We are here

The roadmap to ruin under the Board of Tottenham Hotspur Limited

I believe it’s likely Spurs will go down.

It’s sad I even have to type those words. But this is where we are.

Our record in 2026 has been abysmal. Yes, we’ve had an incredible run of injuries, the main reason we have struggled so much both this season and last. But those injuries have exposed an inexcusably on-going problem at the club—management’s failure to build a sustainable team with Premier League-caliber cover at all key positions.

This failure is even more unforgivable given the club’s stated goal to compete in “all competitions.” One of the biggest reasons I now believe we will go done is that we are saddled with at least two additional matches in Champions League that Leeds and West Ham don’t have to worry about.

And with both van de Ven and Romero available for the tie with Atletico Madrid…and with the ridiculousness of the European knockout stages…we might well advance to the quarters to face (most likely) Barcelona. That would be four matches against 2 of La Liga’s top 3 teams.

The one glimmer of hope here is that Nottingham Forest are still alive in the Europa League. But given the stakes and the level of their opponent in the Round of 16, Midtjylland, it’s not quite the same thing, is it?

With this post, I offer a sort of “pre-post-mortem” before the body is dead.

In my view, began back in 2017, at the height of our Peak Pochettino years.

From 2015-17, we won—far and away—the most points of any other club in the Premier League. We were a thing to behold, a scintillating team that was just as likely to beat you in the first 10 as in the last 10.

And then we sold Kyle Walker to Manchester City, who were then, with Chelsea, one of our two biggest rivals in the league. In my view, this was the beginning of the downturn.

Granted, we didn’t exactly force Walker out the door. When Pochettino began selecting Kieran Trippier over him for the XI, I think we all knew why. The fact we knew—in the midst of a title challenge and a deep FA Cup run—that Walker would be headed to City that summer is evidence of how selectively the Premier League enforces its “no tapping” policy. But with our rigid wage scale and the talent Pep was stockpiling with City-state riches, we were a title challenger that had no hope of keeping the team together.

While that one transfer didn’t ruin us—we dropped just one spot to 3^rd the following season—Walker proved to be the final piece missing from Pep’s building dynasty at City. This was immediately obvious in the stateside preseason match that summer when City absolutely outclassed us. Once again, as we were with Berbatov, Modric, and Bale, we were the club who weakened ourselves while strengthening “name” clubs like United, City, and Real Madrid.

Sure, it’s not as if we didn’t spend a little money to replace Walker. We paid 23M pounds to bring in Serge Aurier from PSG.

Therein lie one of the biggest problems at the club—our issues with scouting. Aurier had some talent…but as Jose Mourinho famously observed for Amazon streamers, he was a red card waiting to happen. Suffice to say, Aurier did nothing to make us forget Walker—or Trippier, for that matter—and would eventually leave the club for Villarreal…then Forest, Galatasaray, and something called Persepolis on the banks of the Persian Gulf. In contrast, both Walker and Trippier remain Premier League players to this day.

That window, we also spent 42M on Davinson Sanchez, a solid defender who, sadly, never looked comfortable with the ball at his feet. Earlier that year, Mourinho had his United team specifically target Sanchez’s skills on the ball during the Europa League final. Between he and Aurier, that was 65M spent on profoundly limited players.

In that 2017-18 season, we remained in the top 4 but had a disappointing end to our Champions League campaign when we blew a lead to Juventus in the knockout stages. We did bring in one (1) and only one player in the winter of 2018, Lucas Moura, another PSG reject. Put a pin in that one.

That pin would remain the only one on the transfer bulletin board for the next two windows, too. That’s right—the club brought in only one new player across three transfer windows in 2018-19.

With this perspective, it seems even more miraculous that we barely held onto 4^th in May 2019, let alone that we made it all the way to the Champions League final, thanks in large part to Lucas’s previously dormant left foot. That last-minute win over Ajax remains one of the greatest glory, glory moments in club history.

But those paying attention could see rot had plagued the core of the team. Injuries had stripped us down to fifth and sixth choice in midfield. Our Belgian defensive duo of Jan Vertonghen and Toby Alderweireld were aging. Danny Rose’s fitness issues left more and more minutes to be filled by Gentle Ben Davies, a solid club servant but not title-contending talent. Most foolishly, we had no long-term successors in place to deputize under Christian Eriksen and Harry Kane.

In that schizophrenic summer of 2019, we came off the highs of a Champions League run and the lows of relegation-level form in the Premier League. Investment was needed to back Poch, we cried!

And invest we finally did: We spent big on Tanguy Ndombele and Ryan Sessegnon for a combined 80M and took Gio Lo Celso on loan, too. Somehow, that move for Paulo Dybala never quite happened or, depending upon whom you believe, was never going to happen.

Again, scouting. The supremely talented Ndombele showed up out of shape and would frustrate multiple managers with his less-than-ideal work ethic. Sessegnon seemed to lack confidence from day one and, aside from a purple patch in the spring of 2022, would never look that confident until he scored against us after we sold him back to Fulham.

In the early stages of the 2019-2020 season, we looked very much like a flat team with a hollow midfield still hungover from the disappointing final in Madrid.

And then…Jose. Daniel Levy finally got his world-class manager. And while he wanted Bruno Fernandez, we refreshed the club with the likes of Gedson Fernandes.

In that All or Nothing season, we managed a sixth-place finish, good enough to qualify for Europa League, at least. But that negative football Jose brought with his Peking Manual was an ugly watch that got uglier still the following season as the holes in our squad became even bigger. We became a defensive-minded team that couldn’t defend leads, even blowing a 3-0 lead at home to West Ham.

Under caretaker Ryan Mason, seventh and a spot in the newly created “Europa Conference League” was our consolation. In that summer of 2021, club management sought to return us to our “attacking DNA.” We rebelled when rumors of Gennaro Gattuso made the rounds. Levy thankfully pivoted away from him…but delivered Nuno.

It was ugly. In September, we lost three London derbies by a composite score of 9-1, the worst coming in a loss to Woolwich in which Nuno’s plan was to cede the entire middle of the pitch to them. TL;DR: It didn’t work.

Here’s where I’m going to deviate slightly from the popular narrative of our past few seasons. After the Nuno disaster, Levy did well in acting quickly to bring in Antonio Conte. And for the rest of that season, Conte did well. Don’t believe me? Go look it up. We climbed back up the table, especially after we brought in Deki Kulusevski and Rodrigo Bentancur from Juventus, both badly needed players. In the spring of 2022, we were one of the best teams in the league, perhaps second only to City, and we ended on a euphoric high when we nipped fourth from Arsenal on the final week of the season, highlighted by Sonny grabbing a share of the Golden Boot.

We had every reason to feel hopeful that summer. We had an historic scoring duo playing under a manager who was a proven winner. And for what seemed like the first time in ever, we were bringing in promising players: Yves Bissouma, Richarlison, Ivan Perisic, Destiny Udogie, Djed Spence. We made Cristian Romero’s deal from Atalanta permanent. We were ready to take that next step.

But then…well, we had a lot of bad luck. Injuries prevented us from having our key players on the pitch at the same time. Sonny struggled. Conte suffered personal losses. Djed turned out to be a “club signing” and Yves rarely showed the form we expected him to bring over from Brighton.

Things fell apart. We tumbled to eighth. Our serial manager seemed to lose his mind amid it all. Kane, perhaps the best player any of us will see wear a Spurs badge, decided he’d had enough of the club’s chronic mismanagement and went to Bayern Munich, where he has joined Modric, Bale, and Walker as Spurs alumni who became chronic winners elsewhere with brand-name outfits.

But then…hope! Oh, those glorious first ten matches of the 2023-24 season under new manager Ange Postecoglou, when we were the talk of the league. We had our Tottenham back. James Maddison hit the ground running and looked like the league’s best player. It’d begun to seem Ange had life-hacked the league with his inverted wingers, incessant press, and shiver-inducing team talks.

We led that next match 1-0 over Chelsea thanks to Deki’s 6^th-minute score. And then it all unraveled in that mass of injuries and suspensions. Romero saw a straight red. Destiny was sent off, too. van de Van and Maddison limped off to the training table.

We fought bravely and remained aggressive and forward thinking even down to nine men, even nearly equalizing late on an Eric Dier goal ruled offside. The home supporters cheered us off the pitch. “It’s just who we are, mate.” Ange told us. Summing up the lessons of the night, Deki would later write that, while we’d lost the match, “we won in life.”

Yet except for that trophy-winning trip to Bilbao in May 2025, it would never be as good again.

Under Ange in his first season, we did manage to hold onto fifth with 66 points. An oft-overlooked fact is how much we benefitted from not having to play in Europe that season. With our plague of injuries, competing on the continent may well have dropped us to down to eighth, beneath Newcastle and Man U, who tied on points with 60. That certainly seems likely given the historic rate of injuries our squad suffered that season.

And, of course, the following season did nothing to demonstrate we had a squad fit enough to compete both domestically and on the continent. Famously forced to pick between prioritizing an unwinnable Premier League season and a very winnable Europa League campaign, Ange wisely chose the latter. He won silverware, our first since 2008 and our first European heavy metal since 1984.

But the summer of 2025 would prove pivotal for club management. We had a squad that very badly needed reinforcement. We had a manager whom the players loved and who needed players to enact his brand of football across four competitions.

If you had followed Tottenham Hotspur until then and had fallen into a Rip Van Winkle-like slumber from which you have only now awoken, I don’t need to tell you what the club decided, do I?

Of course we cancelled S3 of Angeball. Of course we did.

Levy and the Board fired him, citing his inability to compete across all competitions. They brought in Thomas Frank, who had no history of doing so. He checked all the boxes, we were told by the Board. We’re still left wondering what those boxes were.

And in a shocking development, Levy himself made way for CEO Vinai Venkatesham and non-executive director Peter Charrington. But as the players changed, the song remained the same.

We needed hold-up play on the wing…so we brought in Kudus, a stud of a player who can’t shoot.

We needed a deep-lying playmaker…so we brought in Palhinha, a spirited challenger who can’t pass.

We needed a proven creative attacking midfielder. After getting played in our pursuit of Morgan Gibbs-White and Eberechi Eze, we landed with Xavi Simons, a talented but very young and very slight player who has yet to prove he can stick in the Premier League.

For the nth season in a row, we needed cover at left back…and we will end this season still needing same.

We bid goodbye to our feel-good story for the ages, Son Heung-min, and did not try to replace even half of his scoring proficiency. In fact, we also would sell last season’s top scorer, Brennan Johnson, the end-product specialist who was credited with the trophy-winning goal in Bilbao. Stop me if you see this coming, but it often seems the team can’t buy a goal now.

That stadium, tho.

Remember how our state-of-the-art stadium was going to be a game changer? How we’d take that revenue and put it right back into the team to build a sustainable winner?

We never quite got to Spurs 2.0, did we? And as a disproportionate run of injuries sometimes leaves us with more talent in our Training Table XI than in our on-pitch XI, people are beginning to ask fair questions as to whether the club did its due diligence in vetting the playing surface in our fancy, retractable field—the one that is merely a tenant living in the flat above the permanent NFL field.

And let’s be honest: If the club came out tomorrow and told us the field has been properly vetted for its safety, would you believe them?

So in this first season A.D. (after Daniel Levy), we are stuck in the mire under the middling management of sporting director Johan Lange. Perhaps most distastefully, our new CEO Vinai is a transplant from Arsenal, where he presided over sportswashing sponsorships and apologies for alleged rape by a squad member.

In short, we are in a very bad place, and it was a long time in coming. Our current failures are a function of long-term institutional incompetence.

I continue to hold hope in the face of this horror show. But even if we do a Dunkirk and survive this mess, THFC needs significant change from top to bottom going forward or else we could end up in the same place next season.

And our next steps must be these:

#VinaiOut #LangeOut