We love a bit of Tottenham Lore here. Spursiness. The history of the Tottenham. Dr Tottenham.
It’s all great stuff from a club that just consistently delivers. A great bit they’ve introduced recently to try and make sure their fans suffer for as long as possible is to lose just literally every game they play just before an international break.
It’s great news for Leeds, who face Spurs this Saturday lunchtime looking to become, ridiculously, the eighth team in a row to beat them in the last Premier League game before an international break.
Really is weirdly impressive to have lost that many times in a row in the fixtures that maximise the time your supporters have to stew on it before putting it right. Or, as is often the case with Spurs, just losing again.
You have to go back to October 2023 and the giddy Angeball Honeymoon Period for the last time Spurs didn’t lose right before the international break. And on that occasion they scraped a spawny 1-0 win against a Luton side who’ve subsequently been relegated twice.
They can’t even pin this on fixture-computer machinations, because not one of these defeats has come against Big Six opposition, with two of the last three coming at home in games Spurs were heavy favourites to win.
Here’s the full tale of woe.
September 2025: Tottenham 0-1 Bournemouth
Evanilson’s early goal was the first Spurs had conceded after kicking off the season with wins over Burnley and, in accordance with the prophecy, Manchester City.
So spooked by that early setback were a Spurs side who had taken just two games to completely forget they used to concede goals by the truckload that they simply accepted the inevitability of defeat rather than realising they had 85 minutes to try and get back into the game. They opted instead for just sort of stand around looking confused about it all.
In the vast oceans of time Spurs had to try and get back into this one, they managed a grand total of one shot on target to go with three off target. They didn’t even win a corner. They had 62 per cent of the ball. It’s almost impressive to do that little with that much.
March 2025: Fulham 2-0 Tottenham
Couple of remarkable things here. One, it’s not even the worst defeat at Craven Cottage in March on this list. And second that between a 3-0 win in March 2024 and this 2-0 win almost exactly a year later, Fulham had precisely zero home wins to nil in the Premier League.
Spurs can make even the most routine defeat remarkable.
November 2024: Tottenham 1-2 Ipswich
Perhaps the most extraordinary example of Tottenham’s new-found ability to lose any fixture if it’s before an international break in what was also of course a major Dr Tottenham crossover event.
We all know Tottenham’s league campaign last year descended wildly into absolute chaos that in any normal season could have plunged them deep into actual relegation trouble. Ipswich were one of the three teams sh*t enough to ensure that didn’t happen.
But back in November there really was no indication that Spurs were going to perform the extreme banter season they would eventually pull off. They’d just lost to Galatasaray in a Europa League game they showed no real likelihood of winning, but in the Premier League they were doing okay. Not great, but okay.
They’d won five of their first 10 games and their last three home games had produced a 3-1 win over a very decent Brentford side and 4-1 wins against West Ham and Aston Villa.
Ipswich, meanwhile, had won none of their first 10 Premier League games of the season. And after this astonishing and thoroughly deserved success at White Hart Lane 2.0 they would win only three more of the remaining 27.
Tottenham’s first league game after the international break? The 4-0 win at Manchester City. The entire concept of Spurs is ridiculous.
October 2024: Brighton 3-2 Tottenham
On the face of it, a narrow defeat at Brighton is among the less shameful defeats in this long list of quite shameful defeats.
But Spurs were 2-0 up and cruising at half-time thanks to goals from Brennan Johnson and James Maddison.
September 2024: Newcastle 2-1 Tottenham
One of the better performances on the list but perhaps all the more irritating for that. Spurs thoroughly outplayed Newcastle but couldn’t find the goals to put the game away before Alexander Isak popped up 12 minutes from time to grab all the points for Newcastle.
It was at least an improvement on Spurs’ two previous trips to St James’ Park, in which they’d lost 4-0 and 6-1, but losing games you should have won really can be even more painful than getting thrashed in games you should have got thrashed in. Say what you like about being 5-0 down after 21 minutes, but at least there isn’t any of the agony of false hope involved.
Postecoglou was notably grumpy in the post-match presser, albeit less memorably than two weeks later when, after another defeat in the North London Derby, he would make his now legendary second-season trophy promise.
March 2024: Fulham 3-0 Tottenham
Postecoglou’s Spurs at their enigmatic best here, sleepwalking to a thumping defeat a week after a swashbuckling 4-0 win at Aston Villa had appeared to give them the advantage in pursuit of a top-four finish.
Of course, Postecoglou knew what he was doing all along by finishing fifth, didn’t he? Very funny and also just not really very Spurs you have to say that even if you accept the flimsy premise that they didn’t try and beat City in that all-important title-shaping game at the back end of that season the whole ‘Oh you threw away Champions League football just so Man City would win the league instead of Arsenal’ actually ended up working out brilliantly in the end.
November 2023: Wolves 2-1 Tottenham
Spurs do love to make a bollocks of things against Wolves. There are few more powerful statistical indicators of Spursiness than the fact their last 10 games against Wolves have yielded two wins and 11 points while their last 10 against Man City have produced five wins and 16 points.
While Spurs only prescribed a single point in the end last week thanks to a desperately late equaliser from a ridiculously shirtless Joao Palhinha, back in November 2023 there was even more late drama.
For context, this was just after the Angeball revolution had suffered its first setback with that infamous 4-1 home defeat to Chelsea that ended with Spurs’ nine men playing 0-8-1 and donating a Premier League hat-trick to Nicolas Jackson.
What should have been obvious then is that Postecoglou was a crazy person and that this was not going to be an approach that could consistently deliver across an entire season in a proper big-boy league.
But at the time it was in fact viewed as yet more evidence of his maverick brilliance. It really was a very different time.
Still, it would help the narrative if that Chelsea game could quickly be established as a mere blip rather than the most compelling piece of evidence from any of those early games. A win at Wolves would do that, and Spurs made the perfect start through Johnson in the opening minutes.
They would hold that lead, albeit never truly convincingly, until injury time when Mario Lemina and then Pablo Sarabia would leave Angeball more exposed than ever.
Those two defeats would go on to form the basis of a run of one point from five games. The one point was at the Etihad, because Spurs are just that unserious and always will be.
