{"id":822604,"date":"2026-03-20T05:54:40","date_gmt":"2026-03-20T05:54:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/822604\/"},"modified":"2026-03-20T05:54:40","modified_gmt":"2026-03-20T05:54:40","slug":"what-football-thinks-of-tottenhams-tailspin-incompetence-of-the-highest-order","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/822604\/","title":{"rendered":"What football thinks of Tottenham\u2019s tailspin: \u2018Incompetence of the highest order\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

For large parts of this season, it has felt like the whole of football has been rubbernecking in Tottenham Hotspur\u2019s direction.<\/p>\n

A point above the relegation places with eight games left and without a Premier League win since the turn of the year, Tottenham are in genuine danger of dropping out of England\u2019s top division for the first time since 1977. Will they scramble to safety over the next two months? Or will they pay the ultimate price for what is, in the words of one senior executive from a fellow Champions League team, \u201cincompetence of the highest order\u201d?<\/p>\n

The Athletic has been gathering the views of a variety of leading figures within the sport \u2014 club officials, boardroom decision-makers, analysts, agents and coaches \u2014 to establish what they think has brought Spurs to this position.<\/p>\n

As well as approaching various people from around the Premier League, we have also widened the scope to other countries to see what they make of the Tottenham crisis. The Bundesliga, for example.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe saw this here (in Germany), with a few big clubs getting relegated, and it was always a long time coming,\u201d says a boardroom figure at one leading Bundesliga side. \u201cLots of decisions were wrong over many years, and it looks like the same situation (with Tottenham). I would worry (if I were working at Spurs). There are some very big German clubs that assumed (after relegation) that promotion would be natural, but it never is. Hamburg spent seven years in our second division.\u201d<\/p>\n

For context, everyone we have approached has been given the opportunity to remain anonymous so they can speak with freedom and not have to worry about damaging relationships with the Tottenham hierarchy. All of those quoted in this article are currently working in football.<\/p>\n

It is also important to note that some of them talked to us before the 3-2 Champions League win against Atletico Madrid on Wednesday which suggested Spurs might have overcome their worst form. The 1-1 draw at Liverpool last weekend, featuring a 90th-minute equaliser from Richarlison, was another encouraging result.<\/p>\n

On the flipside, the 5-2 first-leg defeat to Atletico last week was startling in all sorts of ways and led, ultimately, to Tottenham being eliminated from the Champions League, losing that round-of-16 tie 7-5 on aggregate. Igor Tudor\u2019s position as head coach remains the subject of scrutiny and, among all the people we have spoken to, not one was willing to speak up for the Croatian, or support the reasons for hiring him just over a month ago after the sacking of summer appointment Thomas Frank.<\/p>\n

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\n Thomas Frank was sacked in February after eight months at Spurs (Steve Bardens\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n

Others have questioned whether the players have taken enough responsibility<\/a>. \u201cThere are so many who are in the business for themselves,\u201d says one high-ranking executive. \u201cIt\u2019s all that shrugging and pointing \u2014 \u2018It\u2019s not my fault!\u2019 \u2014 like watching a kids\u2019 team.\u201d<\/p>\n

One agent who spoke to The Athletic claimed it is openly known that some of Tottenham\u2019s regular starters want to leave, and pointed to reports that England midfielder Conor Gallagher had become the club\u2019s highest wage-earner after joining from Atletico in January as another potential problem.<\/p>\n

\u201cDaniel Levy (the long-time club chairman fired last September) would not have done that deal on those wages, but they panicked,\u201d he said. \u201cSo if he (Gallagher) is the highest-earning player at the club, you\u2019ve probably got (Micky) Van de Ven, (Cristian) Romero and others saying, \u2018Hold on a f***ing second\u2026\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mostly, though, almost everyone has noted Spurs\u2019 plight is not just about one decision but more a culmination of events at a time when the club have become a financial juggernaut.<\/p>\n

They are widely regarded as having one of the best stadiums in Europe, one where non-football activities such as concerts, NFL games and boxing events helped the club post record revenues last year of \u00a3528.4million<\/a>, up 152 per cent from 2016, the year before their old White Hart Lane home was demolished. Their training complex, opened in 2012, is also considered among the finest in the country.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt starts with the expectations of the fans, which are much higher than they should be,\u201d says one high-ranking Premier League executive. \u201cThat\u2019s not because Tottenham aren\u2019t a big club and don\u2019t have the resources to compete, it\u2019s simply because other clubs are further ahead in that journey of being elite.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere has been a focus, rightly, on infrastructure: get the stadium built, drive up the revenues, give yourself the best chance of competing on the field through the financial power you have created, and then make sure you have the training facilities. The problem is, having generated those revenues, they haven\u2019t invested in the right way, at the right time, with the right players, so they have ended up with a squad that looks unbalanced. As a consequence, successive managers have struggled to get performance levels to meet the fans\u2019 expectations.<\/p>\n

\u201cHave they had the right management over the last decade? The answer is probably no, and when I say \u2018management\u2019, I mean sporting directors, chief executives and people around the club who really know and understand football.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey have appointed a coach (Tudor) who has never played or coached in the Premier League, has only ever been at clubs for 12 months at a time, and immediately the fans have taken against him because they look at his record and say, \u2018What the hell?\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cSo, you\u2019ve got this combination of events over many years that have led to this point. There is a toxicity around the club and a sense that this (relegation) is almost inevitable now.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf it happens, it could be good for the club in the sense that it might create the watershed moment for everyone to wake up (and realise) the focus now needs to be on football \u2013 not NFL games, pop concerts or the racetrack under the stadium, but football. In order for that to happen, they need people in there who know football from back to front.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n Spurs has become a destination venue for events such as London\u2019s annual NFL games (Justin Setterfield\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n

The inference, plainly, is that is not the case at the moment.<\/p>\n

Others say the same, citing the club\u2019s recruitment as being high among the list of failures.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think, fundamentally, Spurs don\u2019t know what they are,\u201d says one club chairman. \u201cThey can\u2019t do what Bournemouth and Brighton do. They can\u2019t even do what Crystal Palace do. Then they can\u2019t sign the players that Arsenal, Chelsea and the rest (of the big spenders) do, because those clubs have always had a solid structure in terms of financial stability and they (Tottenham) are also just not attractive enough.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you look at who they have signed, the personalities just don\u2019t make sense. They have signed really badly in general, but they have also had the classic problem that a lot of clubs experience: they have had a lot of different coaches with different styles, and a lot of different sporting directors, employing different ways of building a squad, and they have ended up with this Frankenstein\u2019s monster of all sorts of different types of players, personality-wise, style-wise and age-wise. It\u2019s just incoherent.\u201d<\/p>\n

Inevitably, Levy\u2019s name has come up a lot. Tottenham\u2019s former chairman was sacked early this season<\/a> by the Lewis family, the majority shareholders, after running the club for them for 24 years.<\/p>\n

Would Spurs be in this mess if he was still overseeing business as their highest-ranked executive? It is a question that will polarise opinion among Tottenham\u2019s supporters, many of whom protested against Levy\u2019s leadership and will doubtless point out that many of the decisions that backfired in recent years were made by him. But it is clear that, within the sport, his departure is regarded as a big factor in this slide into trouble.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe was never the problem,\u201d says one Premier League executive, matter-of-factly.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis will probably upset a lot of Spurs fans,\u201d adds an agent, \u201cbut the biggest issue is the departure of Daniel Levy. If Daniel was there now, there is no way they would be in this mess. It\u2019s been horribly mismanaged.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou cannot underestimate the seismic change in the boardroom and how that has impacted things,\u201d says another executive, from one of England\u2019s leading clubs. \u201cLevy ran everything for 20-odd years. Now, they\u2019re looking inexperienced. You only have to look at other big clubs who have struggled or been relegated \u2014 there\u2019s been chaos and change in the boardroom.<\/p>\n

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\n Daniel Levy: a problem or a safeguard for Spurs? (Ryan Pierse\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n

\u201cChange was needed at the start of the season and they looked at Frank (hired away from a smaller Premier League club, Brentford) as that guy. When Frank was sacked there was no obvious replacement but, sometimes, it\u2019s so clear that there\u2019s no way back for a manager.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s happened since is not surprising, because of the lack of options to lead the club forward. They hired the only person in Europe who would take the career risk of relegating a Super League club. I still think they\u2019ll get out of it, but it\u2019s going to be much tighter than I previously thought.\u201d<\/p>\n

More will become clear at the weekend, when Tottenham, in 16th position, play at home on Sunday against a Nottingham Forest side one place below them. West Ham, level on points with Forest, go to Aston Villa in a game kicking off at the same time and are currently showing the best survival spirit among the endangered teams. Spurs, meanwhile, have not won a league game at home since December 6.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you analyse their performances, there isn\u2019t really any identity,\u201d says a leading club analyst. \u201cThomas Frank\u2019s Brentford team were a great example of a team with a very clear identity who knew exactly what they wanted to do, with and without the ball. But that didn\u2019t translate to Spurs at all.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was none of the defensive structure you saw under (Antonio) Conte and none of the front-foot play you saw under (Ange) Postecoglou. They were trying to combine both, but ended up doing neither.\u201d<\/p>\n

The nadir for Spurs came in that tragicomedy in Madrid last week, when they were 4-0 down after 21 minutes and their 23-year-old goalkeeper, Antonin Kinsky, making only his third start of the season, was substituted in the 17th minute having given away two of the first three goals with mistakes.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat was a mess,\u201d says the analyst. \u201cHe (Kinsky) looked out of his depth and, although it was horrible, I could see why they took him off. But I don\u2019t rate (the usual first-choice Guglielmo) Vicario either.<\/p>\n

\u201cRomero, Van de Ven, (Dejan) Kulusevski, (Pedro) Porro, (Dominic) Solanke, (James) Maddison, (Mohammed) Kudus\u2026 they\u2019ve got all these players who look great when they first arrive, but they don\u2019t sustain it.<\/p>\n

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\n Antonin Kinsky is consoled by Cristian Romero after being taken off at Atletico Madrid (Javier Soriano\/AFP via Getty Images)<\/p>\n

\u201cThey have been a poor team for two years. I don\u2019t think they\u2019re bad players, but it looks like the culture and environment are poor. Postecoglou was appointed because they wanted to change the style, Frank was appointed because they wanted to change the culture, but under the new guy (Tudor), it\u2019s all about trying to stay up at any cost. It\u2019s all very confused, and it shows on the pitch.\u201d<\/p>\n

Incompetence of the highest order? The boardroom figure who used those words is willing to elaborate.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey have everything they should need to succeed,\u201d he says. \u201cTo have that infrastructure and not exploit it to its maximum by making poor football decisions, that is absolutely unacceptable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Will Spurs stay up? That, of course, is the key question and, despite everything, most of the replies we got to it were yes.<\/p>\n

But then what?<\/p>\n

\u201cWhatever happens next, they have years of work ahead of them,\u201d says one Premier League executive. \u201cThey have so many average players they need to get out, as well as spending the money to get new players in, and that\u2019s going to be a massive challenge.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For large parts of this season, it has felt like the whole of football has been rubbernecking in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":822605,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2026],"tags":[7,3372,3373,156,14807],"class_list":["post-822604","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-football","tag-premier-league","tag-soccer","tag-sports-business","tag-tottenham-hotspur"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/116259960502602849","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/822604","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=822604"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/822604\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/822605"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=822604"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=822604"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=822604"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}