Tottenham Hotspur Women were not exactly a joy to watch this year. Uninspired performances, injuries to Beth England and Eveliina Summanen, and poor recruitment all saw Spurs end the 2024-25 season in 11th, their lowest ever finish in the Women’s Super League. The team ended the 2023-24 season on a high note, so how did it all go wrong? Why are Spurs still ping ponging around the WSL midtable, unable to solidify themselves as “best of the rest”?
The season’s been over for a few weeks now, and I’ve had a bit of time to process it all. Let’s try to make some sense of how it all went down. Fair warning, this is not going to be a very happy article. A few good things did happen this season—some players had good seasons, but chief among them was Ella Morris, and we’ve just lost her to an ACL tear. If misery isn’t for you, turn around now before I get into it!
Recruitment Issues
Our recruitment has been a problem for a while now. There was some vague hope that Scott Munn might fix things up, given his previous experience in women’s football, but this was all in vain. In the end, this season ended up a perfect testament to how severely we’ve failed to identify and recruit players for the kind of football we’re trying to play.
Alarm bells started ringing over the summer when we lost Grace Clinton and Celin Bizet to Manchester United. Grace and Celin did a huge amount of ball progression (according to fbref, they topped our 2023-24 stats in both progressive carries and progressive passes received, and Grace tallied our second most progressive passes after Eveliina Summanen). Their replacements—Hayley Raso and Maite Oroz—only showed modest promise in this area before joining Tottenham, and both ended up missing huge swaths of the season anyway. We also lost Kit Graham to an ACL injury before the season even started. Robert used Kit as a sort of all-purpose midfield sub to great effect. Summer signing Anna Csiki took on this role in her stead, but at no point did Anna actually look capable of filling Kit’s shoes.
To make matters worse, goalkeeper Becky Spencer’s shot stopping abilities took a nosedive, and we had no suitable backup in place. Of course it was really bad luck that the goalkeeper market was so thin when Becky’s dropoff happened. But also, we’ve known this moment was coming for years. Time really does come for everyone, and it’s baffling to me that the club weren’t more prepared. At the time, word on the street was we had someone in mind who wouldn’t be available until January. I can only assume that was Lize Kop, who we have since signed. Maybe waiting three months to get her seemed a fair risk to those in charge, I don’t know, but it sure doesn’t look too good in hindsight. A half-season on, it’s still not clear whether she’s good enough. Though it’s largely been due to poor performances elsewhere, we’ve only won one game since she’s joined.
Unfortunately, none of this is very surprising. Since Robert joined, almost every player we’ve signed has either been from his home country or home league (Swedish, or from the Damallsvensken), which makes me think he’s doing all the talent ID himself. This should not be part of his job! I don’t think it’s too much to ask for Tottenham Hotspur to hire a person (or people, even) whose job it is to identify talent around the world for Spurs Women.
There is a bit of good news on this front—Spurs Women have reportedly been looking for a Director of Football-type figure for a while, although at the time of writing no one has been hired. There’s also talk that Vinai Venkateshem, Tottenham’s new CEO, may be able to repeat the work he did to strengthen Arsenal Women at Spurs. But, well, people said Scott Munn would fix us too. Maybe Vinai will prove to be a key part of our front office, but I’ll believe it when I see it.
Robert Vilahamn
Emma Sanders reported that Spurs are considering sacking Vilahamn off the back of the 2024-25 season. Personally, I think we should. It comes down to this—Robert was good when he had good talent in his squad that fit his exact footballing needs, but that man does not have a plan B.
Without Grace Clinton and Celin Bizet, and as injuries started to hit the squad and heavy defeats to top sides started to pile up, I lost all sense of what Robert Vilahamn was trying to accomplish on the pitch. The identity that felt so strong in 2023-24 only peeked through a few times, and never for long enough to actually win matches. I often think back to Martha Thomas’ iconic winning goal in December 2023’s North London Derby—a gorgeous and clever and perfectly executed team goal. I’ve hardly even seen us try anything like that this season, let alone pull it off.
I can’t remember one of his substitutions or tactical adjustments ever actually changing a game, and quite often, his inability to accommodate the specific strengths and weaknesses of the squad at hand got him into trouble. For example, Drew Spence has been excellent at times this season, but it’s clear she can only give 50-60 good minutes. Robert insists on keeping her on the pitch for much longer, which results in late game midfield breakdowns. I don’t think a manager this inflexible is a good fit for the WSL.
I also have qualms with Robert’s player development. A number of once-promising players have stagnated under him. After a strong 2023-24, Martha Thomas failed to score a single goal in the WSL on 4.4 xG. Jess Naz, Matilda Vinberg, Amanda Nildén and Olga Ahtinen have failed to hit the highs they reached last year, and Robert has even made Ash Neville look quiet. In years past, Ash has been one of our best attacking players. Yet for most of this season, Robert hasn’t allowed her past the halfway line (because she’s Ash Neville, she still did do a lot of ball progression for us, while also leading the league in tackles). I’m not suggesting that Robert is entirely responsible for all these players’ lackluster performances—there are obviously compounding issues. But the fact that I can’t point to a single player Robert has improved (except for Ella Morris who is so good she may have burst onto the scene anyway) seems like a big problem!
You could argue that we should keep Robert and just try to do better at building him a squad. But there’s no guarantee we’re going to get the front office stuff right this year. If we don’t, I’d rather have a manager who seems remotely capable of elevating an average squad. Even if we do get recruitment right, it’s not like Robert is never going to need to be flexible again. We might sign better players, but so will the rest of the WSL. The league is constantly progressing, and I’ve seen no evidence he’s capable of keeping up with it. We should fire him and take a punt on someone new.
Investment in women’s football
My biggest gripe of all is, as always, that the club just doesn’t seem to care much about the women’s team. While the top Premier League teams in England have all begun to invest in their women’s side, Spurs have trailed behind. Spurs’ investment has come in fits and starts, all under the guise of doing things “sustainably.” This would be a lot more believable if Daniel Levy himself hadn’t effectively said he didn’t think there was a market for women’s football.
“If you look at the economics of women’s football at the moment, there is not the consumer interest compared to men’s,” Levy said in 2023, speaking to Cambridge Union in 2023. “Ticket pricing is exceedingly low, TV rights are very low. Sponsor interest is limited. And as a consequence, every single club in the Premier League’s women’s [team] is losing money. And then long-term, that’s not sustainable. So, something is going to have to change.”
This was, by the way, a non-answer to a question he was asked about his strategy for investing in Spurs Women. I won’t begrudge him that last bit. He is technically correct that pricing is low, that every PL club is losing money and that it’s not sustainable. He says that something needs to change, but he–and every other football exec who thinks like him—refuses to be that change. I find it difficult to believe he and a few other enterprising businessmen couldn’t whip up a good base of support for women’s football in London, of all places, if they really wanted to.
But he apparently doesn’t see consumer interest in women’s football as something one can generate, and he certainly doesn’t see the club’s own role in why the consumer interest is not there. Some of the things the club does actively discourage people who badly want to support Spurs Women—big things, like lack of investment in players, staff and facilities, but also small ones. They schedule women’s and men’s games at the same time, they fail to advertise women’s games, the team only plays games at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium against clubs guaranteed to absolutely ruin us, and when those games happen, they don’t even bother putting Spurs Women-specific merch in the store. When I go to watch Spurs Women content on Spursplay, I have to scroll down so far, I forget why I’m even there in the first place!
Levy’s way of thinking, if it follows what he said in that interview, is cowardly and unimaginitive. I’m admittedly very neutral on the man, but I will take this opportunity to yell at him: The club motto is To Dare is to Do, Daniel. Dare to build a stellar women’s side with a dedicated fan base! If you’d like to read a longer and more thorough takedown of Levy’s statement, I’ll now direct you over to an issue of fellow Spurs Women supporter Caroline’s excellent newsletter, Spurs Across the Pond.
As tempting as it is to paint this as a Levy problem, it’s not that simple. These attitudes are endemic to women’s football and endemic to the WSL (Just look at what Jim Ratcliffe is currently doing at Manchester United, a team with resources so much greater than ours they’re still able to tempt one or two of our players away every season). Women’s football was banned in England until 1970, and there’s still ground to actively make up.
Even if Spurs do choose to invest in the women’s side right this second, they’ve got an uphill battle to face because the WSL is a flawed product. There are four “rich” teams, and each year they fight for three Champions League spots. On the other end, there’s one relegation spot. Many years, the side promoted from the Championship goes straight back down. So what’s left for the eight teams that make up 4th-11th? There are two domestic cups, but those almost always go to one of those four richest teams as well. If you’re not in the Champions League and you misstep in the cups, things become very sparse very quickly. A team might go weeks at a time without playing any games, and when they finally do play, the stakes are low. How are they meant to drum up new support under these circumstances?
There have been a variety of suggestions on how to reform the league—temporarily pausing relegation for a few years, merging with the Championship, or introducing Europa League-like competitions for non-Champions league teams (note that a Europa League has been instituted, but it only exists for teams that have been knocked out of the Champions League already so it’s not relevant to the rest of the WSL). They’ve all got pros and cons, and so far, nothing concrete has taken hold.
I don’t have an answer here either, but I do know that what the WSL has done so far is not it. The league has recently announced a low-effort, low-quality rebrand. WSL, if you’re reading this, please leave your ChatGPT-ass rebrand at home and take some real action. On a serious note, the rebrand campaign is sprinkled with the word “female” throughout. This is a word that tends to pop up a lot when someone’s doing transphobia or misogyny. In the context of the FA’s reprehensible ban on transgender athletes in women’s football, it makes me extremely concerned about the people in charge. In general, this ban is terrible and harmful for players and for the whole sport, and no league anywhere should do it.
So where do we go from here?
