Sad news coming out of Tottenham this week: Ryan Norys’s talk at the South by Southwest festival on Friday will no longer take place. The club’s chief revenue officer, who has overseen a 40% rise in commercial revenue over the past three years, was due to speak on “how Tottenham is evolving beyond football to become a global cultural brand”. And given the rich seam of cultural content Spurs have been providing the world over recent weeks, you have to say it’s been a stunningly successful initiative.
Alas, when Norys posted an advertisement for the event on his LinkedIn page this week, Spurs fans exploded with anger, forcing the talk to be cancelled. Fortunately, those still interested to see how Tottenham are evolving beyond football can simply observe their recent performances on the pitch. Igor Tudor’s Tottenham Hotspur: proudly evolving beyond defending. Beyond possession. Beyond goalkeeping. Beyond tactics, beyond teamwork, beyond competence, beyond the basic bipedal human ability to stand up straight. And – who knows? – perhaps even beyond the Premier League.
Already, the Championship’s journeyman forwards are licking their lips in anticipation. Carlton Morris has the fixture ringed in his diary. Scott Twine can’t wait for pre-season. Jay Stansfield’s put down the deposit on a new kitchen. Lincoln fans – now top of League One – are singing: “Tottenham away, olé, olé”. The prediction models estimate about a 20% chance of relegation, the bookmakers about twice that and the Spurs fans who watch them about twice that again. The club that once sacked Harry Redknapp for finishing fourth has 12 points from its past 20 games, and that sucking noise you can hear is water circling the drain.
After four defeats in his first four games, Tudor has paid the ultimate price by being made to keep doing his job. And frankly the cantankerous and entirely inadequate Tudor is the manager Spurs truly deserve right now, the logical consequence of a grand self‑immolation strategy perhaps eight years in the making, a strategy in which Tottenham built one of the most impressive commercial operations in professional sport while forgetting every single thing that makes professional sport worth watching.
Go and watch a game at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium – and you probably can, there are plenty of tickets going – and what strikes you is the extent to which you are urged to go and watch something else. The electronic hoardings flicker with advertisements for the stadium’s many other attractions: the Skywalk, rugby, American football, a Bad Bunny concert in June. For the longstanding fans who went to the old White Hart Lane, who trekked to Wembley and Milton Keynes, it sends a subtle message: you may think this is your home. But it’s not, not really.
And of course this is also the wildly successful financial model that underpins the modern Tottenham, that paid for Tanguy Ndombele and Xavi Simons, that led them into the promised land of the Deloitte Money League top 10, that feathered the nest for two decades and gave them a seat at the ill‑fated Super League table. In this context a Tottenham relegation may just rank as the single most spectacular failure in the history of English football: the 90-yard own goal, the Theresa May snap election, the Devon Loch of high performance.
Which is why – with the greatest of apologies to Spurs fans still nursing a state of glazed shock – it really needs to happen. Simply put, there must be accountability for failure if sport is to mean anything. Perhaps in years to come “doing a Tottenham” will assume a kind of mythical horror status within boardroom circles, the head on the stick, the macabre bedtime story chief executives tell their secretaries at night. Except this is no sorcerer’s tale. It is, conversely, exactly what happens when you stop believing in magic.
Naturally, back-office ineptitude has a role to play here. Take the catastrophic recruitment from about 2016 to 2022, years in which Tottenham managed to suppress the relative wage bill while remaining largely successful on the pitch, indulging the dangerous fantasy that the playing product would basically take care of itself. Have Spurs made a single objectively successful signing in the past decade? Maybe Lucas Bergvall? Maybe Micky van de Ven? Maybe Pedro Porro? Meanwhile the great Mauricio Pochettino team was slowly being gutted: the likes of Harry Kane and Son Heung‑min and Eric Dier, who were replaced neither in quality nor stature. These were great players, but importantly players who also loved the club, who provided a link between the first team and the first row of seats.
But of course despite the best efforts of Johan Lange, this remains a richly talented squad of players: a squad of World Cup winners and coveted talent and seasoned internationals in every position. Part of the exemplary fascination of the current team is how even very good players are still contingent on a nurturing environment, on culture and confidence and a playing identity. At which point we run into the managers: about 5.3 of them on a permanent basis since Pochettino, all of whom in their own way drained a little life from the place.
Perhaps the Pochettino team was always going to require surgery. But the decision to replace him with José Mourinho in 2019 was the equivalent of carrying out that surgery with pliers and a blowtorch: burning down an entire way of playing on the altar of reactive low-block football. Next came the limited Nuno Espírito Santo and the condescending Antonio Conte, followed by a little Cristian Stellini quackery, followed by the Ange Postecoglou travelling circus.
While they all had different styles and tactics, in one important sense they shared a common link, a rehearsed liturgy of excuses that went something like this. I am a winner. You, on the other hand, are a bunch of losers, losing is hard-wired into you, part of your DNA, endemic to the fanbase and caked into the walls like asbestos. I’ve tried everything, but ultimately you guys are terminal losers, and if you lose on my watch it’s not my fault.
Pretty much every Spurs manager since Pochettino has trodden this path sooner or later. And maybe it’s true!
But perhaps it is no great shock to learn that a squad consistently told that they’re steeped in a culture of failure eventually begins to play like they’re steeped in a culture of failure. This was the paralysis you could glimpse against Atlético Madrid on Tuesday night: the sight of elite footballers lashed by the power of suggestion, negged out of basic competence, barely able to kick a football without falling over.
Conte and Postecoglou were briefly able to transcend these forces by virtue of their brilliant communication skills and clear football ideology. Thomas Frank, by contrast, had no discernible style, no real identity, offered the illusion of extreme competence largely on the basis of having good hair. And perhaps there is a certain irony in the fact that Frank failed so categorically in a league that has basically been painted 20 shades of Brentford. But it also underlines the extent to which football teams, however chaotic, can still function on the basis of an idea, a founding mythology.
Manchester United keep regenerating because on some level they still believe in their own essential magic. Chelsea are the stupidest world champions in history. The tragically maladroit Barcelona are on course for back-to-back titles. For years some of the world’s biggest clubs have been waging a furious war between wealth and foolishness, and somehow wealth keeps prevailing. Perhaps it’s about time foolishness triumphed for once.
And in the long run perhaps relegation is what Spurs need, too. Better, surely, than a Sean Dyche-flavoured lozenge, a shrill short-term scream that would condemn them to being Everton for the next decade. What they need is a little reset, a little humility, a little trip to Lincoln and a reminder of why football matters. Not a digital marketing strategy, not a commercial safety net, but a ritual and a rite, football for its own joy, players playing for the love of playing. Sometimes the darkest sky comes before the dawn.
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