These are tough times for Tottenham Hotspur.
Sunday’s Premier League defeat to Leicester City was their 13th in 23 matches in the competition this season and means they have lost 56.5 per cent of their league games so far in 2024-25. If they maintain that rate over the remaining 15 fixtures, they will have the worst losing record of any team in the club’s 142-year history.
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It is quite the decline.
Remember, Tottenham came fourth under head coach Antonio Conte in 2021-22 and fifth last season in Ange Postecoglou’s first campaign in charge. They may not have won a trophy since 2008 but in the 16 seasons since, Spurs have never finished outside the Premier League’s top eight, and been sixth or better 13 times.
After the humiliating loss of Sunday, the giant of knowledge opts gives them only a 11. 5% possibility to complete in the 10 most sensible.
What is clear is that they are far, far too close to the three relegation places for comfort, sitting eight points above 18th-placed Wolverhampton Wanderers.
How did it represent a club of coherence and stability suddenly discovered suddenly caught in this spiral of destiny?What was accomplished for this high-end forged floor, Tottenham has had?
Much has been written about the current injury crisis, which has spectacularly ruined this season. Much has also been written about Postecoglou and his unique style of play. But what about the underlying conditions and circumstances at the north London club? Can anything there explain how a team who always used to be competitive could suddenly go off a footballing cliff?
It is to completely analyze Tottenham’s difficulties this season without contemplating the resources that must be taken for the manager / chief coach, compared to the previous operators of these paintings and compared to the rivals of the Premier League of Spurs.
Last week, the Deloitte Football Money League published its annual report, which contained a striking discovery at Tottenham. Confirmation of what many other people had thought: that the bill for Spurs’ salaries fell last season. According to top figures at Deloitte’s money company, Tottenham’s salary expenses for 2023-24, the coach’s first crusade from Angel’s Postcoglou Trainer, are £222m, as opposed to £251m a year earlier.
This covers the exits of the giant salary team, in particular Harry Kane and Tanguy Ndombele, while the Spurs have controlled their salary invoice after having less under Antonio Conte. (Tottenham will put his official figures for the last season later).
That decrease in the wage bill is notable for a couple of reasons.
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In the first place, because it shows that any concept of a ‘great six’ in English football, as they decide through salary spending, belongs to the past.
Based on these Deloitte figures, Tottenham are in fact seventh among Premier League clubs, behind sixth-placed Aston Villa (who spend £256million on salaries, according to respected football-business analyst Swiss Ramble’s figures.) Spurs and neighbours Arsenal used to be almost neck-and-neck on wages. Now Arsenal (£327m) are spending more than £100m more per year than their local rivals in that area. Villa and Newcastle United are Spurs’ close competitors now, rather than what you might now call the ‘Big Five’.
In addition, Tottenham’s salary / turn last season in 42%, the lowest of all clubs evaluated through Deloitte. This means that they are controlled more sustainable than their rivals, less exposed to the threat if something is wrong. But that also leaves its enthusiasts wishing the club to be a little bolder in the Move market, given the theoretical construction they have. Especially at this time, the winter window that has a week to run and the team of the first team in an urgency of strengthening.
Jack Pitt-Brooke
Rebuilds are never easy, but it is difficult for Tottenham to get exactly the age profile of their new team.
Postecoglou presided the dismantling of the maximum of the former team of Mauricio Pochettino, who largely supported the Spurs to Conte’s mandate. The only son Heung-min and Ben Davies are still of this generation of players. Beyond the few years, Tottenham has worked very difficult to indicate to young players, at the time of Fabio Paratici in the club (2021-23), and proceeding to Postecoglou.
But at times, it has felt as if they are still paying the price for not getting their signings right before Paratici joined the club. If they had signed younger targets back during the years when they struggled with recruitment, those players might now be of peak age. There is nobody in Spurs’ squad who joined the club between August 2015, when Son was signed, and 2020, when Sergio Reguilon arrived. (And if Reguilon had not come back into the fold this season after two years out on a series of loans, it would be nobody between 2015 and 2021, when Cristian Romero joined.)
That recruitment gap includes the 2018-19 season, where Spurs infamously didn’t sign a single player. The prospective teenage signings of that campaign would be the peak-age players of today and firmly established at the club by now.
All of this has made life more complicated for Postcoglou, who has just faced more youth players who have joined Tottenham in recent years.
It is possible that this has only been solved by recruit To many other established players: Jacob Ramsey (now with 23 years), Conor Gallagher, Pedro Neto (both with 24 years), Ebelechi Eze (26), but reached agreements for any D ‘among them.
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Apart from Solanke, who turned 27 in September, the focus was on signing teenagers: Lucas Bergvall, Archie Gray and Wilson Odobert. Yes, they could all turn out to be excellent investments, and Bergvall and Gray have done incredibly well recently, but it has left Tottenham a bit short of proven players in their mid-twenties who could have stabilised the team in difficult times.
Postcoglou has defended the policy of movement of the club in public, but in reality it would have been less difficult this season with more experienced signatures.
Jack Pitt-Brooke
For the best part of a decade, Tottenham could rely upon one of the deadliest strike partnerships in Premier League history to dig them out of trouble. Between Son’s arrival and Kane’s departure in summer 2023, the pair directly combined for 47 goals — a record for the competition.
In 2021-2222, when Spurs asked local rivals Arsenal for the fourth and final Champions League qualifying point, he was the most sensible scorer on the most sensible flight along with Mohamed Salah (23 years old from Liverpool. They scored in a remarkable 3-0 win over Arsenal that arguably would be, and there are plenty of other examples of them winning games together.
They were world-class stars and relentless match winners at the height of their strength, at the most sensible of their game, and Tottenham have no one in their ranks at the moment who is definitive in their equal. Solanke’s signing has inspired clubs, however, they are still not at the grades that Kane and his son established at the time.
While Kane joined the German champions in the Bayern Munich series before last season, he stayed with Spurs. But now 32 years has been disappointing in the more than six months.
As indicated above, the son and the deffinisher Davies are the only senior figures since the end of the Reign of Pocket in 2019. Eric Dier followed Kane in Bayern last January and Hugo Lloris moved to the MLS a few more weeks more weeks late. Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg arrived a year after Pochettino’s dismissal, but he is another senior professional who left postcoglou time in charge. Some of those players could not have been the first option, but obviously there was a loss of leadership within the team.
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At their peaks, Kane and Son were two players who led by example, and would regularly win matches in which the team overall had underperformed. Without that elite edge in attack, it is much harder for Tottenham to come out on top without playing somewhere near their best.
Jay Harris
Postecoglou was presented to the fanbase as an antidote to the three managers who came before him when he arrived from Scottish champions Celtic.
Conte, José Mourinho and Nuno Espirito Santo their coach races on pragmatic and reactive tactics. In the correct circumstances, they succeeded.
Conte and Mourinho are winners of the series who have raised trophies with clubs in other countries; Napoli has won seven consecutive championship games and lately is more sensible to the series under Low Conte, Nuno has surpassed all expectations through repeated applicants of Nottingham forest applicants in the 3rd. Fenerbahce is a moment in the Turkish elite.
Postcoglou likes to play soccer and expansive attacker; A flavor that comes to take risks. He pushes his defenders on the most sensible of the square to review the territory. The outdoor wins opposed to Manchester City (4-0) and Manchester United (3-0) this season are examples of selection of what it looks like when everything works.
Flying between those other coaching ideologies had a long-term effect on Tottenham’s success.
How can you challenge the trophies when your wishes replace every 18 months, you’re in the canoe?
Postcoglou inherited a team, adding players who had been signed for Pocsettino, Mourinho, Nuno and Conte. For example, the midfielder Ndombele, the club’s record firm until the arrival of Solanke, did not officially went in summer, two years and part of years after his last appearance of Tottenham. The new chief coach also sent Ivan Perisic, Emerson Royal, Davinson Sánchez, Joe Rodon, Giovani Lo Celso and Hojbjerg.
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Younger players the club signed with a plan to develop them into stars, including Alejo Veliz and Bryan Gil, have not worked out. Postecoglou has had to slowly build his perfect squad over time, and that process is still far from completion.
If you compare the Spurs with other Premier League clubs, not only in Liverpool and Manchester City, but also Brentford and Brighton, the main difference is the consistency of their taste for the game during a prolonged era of time, even under other managers/ Chief coaches. Yes. , Each new date will bring small changes to the taste, however, it is helping when the general vision is explained through the property. This means that there may be alignments in all departments in the type of player of a player who recruits a club.
For example, Liverpool signed Ryan Gravenberch when Jurgen Klopp was in charge but the Netherlands midfielder has reached new heights this season under the German’s successor Arne Slot. There are signs Tottenham have a more defined approach to the transfer market now under technical director Johan Lange, who was hired in November 2023, but it will take time for that to pay off.
After almost two years under postcoglou, it turns out that the Spurs do not yet have the team to respond to the requests of their chief coach.
Jay Harris
The environment on the terraces is not directly linked to what is going down on the ground, however, this sometimes provides a fairly transparent symbol of the intensity of the rot of a club.
The first sign of the disorders of serious enthusiasts this season occurred at the end of Tottenham’s 1-0 defeat to Bournemouth on December 5, when there was a confrontation between postcoglou and a small number of followers out of Dorasarray a little more a week. Later, enthusiasts obviously indicated that their frustration was basically aimed at the Board of Administrators instead of the coach when President Daniel Levy sang a 5-0 victory opposed to Southampton.
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Those songs have persisted at every game since, but reached a crescendo on Sunday when Bilal El Khannouss gave struggling Leicester what would prove a winning 2-1 lead at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, with shouts of “We want Levy out” also booming around the ground. The full-time whistle was met with boos, and the unfurling of a banner which read: “24 years, 16 managers, one trophy — time for change.” It has become the most striking image of Tottenham’s latest poor result.
There are many other reasons for the fanbase to be frustrated with the tax. The Tottenham side have been decimated through injuries, but, with just over a week left in the winter window, the only signing, so it has been goalkeeper Antonin Kinsky. Postecoglou reiterated that he and his players want help.
The club’s publicity force has been spurred through concerts and NFL games in the stadium’s partnerships and wise with primary brands, however, it turns out that the team’s first team is no more sensible than the list of precedences.
You can make your own jokes about the stadium brand and music that pay tribute to the Netflix dystopian squid game the same day, Tottenham lost 6-3 chaoticly against Liverpool the weekend before Christmas. There were opposite protests to the assets before that day he had enthusiasts by releasing black balloons in the air.
The appointment between the enthusiasts and the club is already frozen.
Last year, Spurs increased season-ticket prices by six per cent and made changes to senior concessions. Their most expensive adult season ticket costs a staggering £2,367 ($2,954), which does not exactly scream good value for money when they have not won at home in the Premier League since November 3. The Tottenham Hotspur Supporters Trust (THST) plan to talk about the “performance of the current ownership” at their annual general meeting (AGM) next Monday.
While Postecoglou speaks to the media multiple times every week, there has been no word from Levy, chief football officer Scott Munn or Lange.
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Maybe it would be beneficial for everybody if a member of the club’s senior leadership spoke publicly about what has been happening this season and alleviated the supporters’ fears, or laid out what exactly their long-term plan is.
Jay Harris
That of this season has caught the attention not only to postcoglou, but to the entire design around it.
The Tottenham configuration dates from 2023, the year of the left and the history of the year and the postcoglou has arrived.
First Munn arrived as director of football, then Johan Lange as technical director in the autumn. Since those meetings, there has been a heavy overhaul of football services, with strategic reviews carried out, safe workers leaving and others hired. It’s a different position compared to two years ago.
But what happens if it has been lost with all this rotation of experienced personnel?
Whatever you think about the reasons for the departure of Paratici (it resigned in April 2023, after being expelled from football activities for 30 months for accusations of monetary irregularities), it is greatly given through staff and through of the players, who appreciated their revealed in their days with the Italian giants of Juventus and their winning mentality. In addition to supervising the recruitment, Paratici a visual presence and an intermediary of good reputation, mediating between Conte, Levy and the players. It can also constitute the reviews of the club to the players and solve the daily disorders that have arisen.
Does Tottenham have such a figure now? That is the role of Munn, but Paratici was a worn personality so exclusive that he showed. Not only because of his mystery air and love for the center of attention, but also his great club delights and won the mentality. (Tottenham liked the way Lange Ange tries to make transactions of spurs movement in private, however, there is also some other aspect in that piece). Some other people miss the elite delighting and leading to Paratici provided to the educational field.
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In the end, this puts more strain on the postcoglou. He wants to focus on team training, but he’s not exactly chatty with players all over the place. This is very different from the way Pochettino is open, taking the time to invite them to his workplace to chat. If the head coach helps keep their distance, they want other people, players and staff, to interfere and fill this space.
Jack Pitt-Brooke
(Top photo: Andrew Kearns/Getty Images)