds United with a game in hand, but it’s tight and they are horribly out of form. The wind howls, the curtains twitch, and it isn’t easy to know which of these teams ought to feel the most acute embarrassment to be in this position.
Is it Spurs, perhaps, given the financial riches that accompany having the best stadium in England and the considerable evidence that their decline is not just a one-off loss of form but the culmination, season after season, of serial mistakes, questionable decision-making and badly blurred priorities?
Ten years ago, Mauricio Pochettino’s brilliant, fast-flowing side were fighting for the title. Today, Tottenham are contemplating their first relegation since 1977. Worse, their supporters are facing the possibility that they go down while Arsenal, their neighbours and fiercest rivals, finish the season as champions.
Or is it West Ham, where large numbers of supporters regularly protest with black balloons and ‘No More BS’ slogans to signal their disdain for the principal decision-makers, Karren Brady and David Sullivan?
This was the club, lest it be forgotten, that eulogised about Champions League football, not Championship football, when the decision was made to move to the London Stadium. A decade on from leaving Upton Park, West Ham still appear to be suffering an identity crisis. They have just posted the worst financial losses in their history — £104.2million ($140.6m) pre-tax — and appear in need of a complete reboot.
Or should we linger on Forest and, specifically, the thick portfolio of evidence this season to indicate they are not equipped to have the sustained success the club undoubtedly wants?
There is a lot to unpick at the City Ground, that’s for sure, and it’s just a pity that Netflix, or one of the other fly-on-the-wall documentary-makers, was not in place to film the soap opera of Nuno’s fallout with Edu, Nuno’s sacking, Ange Postecoglou’s 39 days in charge, Sean Dyche’s hiring and firing, Vitor Pereira’s appointment and everything else that has happened in between.
For the time being, however, it was summed up to some degree by the picture that was doing the rounds on the internet recently to show the club’s owner, Evangelos Marinakis, mocked up as a guest on Would I Lie to You?, the BBC show in which participants share a wild story and everybody has to guess if it can be true.
This one had Marinakis purportedly stating: “I once sacked our best manager in the last 40 years because he didn’t get on with my mate, replaced him with (Postecoglou) who nearly sent Spurs down, only to appoint Dyche eight games in, sack him and get the guy who had less points with Wolves at Christmas than a triangle.”
Some season, indeed.
At this point, perhaps we should remind ourselves that there is still the potential for Leeds, in 15th position, to fall further into trouble and also the rather eccentric possibility, in the case of Spurs and Forest, that both clubs may yet change how this season is remembered. Tottenham are into the last 16 of the Champions League and Forest are at the same stage in the Europa League, so it is not entirely out of the question that the story can change.
All the same, it would feel a stretch, to say the least, to dress up what has happened as anything other than hugely disappointing.
Perhaps there is a wider lesson here when analysing the league table in more detail.
Look at the cluster of clubs, in particular, who are taking in the view from seventh to 12th place.
Brentford, for example, who are sitting defiantly in seventh despite losing their head coach, Thomas Frank, and two main goalscorers, Bryan Mbeumo and Yoane Wissa, last summer. Look at the way Sunderland have acclimatised during their first season back in the Premier League, reaching 40 points with Tuesday’s 1-0 win at Leeds.
Brighton & Hove Albion’s season has been tough, according to some. Yet they are still in with a decent shout of ending up in the top half of the table, having finished 11th or higher in each of the previous four years. Or see how Bournemouth have improved their position, from 15th to 12th to ninth, in the past three seasons, and may yet do so again from their current ninth spot.
The moral of the story? That it all comes from the top, and that strategic planning and shrewd leadership can be useful traits in a sport where the competition is so fierce.
Daniel Levy left his role as executive chairman at Spurs in September but will the people still in positions of power at the club take some form of responsibility for the team’s regression?
Can the hierarchy at Forest accept that it has been a season of self-sabotage?
Do the relevant people at West Ham understand that many of those protestors, wanting better for their club, make relevant criticisms?
Because if the answer is no, in any of these cases, they would be kidding themselves. And that is maybe the most important lesson for all of them here, unless the people in question are just going to continue making the same mistakes, over and over again.