Tottenham‘s nosedive towards the relegation zone has forced their fans to think the unthinkable.
Relative to financial security, sporting expectations and basically any other metric you could care to mention, this Tottenham Hotspur season has more than a fair shout at being the worst by any team in English football history.
Spurs supporters have been ringing the alarm bells for months, but their distress signals had often fallen on deaf ears. With the business end of the season having arrived, rivals have now woken up to the club’s plight, but, to continue to borrow Thomas Frank and Igor Tudor’s analogy, many of them have only come to revel in watching the sinking ship.
Did the club’s downward trend start with the lack of spending that accompanied the stadium move? Mauricio Pochettino’s sacking five months after the Champions League final defeat in 2019? Or was it more recent? The series of ill-advised managerial appointments that started with José Mourinho and now leaves them with Igor Tudor? The behind-the-scenes upheaval highlighted by the Lewis family’s ousting of Daniel Levy at the start of this season? The fact that most of their players are always injured? There’s certainly plenty of blame to share around.
The most important thing now, however, is not to work out how all this misery started — it’s how it will end.
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Why Tottenham will get relegated
What had once seemed like another lost season in the annals of Spurs’ recent history, has turned into the worst in living memory.
It’s reached the point where it’s tough to envisage where Spurs might get the points that will save their season. More than a quarter of the campaign has passed since the north London club last won a league game. Relegation rivals West Ham have earned 13 points from their last eight and Nottingham Forest have 10 from their last nine.
The scale of Spurs’ disarray is so large that it’s almost hard to get your head around — cold, hard facts are the easiest method by which to survey the damage:
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Tottenham have taken just 33 points from their last 38 Premier League games, and 12 from their last 20
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They have failed to win 11 successive league games for the first time since October 1975. Their last win was on Dec. 6 — a 2-0 victory over Brentford
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Spurs have lost five consecutive Premier League matches for the first time since November 2004, when they put together a six-game winless run
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With just two home wins in the Premier League, only relegated Championship side Sheffield Wednesday have a worse home record than Spurs in the English football league this season
Combine those numbers with the overriding sense of a team being dragged towards the relegation zone by some kind of unwavering force and all the ingredients are there for this team to go down.
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When Ange Postecoglou’s Tottenham team started dropping like flies last season, it was largely put down to his famously intense training methods, but the trend has continued long after the Australian’s summer exit from the club.
This year, it’s not only been the frequency of the injuries that’s been the problem, it’s also their seriousness, their timing and the identity of the players who’ve suffered them.
Take Spurs’ lack of attacking threat, for example — their performances have been turgid for almost the whole campaign. Spurs amassed an xG of just 0.05 in a 1-0 home defeat by Chelsea in November which turned a sizeable portion of the Spurs fanbase against Frank. Their 4-1 away defeat to Arsenal two games later saw Frank’s team produce a marginal improvement: 0.07xG.
The impact of James Maddison and Dejan Kulusevski‘s injuries on this figures is unquantifiable but the fact the creative duo haven’t played a minute of football this season due to their respective knee injuries will not have helped matters at the attacking end of the pitch.
Of all Spurs’ first-team players that have been at the club for the entirety of the campaign, only two have not missed a game through injury: Guglielmo Vicario and Mathys Tel.
How much of that is bad luck and how much of it is poor squad planning is open to debate, but injuries have arguably been the biggest limiting factor on Spurs’ hopes this term.
And as if that wasn’t bad enough, only Chelsea (7) have received more red cards in the Premier League this season than Spurs (4).
– Tottenham’s Pedro Porro rues injuries amid ‘disaster’ season
Why Tottenham won’t get relegated
Despite all the doom and gloom, there are plenty of factors that still suggest Spurs will be a Premier League team next season.
Chief among them is the objective difficulty of their remaining fixtures in comparison to their fellow relegation battlers. They may have fluffed their lines in a big way against Crystal Palace but with matches to come against Forest, Brighton, Wolves, Leeds and Everton there are opportunities for Spurs to pick up the points they need.
By Opta’s reckoning, only five teams in the division have a kinder run-in than Tudor’s side.
The match between Spurs and Forest in north London is likely to prove pivotal. Lose that and the rest will look much harder.
Forest, meanwhile, face matches against Aston Villa, Chelsea, Newcastle and Manchester United, while West Ham will play Manchester City, Villa, Arsenal and Newcastle.
It’s also worth considering that only one of West Ham, Forest, Spurs and Leeds will join Burnley and Wolves in the Championship next season, so the odds are with Tudor’s side. Forest are in a comparable situation to Spurs: one win in eight games, on their fourth manager of the season, 19th in the form table and lost to West Ham and Leeds recently.
Another positive sign is the ever-reliable Opta supercomputer which at this stage gives Spurs just an 18.09% chance of going down.
The figure may seem optimistic at first glance, but Opta’s meticulously-maintained model reflects betting market odds and Opta’s power rankings — both of which are based on historical and recent team performances as well as the statistical likelihood of the outcomes of remaining fixtures.
Postecoglou’s team finished 17th last year with 38 points. It was a campaign that saw a record-low points total (26) needed to avoid the drop.
This season, Spurs are likely to need between 36 and 38 points to survive — two wins and a draw could be enough for Cristian Romero and Co.
While the 40-point mark has long been held up as the required total needed to stave off relegation, data shows that 36 points has been enough to survive in 18 of the 30 Premier League seasons to have been played to date.
Which fixtures are most likely to decide the relegation battle?
March 22: Spurs vs. Forest
April 18: Forest vs. Burnley
April 10: West Ham vs. Wolves
April 20: Palace vs. West Ham
April 25: Wolves vs. Spurs
May 9: Spurs vs. Leeds
May 24: Spurs vs. Everton, Forest vs. Bournemouth, West Ham vs. Leeds
(Exact match dates April 25 – May 24 still TBC)
Information from ESPN’s Global Sports Research contributed to this story
