Tottenham Hotspur have been edging slowly but steadily towards the Premier League’s bottom three since the turn of the year, but this weekend they finally got sucked in.
West Ham’s win over Wolves on Friday night saw the east Londoners burst out of the drop zone, pushing Spurs beneath them. Spurs were unable to immediately escape, meekly losing 1-0 at Sunderland on Sunday afternoon in Roberto De Zerbi’s first game in charge.
This is the first time Spurs have been in the relegation zone beyond the early weeks of a season since January 2009.
A question that has been a hypothetical for the last few months now feels far more real — could a club that won a major European trophy, played in the Champions League this season, and is the ninth-wealthiest football club in the world, according to Deloitte, really be relegated to the Championship?
We’ll find out over the next few weeks — in the meantime, this is what some of The Athletic’s writers think…
“Will go down” still feels like a stretch. Burnley and Wolves are as good as gone, so we’re talking about four teams (Tottenham, Leeds, Forest and West Ham) separated by three points, fighting to avoid 18th place. That leaves a lot of room for other eventualities. I would have said before this weekend that the weight of probability was still just about in their favour.
But whereas Leeds, Forest and West Ham have all shown they are up for the battle, Tottenham’s form, which has been appalling for 18 months, has got even worse since the turn of the year. There’s absolutely no sign of encouragement in the way they are playing. It’s widely agreed that they have lacked fight, but they also lack resilience, composure, quality, dynamism and pretty much every quality you would want in a team.
I give them a better chance under Roberto De Zerbi than under Igor Tudor, but if you’re demanding I say yes or no, then yes I think they’ll go down. And the way things are going, they’ll be going down without a fight. It’s shocking, really.
Oliver Kay
I think so. With the change in mood following Roberto De Zerbi’s arrival and the three-week break between matches, it was easy to forget that Spurs are just… a really limited team. This latest defeat was a reminder that the players are totally bereft of confidence and quality, and there are too many individuals who do not appear to care enough about the club’s plight.
De Zerbi was the latest manager to largely ignore Xavi Simons on Sunday, which left his side short of creativity, but at this point, you wonder if tinkering with the XI is akin to rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. There is a grim momentum about Spurs’ slide down the table and they bear all the hallmarks of a shock relegation.
As De Zerbi said at the Stadium of Light, Spurs may only need one result to change the mood and remind the players how to win. But with just six games remaining and points to make up on the teams around them, it is increasingly hard to see where that win is coming from and how Spurs get out of this mess.
Dan Kilpatrick
For months, Tottenham were sleepwalking towards relegation. Now they are freefalling into it.
Spurs have been — by a considerable distance — the worst Premier League from either results or performances since the start of the calendar year.
The rot had engulfed itself long before that, of course. Spurs were booed off at home to Chelsea on November 1, when they were fourth. Fans knew early positive results were not only unsustainable but that, to steal Ruben Amorim’s words from Manchester United a year previously, “a storm was coming”.
Spurs were lacking in creativity and flair, but have increasingly lacked physicality, tactical discipline, teamwork or any self-belief. The club’s pondering over Frank’s future and indecisiveness on his successor has led to increasingly panicked and poorly thought-out decisions.
The dreadful 3-1 capitulation at home to Crystal Palace on March 5 was surely the moment Spurs fans thought their nightmare was unfolding in front of their eyes. Players sporadically raised themselves for periods of games against Manchester City, Liverpool or Atletico Madrid, but when the pressure and focus was on them: they have routinely crumbled.
Players look emotionally exhausted and detached from their current status. Any win, never mind several of them, looks a distant prospect.
Colin Millar
I feel like someone should make the case for Spurs staying up, so here goes. In the first half at Sunderland, we saw an unusually positive performance. They created chances in open play, not something they have done too often recently. They even made it to half-time without conceding for the first time in months.
Of course, they fell apart in the second half, collapsing at the first setback again. That is par for the course. But it still feels like just one bit of luck, one win could transform the players’ mentality. As De Zerbi has repeatedly stated, the number one problem at Spurs is in their heads. They just need an injection of belief somehow. With Brighton at home and then Wolves away, they have two games where things might just bounce their way for once. And if they do, they have sufficiently good players to get out of this.
It is starting to feel as if West Ham have real momentum, so they may be beyond catching. But neither Nottingham Forest nor Leeds United are playing brilliantly. And so if Spurs can just somehow scramble one win soon, then perhaps they could generate the momentum to leapfrog one of those two and make it to dry land.
Jack Pitt-Brooke
Yes, barring a drastic change in attitude, they will.
Sunderland’s Stadium of Light has housed plenty of teams bearing all the traits of the doomed and on Sunday it added another to the list. That Spurs were better in the first half is a sign of how bad they have been and how low expectations have dropped. Sunderland were disjointed and sloppy and still their visitors couldn’t put themselves in front. After the break, a team that the situation dictates should be battling did anything but.
It is the latter that will do for them. There is an indignity to this team that belies its apparent talent; they give the impression they simply don’t care enough. To watch Micky van de Ven and Cristian Romero, Spurs’ captain, no less, expend more energy on bemoaning decisions than anything else is indicative of the problem. Richarlison careening to the floor at every opportunity, likewise.
Teams without talent go down every year. Two more, in Burnley and Wolves, will this season. While Spurs have overpaid for a lot of average footballers they are also exactly that: average, which is better than relegation. Yet the adage of talent only getting you so far has never looked truer than when watching this Spurs team. They lack heart and it shames them. De Zerbi has a huge job on his hands and it will be a greater shock if he succeeds rather than fails.
Chris Weatherspoon
They deserve to be, but I think they survive by a point or two.
The micro issues are obvious. Some of these players are not good enough. Among those who are, there are a couple playing well within themselves, with minds on the World Cup and their moves away.
But this team is a reflection of what the club has become. Football teams make mistakes — that’s just part of the game — but Spurs have made so many now and have been so slow to correct those that are reversible, that pointing the finger at individual players seems beside the point. There’s a pervasive hopelessness to everything now and even a nationwide appetite to see them relegated; there are too many enemies and there is too much negative momentum.
A healthy team would rally against that — even use it to stoke their revival. With games against Wolves, Brighton, Everton and Leeds left, there is more than enough time to change the course of the season. But we’ve been saying that for months now.
I’m a fan. I have to be positive. Perhaps the only reason I believe that they will survive is because I want them to.
Seb Stafford-Bloor
Until about a month ago, I was of the mind that Spurs fans were being overly dramatic about their team’s chances of relegation. Then I watched their 3-1 defeat to Crystal Palace, and realised that nobody was exaggerating.
As Oli says, it is hard to make a definitive statement when there are still four teams within three points of 18th place. But the clue is in the name: this is a relegation battle, and Tottenham are missing the fight. They look progressively more and more shell-shocked by what is happening to them, but it is putting them into a stupor rather than shaking them awake.
I don’t believe that Spurs are completely without quality — there are some players who are not good enough for what the club want to achieve, but there are plenty who should absolutely be good enough to avoid relegation. Their issue, as everyone knows by this point, is that they completely lack confidence.
Tudor’s short tenure was a disaster: his job description might as well have read ‘new manager bounce’ rather than ‘interim manager’, and it became rapidly clear that no bounce was forthcoming. De Zerbi has better credentials for the post than Tudor, but very little time to snap these players out of their funk. Had he started his tenure with a win, it could have been a springboard, but instead they have gathered so much downward momentum that, if they stay up, I think it will be down to other teams’ favours rather than any resurgence by Spurs.
Cerys Jones
“Tottenham away, ole ole….”.
As Stevenage’s hardy band of 279 travelling fans celebrated what may well prove to be a season-defining victory in their pursuit of the League One play-offs at Bradford City on Saturday, no doubt what possible future fixture was uppermost in their minds.
Tottenham Hotspur. In north London. As Championship peers. A mindboggling prospect that just a few weeks ago I’d have dismissed as fantasy.
Sure, Tottenham were on a bad run. And sure, every Tottenham-sporting colleague seemed to be working themselves up into a frenzy about relegation.
But, this was Tottenham. I’d seen Thomas Frank’s side cruise to a deserved 2-1 victory at Leeds United in October, so felt sure they had the players to get out of trouble, even as results continued to worsen in the New Year.
How could a team with proven Premier League goalscorers such as Richarlison and Dominic Solanke not get the couple of wins they needed to stop the rot? I said the same to anyone who asked about West Ham and Jarrod Bowen.
And then I watched Tottenham’s 3-0 defeat to Nottingham Forest just before the last international break. Wow.
It wasn’t just the loss of three points to a major rival in the fight to avoid the drop. It was the total lack of heart and desire once behind that had ‘relegation’ written all over it. Sunderland on Sunday was similar.
Stevenage may not go on to win promotion from League One. Even if a club who dropped ‘Borough’ from their name in 2010 because it sounded “too non-League” hold on to sixth place, they’d still then have to get the better of some very good teams in the play-offs.
But, if Alex Revell’s side do upset the odds to go up, the Premier League’s first £1billion stadium will next season be hosting a league fixture that no one, not even the most ardent Arsenal fan enjoying their wildest dream, could have forecast.
Richard Sutcliffe
I still can’t quite believe it, but yes, I think they will.
The caveats here are that all of the other three candidates to go down could quite easily collapse at any moment, and only West Ham look close to actively good. It could all change with one win for Spurs, and it maybe isn’t reasonable to expect De Zerbi to have that much of an impact after just one game.
But it now looks like you’re going to need 39, maybe 40 points to stay up this season. West Ham have 32 and the way they’re playing, they might reach that with a couple of games to spare. Forest aren’t playing brilliant football but have 33, play Burnley next weekend, and in the last few games have figured out a way to scrap points from some decent opponents. Leeds have 33 as well, and while they haven’t scored a goal in their last four games (before they play Manchester United tonight), four of their last six fixtures are against other relegation candidates.
In short, of the four, Tottenham currently look the least likely to reach the required figure. Which is why I think they will be relegated.
Nick Miller
I have seen this movie a few times before with another original member of the ‘big five’ in Everton, only for them to somehow find a way to get out of trouble. I think history will repeat itself.
Sure, Tottenham are in the worst run of form of all the remaining relegation candidates fighting to avoid joining Wolverhampton Wanderers and Burnley in the Championship.
But I believe hiring Roberto De Zerbi, albeit a bit on the late side, is going to pay off. It is not as if Tottenham’s run-in is against lots of teams putting in amazing performances on a regular basis themselves. Even a trip to Chelsea is not that intimidating, given the woeful displays they have been putting in of late, especially at Stamford Bridge.
I just think Spurs will get the few breaks you need to turn the negative momentum around and scrape to safety.