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Tottering Spurs?

The Daily Mirror was far from complementary about the defeat Tottenham Hotspur suffered at the Cottage on Sunday,    Journos had fun with 'Tottenham Rotspur', 'St. Totteingham Day' and 'Spurs stinker'.

Interim coach Igor Tufor tore into his players and said they lacked quality in attack, in taking scoring chances, in the midfield and at the back.

I am not a betting man, but if I was I would put money on Spurs staying up and Forest going down.  However, I also think that there are deeper structural problems at Spurs that can't be solved by changing the manager or bringing in some new players in the summer.

Tottenham’s commercial success — turbocharged by the likes of Beyoncé, P!nk, Anthony Joshua and Tyson Fury in the past — is certainly nothing to be sniffed at. In fact the club’s commercial revenue alone would give them a hefty safety net, given it stood at £276.9million in their latest accounts, which is nearly four times the total revenue of even the richest clubs in the Championship. In 2022-23 Norwich City had the highest revenue in the second tier, at £76million.

Those sorts of numbers are why Tottenham even being in sight of the bottom three is such an indictment of the club’s decision-making in recent years and why many inside the game still refuse to take seriously the idea of Spurs falling out of the Premier League. “People are laughing about it, but it’s a joke, no one I’ve spoken to really thinks Spurs are going down,” one experienced director, who has worked in both the Championship and the Premier League told The Times.

Tottenham are not believed to have inserted relegation exit clauses into their players’ contracts — nobody expected such a scenario to occur — or even “escape clauses”, which some players at lower-placed teams have included in deals to allow them to go out on loan.

Figures from Deloitte put Tottenham's average wage bill at £248.6m, below that at other leading clubs, but huge in comparison with the second tier where the figure is about £40m.

If relegated, Tottenham could expect their revenue to drop by about 30 per cent, considering the significant reductions in television income without the Premier League or Champions League (assuming they don’t win the tournament and qualify again), as well as prize money and match-day income. According to Deloitte, Tottenham’s total revenue last season was €672.6million, which made them the ninth-richest club in the world and would make them the wealthiest Premier League club ever to go down.

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