‘This club is going down’: Inside the stadium, the moment we realised Spurs were ‘doomed’
The Ismaila Sarr goal that gave Crystal Palace a 3-1 lead on the stroke of half-time was not the moment Tottenham Hotspur’s relegation first felt inevitable. For those of us inside the stadium, the realisation Spurs were doomed struck just before kick-off.
The atmosphere in the ground these days has gone beyond anger and into the abyss of apathy and resignation, although the depth of feeling didn’t really hit until last Thursday when the usual pre-game pageant began to boom over the PA system: a monologue that thunders over images of club legends while a light show briefly turns Tottenham’s mega dome into the world’s most expensive nightclub.
The speech rose to its crescendo with a final line that has remained unchanged for several years now: “… where we play without fear. Where we dare. Where. We. Do.” Here, too, Spurs supporters have reached indifference, no longer rolling their eyes at the cruelty of that refrain but instead ignoring the entire show. As an observer, the dissonance between the detachment of the crowd and the excitable voice from the speaker produced an unnerving, almost Lynchian tightening of the stomach.
This club is going down. That’s the dissociation talking, and you notice the same feeling in the players as they stagger onto the pitch and begin traipsing around, lost (in the most existential sense of the word) in a fog that gives the illusion there is no tactical shape, no structure, no meaning. Far from providing direction, the pre-game speech only accentuates the alienation painted onto the stony faces of the supporters, the players, and Igor Tudor, who looked dumbstruck long before Sarr had put the game to bed.
When football clubs reach a nadir the recriminations usually start by debating just how far back you have to go to find the beginning. But Tottenham’s fall has been so sudden the happy days are still within recent memory. Go back to November 2023 and Ange Postecoglou’s Spurs are top of the Premier League table. Even the following November, just 16 months ago, Tottenham had 19 points from 12 games and all was well – or at least it should have been, although in reality fans were bitterly dissecting the broken promises of Angeball.
There is no club in English football so obsessed with its identity, as the pre-match trumpeting of their “to dare is to do” motto attests. The fans demand freewheeling attacking play not just because their historic success has created a kind of mythical identification with dazzling football but because the club actively encourages them to expect it – even when they make managerial appointments that send the exact opposite message.
To an extent the Thomas Frank project was defeated before it had begun, just as Antonio Conte and Jose Mourinho were fated to be disowned. Spurs just don’t do pragmatists; it’s sewn into the badge. Go back 25 years and the only success stories are Martin Jol, Harry Redknapp, Mauricio Pochettino, and Postecoglou, yet under Daniel Levy Tottenham got into the habit of lurching from one tactical idea to another, most recently assuming that after the expansive carnage of Ange they needed a quiet pragmatist to pull on the reins.
Frank looked out of his depth without the structural safety of the Brentford machine around him, which meant all the positives of the Postecoglou era were erased without any new foundations put in place. Yet even that – even Frank’s defensive mindset jarring with the club’s sense of self – cannot quite explain how Spurs could become relegation candidates in such an incredibly short period of time, and nor can an injury crisis that ought to leave more than enough quality in the squad for a mid-table finish.
To understand what’s happened we have to get to the heart of exactly how Spurs got themselves into the position of demanding daring attacking football through a literal loudspeaker even while investing in someone risk-averse.
As ever, it’s all about money. Tottenham are truly unique in English football as a club caught in the limbo between the ‘Big Six’ and the rest, and even as their financial power begins to catch up with the likes of Arsenal and Manchester United breaking from their outsider status has proved extremely difficult, hence the self-imposed wage cap that’s lower than Aston Villa’s and the transfer frugality that has allowed rivals to sign elite players while Spurs settle for the tier below.
“When you look at their expenditure and particularly their wage structure, they’re not a big club,” as Postecoglou put it so pithily on the Stick to Football podcast last month. “When you walk into Tottenham what you see everywhere is ‘to dare is to do’, and yet their actions are almost the antithesis of that.”
A football club can be run successfully without truly daring, without spending much money. What cannot work is a club selling itself on a motto and then refusing to follow through, getting lost in its own contradictions until they seep out in the form of absurdist pre-match entertainment. It is what lured Mourinho, Conte and Postecoglou but left all three infuriated and flailing. It is what creates the derealisation that has zombified the fans and players. It is how you build a billion-pound stadium and stare into the abyss of relegation.
Tottenham’s chief executive Vinai Venkatesham is reportedly ready to break the chains of their wage structure should the club survive this season and Conor Gallagher’s £200k wages are meant to symbolise a change in attitude. Coupled with Levy’s departure and the thought of Ryan Mason parachuting in to scrape Spurs over the line there is a glimmer of hope yet.
But Gallagher is already a totem of Tottenham’s failures; a bad fit for Frank or Tudor, a player discarded by rivals Chelsea, a man already chugging helplessly in the Spurs midfield. Like so much else about Spurs his presence is jarring, a symptom of something deeply broken.
Walking to or from the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium you are struck by its essential incongruence, the most expensive stadium in world sport plonked among terraced houses in an area of north London barely surviving the cost of living crisis. It’s an alien spaceship among mortals, a status symbol willed into existence by a chairman whose ambition was too confused to function.
It told the world Tottenham are a big club who demand the very best of everything. But seven years in, it signifies nothing. Turning up the speakers is pointless now. Spurs fans have tuned out, quietly waiting for the end.