Xavi Simons became the next victim of Tottenham’s terrible injury crisis with his season-ending ACL rupture, but the statistics tell an even more depressing story.
Saturday afternoon was a mixed bag for Tottenham. If you’d have asked a fan before Spurs’ 3 PM kick off against Wolves whether they would have taken a Spurs win but two of their highest profile attackers would wind up receiving season-ending injuries, how many of them would take up that deal? Break Tottenham’s 118-day winless streak in the Premier League, but severely hamper their attacking options and thus decrease their chances of Premier League survival?
It shall forever remain a moot point because this is exactly the reality Tottenham Hotspur have found themselves in.
Spurs earned a hard fought 3 points in a frankly stodgy 1-0 win against Wolves at Molineux thanks to a late goal from Joao Palhinha. Both Dominic Solanke and Xavi Simons went down with season-ending injuries during the Premier League fixture.
From the two, Xavi’s injury is the much graver one as the young midfielder ruptured his ACL. It’ll keep him out of the team for at least 9 months, making it entirely possible that his next appearance for the club could be against Lincoln City in January next year…
Solanke is suspected to have suffered a grade two hamstring strain, which also all but rules out any involvement in Spurs’ end of season run in as they battle against the drop.
This leaves Tottenham with exactly three senior attacking players available to face Aston Villa on the weekend – Mathys Tel, Randal Kolo Muani and Richarlison, all of whom are natural centre forwards rather than wingers.
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Roberto De Zerbi is sparing no effort in his quest to carve out a narrow path that saves Tottenham from relegation, but it feels like due to luck, mismanagement or otherwise, his options have been systematically culled since his arrival.
With earlier injuries to Mohammed Kudus and Christian Romero, De Zerbi now averages one season ending injury per week in charge, possibly yet another bizarre Premier League record Tottenham Hotspur can add to their books.
Painting Tottenham’s injury crisis by numbers
It is no longer a surprise to anyone to say that Spurs have suffered an unprecedented injury crisis, but such terms and what constitutes a crisis is too often the nomenclature of punditry, media.
In these conversations reality can sometimes give way to emotional narrative so as it is with almost anything, it’s worth grounding ourselves (maybe to stave away the existential threat facing your club) with some numbers.
While player availability is not the instant hallmark of a high quality team, it is almost banal to say that availability has an effect on performance. The less players available a team has, the lower its tactical flexibility, the higher the players exhaustion, their risk of injury.
Well, in their Premier League campaign this season, Spurs’ senior players through injury, suspension or other unavailability, have missed a total of 263 potential individual appearances.
It might be hard to put that into context at first, so here’s a little explainer. This is Tottenham’s availability list for this season in the Premier League, which seems closer in comparison to the core map from the Chernobyl reactor control room than an availability list.
From all possible appearances that Tottenham’s players with more than 100 minutes played for the senior team can make (833), across the 34 matchweeks so far this season, player unavailability has reduced that number by 263. In even simpler terms, Spurs have lost 30% of their capacity to field senior players in this Premier League season.
Maybe it’s difficult to verbalise this with sufficient weight but the impact of not being able to field almost one third of your squad, of being denied that much firepower, is almost unimaginable.
For immediate comparison, Tottenham’s relegation rivals West Ham, lost just about 10% of that same capacity (77/782).
It feels like Spurs were given little leeway this season for as completely unprecedented this level of unavailability is.
But it’s not just the raw unavailability that hurt Spurs so deeply this season. Their rate of concurrent injuries, meaning how many injuries they had going on at the same time, is also incredibly high.
Spurs have had at no point this season less than 5 senior players injured, a state of affairs that lasted only for three gameweeks in total anyway. At its worst, they were missing 13 senior players at one time (fans will remember their draw at Anfield as that occasion), and 10 or more on seven separate occasions.
It is not exactly a grand discovery to say that there probably exists a negative corelation between a team’s form and the fitness and availability of their players.
But it is absolutely clear that Tottenham’s season unravelled along with their injuries. Issues with style and performances notwithstanding, it is nearly impossible to imagine that Spurs would’ve been relegation frontrunners with 11 senior players consistently available.
The drop-off has been so drastic its worth visualising.
Tottenham were particularly impacted by injuries to Mohammed Kudus, around matchweek 21 (Bournemouth A), on whom they over-relied for chance creation. Porro’s absences were keenly felt not just in terms of their points per game but also clearly impacted Tottenham’s performances. Spurs’ xG has been consistently lower without him in the team.
Lastly, the perhaps biggest indictment of Tottenham’s medical team, is their injury recurrence rate.
Fears of a curse are probably wide off the mark (the last time I checked there were no burial grounds in Enfield that Hotspur Way could have been built on) but they are not unsolicited.
Spurs’ medical team boasts an impressive 57% re-injury rate. Across 36 distinct injury spells among Tottenham’s 21 senior players with at least one injury this year, 12 players suffered relapses and ended up back in the medical room at a later date.
And what does this say about the Spurs medical team?
It’s difficult to say what exactly is going wrong in Tottenham’s medical department. The issues with injuries had been so persistent across the last three seasons that it can no longer be considered an issue of playing style or training methods.
The injury plague has reaped its toll across four different managers with playing styles that ranged from ultra-conservative to ultra-attacking.
The one constant across that period at Tottenham Hotspur has been instability, both behind the scenes and on the grand stage. The grand Succession style intrigues that were playing out within the leadership structure had left their mark on the medical department all the same.
While this season saw the arrival of Nick Stubbings as the new head of medical, joining from a lead physiotherapist role at Brentford, supposedly during Ange Postecoglou’s last season in charge, the medical department saw a major revamp as well.
Geoff Scott departed Spurs after almost a 20-year involvement after unconfirmed disagreements with Ange Postecoglou. During his time in charge of the medical department at Tottenham, Scott oversaw multiple season were Spurs had some of the best player availabilities in the Premier League, making his departure all the more puzzling.
While the flurry of questionable managerial appointments, bad recruitment, and honestly a dose of bad luck certainly haven’t helped Spurs this season, their current crisis had been in the works for years already and stands on foundations of terrible boardroom leadership and baffling decisions.
What we’re seeing at Tottenham is finally the result of accruing years of instability covered up by first team performances.
