Time for a reset at Spurs

If Tottenham Hotspur were a PowerPoint presentation to be shown to a wealthy investor, every slide would go down a storm. State-of-the-art training ground, tick, and one of the plushest stadiums in Europe, tick. An inner-London location, absolutely, housing a club with a rich football history, sure, and a modern record of playing in the Champions League, perfect.

And what about the numbers?  Hefty wages to cover? Big transfers to absorb? Surely some Profitability and Sustainability Rules problems to solve?  No, none of those.   The club is a success off the pitch, but this may have been achieved at the price of success on it.   And like many other leading clubs, fans are concerned about ticket pr ices.

This is the present Tottenham, built like an asset to sell, more than a team to succeed. Ange Postecoglou is certainly not blameless for Spurs lying 15th in the Premier League, after losing six of their past seven matches — far from it. Postecoglou’s gung-ho tactics have tossed away countless points this season while his draining methods have at the very least contributed to, and perhaps caused, the loss of a team’s worth of injured players.

Nobody can deny the work Daniel Levy has done in growing the business during his near-25-year tenure as the Tottenham chairman. The stadium, the training ground, the commercial deals, lifting of Spurs from a lower-mid-table team in the Nineties to European regulars — all this occurred under his watch. They reached the Champions League final with Mauricio Pochettino in 2019 and the idea at the time was that a spectacular new stadium would usher in a new era,

From 2018-19, the season the new stadium opened, to 2024-25, Tottenham’s net spend has been 19th, sixth, fifth, eighth, eighth, third and fourth-highest among Premier League teams, while in the past decade they are fifth overall for net spend on transfers, almost £160million behind Arsenal.

But transfer fees are only one half of the story. If Tottenham could claim to be among the Premier League’s European — although not title — challengers in terms of fees spent, they plumb the depths of the table when it comes to the proportion they invest in wages.

According to Deloitte’s “Money League” figures released last week for the 2023-24 season, Tottenham were the ninth-richest club in the world for revenue (£517million) but spent only 42 per cent of that on wages, which was the lowest ratio among the top-20 richest clubs.

Under Levy, Spurs are also one of the most cautious top-flight teams. According to the football finance guru Swiss Ramble, they were bottom of the Premier League for 2022 and 2023 in terms of wages-to-turnover ratio at 46 per cent, which was even before the club began shifting their highest earners from the Pochettino-era, such as Harry Kane, Hugo Lloris and Eric Dier.

Since the stadium opened, the percentage of turnover spent on wages has gone down, not up. In 2014, the year Pochettino arrived, it was 55 per cent. Ten years later it was 42 per cent.

Tottenham’s reluctance to pay big salaries, despite the increase in revenues, has been an open secret in the transfer industry for years. Kane earned about £300,000 a week at Spurs but when he was sold to Bayern Munich in 2023, the club’s wage ceiling dropped to £200,000, roughly the figure earned by the club captain, Son Heung-min.

Spurs started this campaign with only 18 established outfield players, including the three young signings, and two spare spots in their 25-man squad. Now they are struggling to play catch-up. This month, despite Postecoglou’s calls for help, they are yet to sign a single outfield player.  They are hardly a good prospect for an ambitious and talented player.

To many, it smacks of Levy’s reactive, rather than proactive, approach and a “bare-minimum mentality” that trickles down from the top. It feeds into the big decisions, but also the finer details. Only in September, Cristian Romero reposted a message on social media that criticised Tottenham for being the “only Premier League club” that made players make their own travel arrangements to return from international duty, “meaning their players arrive with less rest than the others”.

The future is unclear, with speculation swirling that the investment company ENIC, which owns 86.6 per cent of the club, could be preparing for a lucrative sale. Last year the club publicly declared its openness to minority investment for “a significant increase in its equity base”, with Amanda Staveley, who brokered the deal for Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund to take over Newcastle United, believed to have expressed an interest.

Tottenham are valued at close to £4billion now, 50 times the £80million they were worth when ENIC bought out Alan Sugar in 2000. Off the pitch, the trajectory is clear, but the banner unfurled in the South Stand on Sunday offered some other powerful numbers on performance: “24 years, 16 managers, 1 trophy,” it read. “Time for change.”

It feels like everything is spiralling out of control. Senior players are underperforming, the injuries are piling up, fans are angry with the board and Postecoglou is struggling to find a solution. How much longer can Spurs go on like this?

The first week of February feels defining. In the league, Tottenham face Brentford, who have an impressive record at home, and then play Liverpool at Anfield in the second leg of their Carabao Cup semi-final. They finish off a punishing eight days away to Villa in the FA Cup

A brief confrontation between Postecoglou and a supporter was caught on camera at full time against Leicester. The 59-year-old appeared to attempt to respond to the fan before he was dragged away in scenes that echoed what happened after the defeat to Bournemouth in December. Levy is bearing the brunt of the fan base’s anger, but they are turning on Postecoglou in increasing numbers..