Last season Tottenham Hotspur won the Europa League, let that breathe for a second. They lifted a European trophy in May 2025, confetti fell on their players, the fans celebrated, and the club issued a statement about pushing forward, about building, about ambition.
Ten months later they are fighting to stay in the Premier League.
I genuinely don’t know where to start with this because the collapse has been so total, so swift, and so inexplicable that it almost doesn’t feel real. But the table doesn’t lie. Spurs are 17th, one point above the relegation zone, without a single league win in 2026. Their last Premier League win was December 28, a narrow 1-0 over Crystal Palace and since then it’s been 13 league games, five draws, eight losses, zero wins.
Only three clubs in Premier League history have had longer winless runs from the start of a calendar year, and all three were relegated.
So how did it come to this? Because it didn’t happen overnight, the warning signs were there if anyone was willing to look.
The injury crisis has been genuinely horrific, with over 20 players missing significant time this season. The squad depth that looked barely adequate in August was exposed completely by October, key players disappeared for weeks at a time, and nobody coming in offered anywhere near the same quality. Spurs have conceded 18 goals in the last 15 minutes of the first half alone, more than any other team in the league and that is not a tactical problem but a fitness, concentration, and squad problem.
Then there’s the managerial chaos. Thomas Frank was sacked last month, Igor Tudor came in as the firefighter, and that makes six managers since Pochettino left in 2019. The club has had no coherent footballing identity for years, no style, no philosophy, no direction. Every new manager arrives with a different idea and leaves before it takes shape, and underneath all of it the dressing room has crumbled. An unnamed Spurs player was quoted in The Athletic this week saying he wasn’t worried about relegation because he’d find a move elsewhere in the summer. That’s the mentality right now.
And Tudor himself has not helped. In the Premier League on Sunday against fellow relegation rivals Nottingham Forest, a game they simply could not afford to lose, Tudor made decisions that baffled everyone watching, and Forest won 3-0. It wasn’t even that close.
Seven games left. Captain Cristian Romero called them “seven finals” after the Forest defeat, and he’s right. Sunderland away first after the international break, then Brighton, Wolves, Everton, Leeds. On paper there are points to be won, but in practice a team that has won twice at home all season and hasn’t won anywhere since December is not a team you trust to find those points when they matter most.
The thing about Tottenham is that this isn’t just a bad season, bad seasons happen to everyone. This is the culmination of years of structural dysfunction, of short-term thinking, constant managerial change, squad mismanagement, and the fundamental absence of anyone at the club willing to say out loud that something has gone deeply, systemically wrong.
They won the Europa League in May, and they might play Championship football in August.
In football, nothing is too good to fall apart, and Tottenham are proving that in real time.
