How Tottenham Hotspur were almost relegated from Premier League

As a conversation, it lasted only a few minutes at most but as a snapshot of the decline of Tottenham Hotspur, it could have told the story of an era.

Tottenham had just drawn 0-0 away at AS Monaco in the Champions League on October 22, holding on for a point they hardly deserved. After full-time, in the corridors of the Stade Louis II, the players of both teams were making their way out when staff overheard Eric Dier, the former Tottenham defender, now of Monaco, deep in discussion with Djed Spence.

Dier had always looked out for Spence at Spurs, like a mentor of sorts, convinced he would thrive if he could just straighten out some of his habits. With Spence on the bench against Monaco, Dier seemed frustrated and was reminding him of that advice when Johan Lange, Tottenham’s technical director, walked past and detected the tone of the conversation. “At last!” Lange said with a smile. “If only we had more of that.”

Tottenham’s collapse has been a tale of the players who left and were never replaced and of the directors too complacent to notice. They are an example of how corrosive a culture of apathy can be and how far it can spread, from the executive suites at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium to the training pitches at Hotspur Way. In a game so weighted towards the elite, they are a warning of how fast one of the wealthiest clubs in the world can unravel when it believes expertise is expendable and status locked in.

According to Deloitte, Tottenham were the ninth-richest club in the world last season, and their immense advantages meant none of those failings alone would have left them one defeat away from a first relegation in nearly 50 years. As one experienced Premier League sporting director put it, a club like Tottenham “can make a shitload of shit decisions and still not be this shit”. But stirred together, bit by bit, in a league never less forgiving of mediocrity, those failings curdled into the one thing neither history nor revenue could hide: a chronic lack of quality on the pitch.

Levy ousted after five-year drift

On the morning of September 4 last year, Daniel Levy drove past the pristine putting greens inside the training ground of which he had ordered the building and thought he was starting just another day. It was a Thursday, the transfer window had just closed, and Levy had meetings in his diary for the end of that week. The first was with Peter Charrington, a long-time adviser to the Lewis family, Tottenham’s owners, who had been appointed to the board six months earlier. That meeting was Levy’s last. After 24 years as Tottenham’s chairman, he has never been back at Hotspur Way and never seen another game inside the stadium. Even Levy’s office belongings, and those of his wife, Tracy, who worked as his personal assistant, were delivered to them both in a van.

For Tottenham, Levy’s departure was the hiss at the end of the stick of dynamite but the dynamite was also out of the box, unpacked, with the detonator lying around nearby. Levy’s Spurs wasn’t working. In his six seasons after they reached the 2019 Champions League final, Tottenham made the Premier League’s top four only once. In his last full season, Tottenham finished 17th, which should have been the final danger sign, except Spurs sacked Ange Postecoglou while also swallowing his narrative whole, about prioritising the Europa League. But Tottenham were in trouble before that European run kicked in. On January 30, two months before the Europa League knockout stage, Tottenham were already 15th in the Premier League.

Levy and the Lewis family had overseen a period of drift beyond league positions too. The hierarchy prioritised pop concerts, Amazon documentaries, go-karting tracks and lucrative pre-season tours, which put football “further and further from the centre of things”, one present official said, and irritated the players, like Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg, who was fined two weeks’ wages for refusing to play in a post-season friendly in Melbourne in 2024. Morale among staff was low, with many fed up with the top-down way of working.

Football departments cut during the pandemic were also never fully restored. Scouting was trimmed back, nominally in favour of a more centralised, data-led approach overseen by Lange and the briefly in post chief football officer Scott Munn, but which resulted in fewer eyes on fewer players. The academy, which has yielded only 26 Premier League minutes this season, was neglected, “one of the lights turned off during Covid that never got turned back on”. Even in non-football areas like marketing, staff describe the club as completely ignorant about the Tottenham fan base, in a way that would be deemed unthinkable in other industries. “Everyone had to get their head around everything,” a source said. “It was completely bonkers.”

Rebuilding the plane in mid-air

Pointing fingers only goes so far, not least because the old regime is also the new regime, with the Lewis family still at the top. Joe Lewis, now 89, handed the reins over to his children, Vivienne and Charles, years ago while Vivienne’s son-in-law, Nick Beucher, has been closest to football decisions this season of the three. Beucher speaks regularly to Vinai Venkatesham, the former Arsenal director and now Spurs chief executive, who replaced Levy in charge of football operations and sits just above Lange, the club’s technical director.

All were in situ before Levy left, including Venkatesham, who arrived in April and said publicly “Daniel was a key part of the decision” to come. The final decade of Levy’s tenure yielded an increase in revenue of more than 150 per cent and established Tottenham among Europe’s elite. Bottom line, they were never in serious danger of relegation. Again and again this season, that point has been made by those loyal to Levy: “This would never have happened under Daniel.”

The real problem after Levy’s departure was the gaping holes in leadership positions and the vacuum of knowledge and experience. The club had basically been run by three people — Levy, the long-serving executive director Donna-Maria Cullen, who also left last year, and Matthew Collecott, the chief finance and operating officer, who has remained on the board — each of them with huge remits. Levy and Cullen’s exits meant hiring not one or two executives, but a whole pack of them, mid-season, while navigating the Premier League and Champions League. Venkatesham told colleagues they were “trying to rebuild a plane mid-air”. Or, as one source close to the hierarchy put it: “We basically needed a year without the football.”

The result was 13 new heads of department in the past 12 months, and some of them took time to arrive. Venkatesham told colleagues in September a performance director was the first position he wanted to fill, but after the recruitment process and gardening leave, Dan Lewindon, previously of City Football Group, joined the day Thomas Frank was sacked. The new director of football operations, Rafi Moersen, who is also seen as key to the rebuild, particularly around transfers, isn’t starting until the middle of June.

Others appointments were just misjudged. Munn, whose job it was to overhaul the medical and scouting department as chief football officer, lasted less than two years after joining in 2023 while Adam Brett, director of performance services, came and went in a year. Fabio Paratici was as unreliable as the Tottenham players’ hamstrings. He was in (2021), out (2023), half-in (2024), job-sharing (2025) and out again (2026), his final spell as co-sporting director cut short after only three months, when he returned to Italy to be closer to his children.

Levy and Paratici were drivers of high standards and some believe Tottenham became a more amateur place without them, a “club full of No2s,” as one long-time former employee put it. Levy’s obsessive nature is well documented, but Paratici was a stickler for standards too. He hit the roof on a trip to Leeds United once, unhappy about the dining facilities, and when new signings first arrived at Hotspur Way, Paratici always rolled out the red carpet, determined to make the welcome feel first-class. The club will make further executive appointments this summer and will consider bringing former players back for the right roles, after Toby Alderweireld told The Times last week he would love to return. Ben Davies is very well thought of and there is a belief he will step up after he finishes playing, either into a coaching or strategic position.

Deferring on the big decisions

Paratici first proposed Igor Tudor as a contingency plan in November, after a dispiriting defeat at home to Fulham, in the event they had to remove Frank as head coach. Paratici’s doubts around Frank caused tension in the Tottenham hierarchy, especially as Venkatesham and Lange were deeply supportive. Both had reason to be, even beyond Frank’s positivity and record at Brentford. Lange and Frank started out together at Lyngby in Denmark while Venkatesham was informed by his experience at Arsenal, when they stuck by Mikel Arteta. In the November international break, Venkatesham, Lange and Paratici flew out to the Bahamas for a meeting with the Lewises and Beucher, when the key message was that early bumps were to be expected. Frank just needed more time.

With all the upheaval in leadership positions, Venkatesham and Lange were naive enough to hope the football would take care of itself. As early as October, the idea of a transition season under Frank had been accepted internally, but nobody envisaged anything more drastic. In that context, disarray off the pitch led to a deferring of key decisions on it, not least in relation to the position of Frank. Even as performances and Frank’s relationship with the fans nosedived at the turn of the year, there was a blind insistence on calm over more chaos. Others frame it less generously, insisting Tottenham decision-makers were just too complacent to confront the possibility of relegation. Even in March, with the team in freefall, officials were refusing to use the word relegation, referring to it as “the r-word” instead.

At every key juncture this season, Tottenham were two or three steps behind. In the middle of January, after the 2-1 loss at home to West Ham, the club discussed sacking Frank but decided he could survive the season. By the end of the January transfer window, with Tottenham eight points above the relegation zone, Lange signed only one senior player, Conor Gallagher, because he felt there would be better options available in the summer. In February, they believed they could risk Tudor as an interim coach, with a view to making a proper, permanent appointment in June. At the end of March, they finally turned to Roberto De Zerbi, on a £12million salary, with seven games to go and the team only two points above the relegation zone.

Venkatesham’s position is believed to be secure this summer but Lange’s future is less certain. Plan A is for more of a technical director focused on transfers to come in alongside Lange again, but it would depend who that person is and what they want the structure to be.

Young, mobile and malleable

In the summer of 2024, after Tottenham had finished fifth in the table in their first season without Harry Kane, Cristian Romero asked Postecoglou why the club were signing only young players. He should not have been surprised. After a cluster of underwhelming, expensive deals between 2019 and 2024 — Tanguy Ndombele (£63million from Lyon) and Giovani Lo Celso (£55million from Real Betis) among them — Levy wanted to return to a recruitment policy that had served Spurs well in the previous decade: players who were young, mobile and malleable.

That shift suited Lange, who brought Rob Mackenzie with him as chief scout when he joined Spurs from Aston Villa in 2023, and was hired on his strengths to drive a more data-led, youth-focused approach. Postecoglou wanted Pedro Neto, Antoine Semenyo and Gallagher in 2024 but got two 18-year-olds in Archie Gray and Lucas Bergvall, as well as Dominic Solanke, Kane’s replacement, the only signing that summer older than 20. Over the past two seasons, Tottenham have made 14 permanent signings in total. Their average age was 20.7, and half of them were teenagers.

The shift also suited Tottenham’s tight wage structure. The club have regularly been in the top six on spending on transfers in the past ten years and, remarkably, sit first for net spend in the past two seasons, even ahead of Arsenal. But wages are the key to attracting proven quality and, in that area, Spurs have been much less generous, with the wage-to-revenue ratio, according to Deloitte in 2024, the lowest in the Premier League.

Gallagher was seen as unattainable for Postecoglou, when he joined Atletico Madrid instead, and Spurs wouldn’t even compete for Frank’s favourite, Bryan Mbeumo, when Manchester United approached Brentford last summer. Even Romero’s frustration has in part been driven by wages. After Argentina won the World Cup in 2022, he complained he was one of the only Argentinian players not to be given a pay rise.

Tottenham officials say they are already loosening the wage structure after Romero was given a new four-year contract in August before Gallagher joined as the club’s highest-paid player in January. But the search for young, mobile and malleable targets has delivered a squad short of experience, leadership and quality.

For Frank, who struggled with disciplinary issues, the lack of personality was particularly problematic. According to those close to Frank, he knew Romero was a far from ideal choice of captain last summer, but felt the squad offered no alternatives. Tudor was shocked at how little the team talked, both on and off the pitch. One young player told his agent he wanted to arrange a team bonding barbecue only to give up on the idea, because he didn’t think it was “his place” or “the done thing”.

Romero’s trip to Argentina for treatment last week was not unusual. Several players have used external specialists and national team doctors to recover from injury, with trust in Tottenham’s medical department eroded after a harrowing two years. Even in the treatment room, upheaval has had an effect.

In a fascinating study called New Coach, New Risks? published last year, researchers analysing a Croatian top-flight club for eight seasons found there was a 35.4 per cent increase in injuries in the first four weeks after a change of coach. Upheaval, they said, created a permanent first-day feel, where new coaches overtrain players to make an impact and players overstretch to try to impress. Frank squeezed in more sessions — tactical ones that bored the players — while Tudor’s decision to do running drills in February, during a period with midweek Champions League games, was described by a source close to the dressing room as “mental”.

The 1,549 days missed this season by Spurs players because of injury is by far the most in the Premier League but it was the quality of those players that was so sorely missed. Solanke, James Maddison, Dejan Kulusevski, Wilson Odobert, Rodrigo Bentancur and Destiny Udogie — all likely starters — have hardly played, leaving a paper-thin squad, ill equipped for the demands of European football, relying on back-ups when the pressure was highest.

Frank was so underwhelmed by the quality of his squad, he told colleagues that Pedro Porro was the only one who could play for a top club. De Zerbi has had to fight relegation with Mathys Tel, Richarlison and Randal Kolo Muani up front.

Spurs first discussed De Zerbi as early as January, when results were wobbling under Frank and the Italian was known to be wavering at Marseille. On March 31, he took the job nobody wanted and made it work, the wins and confidence trickling back and the metrics pointing to more of a mid-table team, rather than a relegated one. Just in time. Asked why De Zerbi wasn’t appointed sooner, the answer that comes from the club is that he needed “heavy persuasion”, and perhaps it should be obvious why: culture, ambition, experience, stability, quality in the team, leaders in the dressing room. If only Tottenham had more of that.

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