The hot mess state of Tottenham Hotspur and where they go from here

It took years of mismanagement to get Spurs here, but there is a way out.

I’ve gotten a lot of requests in recent months to capture every bit and bob of the state of Spurs and where they go from here since I’ve talked about in small chunks over years, but never put it in all in one place. Well, when y’all ask, I deliver. What else do you want to see me write about? Hit my email ryrosenblatt@gmail.com, comment below or find my social media and let me know. Take this as proof that I’m open to most anything you’d like to read.

Tottenham Hotspur are not in a very good place right now. They’re in 15th place and closer to the drop zone than 10th after an embarrassing loss to Everton that saw them go down 3-0 in the first half.

There’s no positive way to spin Spurs’ league position, which raises the question: how did they get here and how do they fix it?

The squad isn’t very good

Spurs are in the second season of a rebuild that they started years too late (we’ll get to that later), so it’s not reasonable to expect a fully formed squad yet. They’re supposed to be a little light in some places or waiting on the development of players in others. And yet, even with that in mind, the team is simply not good enough and that was clear the minute the transfer window shut on August 30.

Micky van de Ven, Cristian Romero and Pedro Porro are the only players who a team with ambitions of competing for a Champions League place would be happy to have starting.

They’re followed by the likes of Son Heung-min, Dejan Kulusevski, Guglielmo Vicario, Destiny Udogie, James Maddison and Dominic Solanke, all of whom are nice players who are not a problem to have starting matches, but not walking into any top four side’s first choice team. That’s a grand total of nine starting quality players.

That’s not nine very good starters. Just nine players who are starting quality.

Even in a rebuild, that’s not enough top end talent and it’s not enough good talent.

The team has only one midfielder who is a good passer in Maddison. There are only two wingers who can beat a man off the ball, one of whom is 32 years old and the other is a lightly proven 20-year-old who has been hurt since October. The squad’s lack of complementary skill in key spots is matched only by the absence of overall quality.

More worryingly, there aren’t enough players, good or not, period.

Tottenham handcuffed themselves by the limits of the UEFA squad rules, deciding to carry the 21 senior players that they were allowed to in Europe plus Djed Spence instead of extending their team to 24 or 25 players and keeping a few more unregistered for the Europa League. The idea that 22 senior players were enough for a season that could go over 60 games was always laughable even if they only suffered a normal number of injuries.

There is not a second left back in the entire squad, unless you believe Ben Davies, a 31-year-old who had physical limitations at the position a decade ago, qualifies. And if he is the back up left back, then there is no back up left centerback.

Of course, there is Sergio Reguilon, a player only still in north London because nobody else would take him.

If Reguilon is your answer then you’re asking the wrong question.

The midfield has six players total, including the 18-year-old Lucas Bergvall and Kulusevski, a forward whose occasional transition to the middle of the pitch has required a bit of wizardry from Ange Postecoglou.

The forward line is one place where the team appeared relatively well-stocked with six senior players and the tantalizing 17-year-old Mikey Moore, but it was still a forward corps that included the 32-year-old Son and ever-injured Richarlison, so the calculations required either the two of them remain fit, Moore be able to play upwards of 1,500 minutes at such a young age or the midfield be shockingly healthy so Kulusevski wouldn’t have to be called upon further down the pitch.

And to think that the forward line is better off than the midfield, which is better off than the defense.

So the team is short on talent and on bodies, but other than that, how is it going?

Remember, it is a rebuild

Rebuilds are notoriously difficult and they require a great deal of urgency. You cannot afford to take small steps forward. Every summer has to be a big step.

Spurs ushered in their rebuild by selling Harry Kane and Fabio Paratici made six signings, van de Ven, Maddison, Vicario and Johnson leading the way.

Then Johan Lange took over, and Dragusin, Solanke and four teenagers joined before Antonin Kinsky this month.

That means in the first four windows of Tottenham’s rebuild, they have van de Ven, a settled goalkeeper position, a couple pretty good older players, some bench fodder and some teenagers to show for their work.

Oh, and they spent £339 million in transfer fees to get that little. Ouch.

The second summer is usually when rebuilding teams need to take a big step, and Spurs used theirs on Solanke, Lucas Bergvall, Archie Gray, Wilson Odobert and Yang Min-hyeok.

Compare that to Liverpool in their second summer under Jurgen Klopp, when the Reds signed Mohamed Salah, Andrew Robertson and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, with Virgil van Dijk coming in the following January.

In the equivalent summer at Arsenal under Mikel Arteta, they signed Martin Odegaard, Ben White, Takehiro Tomiysu and Aaron Ramsdale.

To put it mildly, Spurs are well behind the models their rivals have laid down for a rebuild and they’ve done it at great cost.

Two years in, you should begin seeing a picture of what the team could look like when they are ready to start competing towards the top of the league in year four or five.

Now project out to Spurs’ third year, the 2027/28 season, which was probably the optimist’s target for a successful rebuild being able to compete at the top of the league again. How many players do Spurs have that will be under 30 years old and could be key parts of that team?

Romero, van de Ven and Porro surely. You can reasonably hope that Udogie takes a step forward too, so there’s a back line settled, but that’s it, with the next best bet being Kulusevski, who is best suited to a secondary role that optimizes his versatility.

Maybe Pape Matar Sarr radically improves his passing and gets there. Maybe the crop of teenagers all take massive leaps forward and are very good players at ages 20 and 22, but even if you believe that they are talented with a bright future (and I find the teenagers wildly promising, with Bergvall leading the way), the odds of them getting there at such young ages and all of them panning out is extraordinarily low.

So Tottenham’s rebuild is running behind and does not have a single midfielder or forward you can reliably say will make up the foundation of a contender in two-and-a-half years.

Whether looking at the current squad or the future squad, it’s clear that the rebuild is two years old and barely taking shape, clinging hoping that some teenagers can bail them out. That was a process started by Paratici, but one that Lange has done little to turn around in 15 months and nearly three full windows in charge. In fact, he’s created as many problems as he’s solved.

And what about Ange Postecoglou?

It’s easy to point the finger at Postecoglou right now. After all, the results are what they are, but it is worth taking a step back.

The broad belief was that he did a good job last season, taking functionally this same team, but with Pierre-Emile Hojberg subbed in for Solanke, to a fifth place finish. And as recently as early November, he had the team in seventh, two points back of fourth, perfect in Europa League and having just beaten Manchester City in the Carabao Cup.

And, again, nobody thought the squad was particularly good on November 4, so he had that flawed team sitting pretty despite it all. He’d used his fullbacks for progression to make up for the absence of passers. He magicked Kulusevski into a midfielder for the first time in his career to paper over the hole at the position. He pressed to utilize the squad’s only recognizable strength . Even his biggest flaw from the previous season - set piece defending - had been rectified with Tottenham going from league worst to above average. The consensus was he was a good manager.

What’s changed since?

Injuries, of course.

Spurs have now gone six weeks without playing two recognized centerbacks in the middle of defense even once. They were stuck with Dragusin, whose quality is suspect at best, and Gray, a teenage right back in his first Premier League whose future lies in midfield. Those two were in front of the shambolic Forster and primarily had third choice right back Spence on their left. That is when Spence didn’t have to play centerback when Dragusin got hurt.

In what world is a defense that loses their first, second and fourth choice centerbacks, along with the only left back, playing in front of a back up goalkeeper supposed to do?

That team has also suffered simultaneous injuries to Johnson, Werner, Odobert, Solanke, Yves Bissouma and Rodrigo Bentancur. They could field an entire XI of injured first team players.

No team could reasonably survive that type of injury crisis, let alone one playing twice a week with a squad that was undermanned to begin with.

So what was Postecoglou to do? Sit deeper and invite pressure onto that ramshackle defense? He did that to a degree, but it was unsurprisingly rank. Press and try to defend from the front? He had to back off that because he had so few players that they would tire if asked to run so much. There simply isn’t an answer.

So, once again, go back to November 4. Has Postecoglou become a worse manager since then? Has he been particularly exposed in that time? Or has he run out of players?

Now some may say that Postecoglou created the injury crisis with his refusal to rotate, but it’s worth looking back to the first midweek match of the season when he had a full complement of players and the luxury of rotation - he made eight changes to the starting XI. His first Europa League match saw him make five changes.

When he had options, Postecoglou made changes. You can nitpick a decision or two over the course of a season, as you can with any manager, but when the Australian has something that resembles a second unit, he’s used it.

Could he be more flexible, though? Maybe, but he’s hardly inflexible. In the months leading up to November 4, he radically altered his system by leaving his fullbacks in traditional, conservative positions instead of bringing them into the midfield, to great success. He’s shown the ability to tailor specific gameplans, with the high line, but minimal pressing to squeeze Liverpool’s first two lines and deny Salah service a rousing success in the Carabao Cup semifinal victory.

He’s even backed off his press, with the team’s sprints being cut nearly in half since the beginning of the injury crisis, so he’s hardly unwilling to adapt or respond to the state of the squad. He even opted for more defensive solidity, with the Maddison and Kulusevski dual 8 midfield mostly abandoned. Hell, the disastrous trip to Goodison Park featured a back three.

So what exactly is the problem with Postecoglou? It starts and ends with results, of course.

Unfortunately, they are one of the most unlucky teams in the modern history, as Joel Wertheimer has documented pretty extensively, leading to dropped points from deserving performances with laughable regularity.

Even if you want to dismiss some aspects of luck or underlying play, it’s impossible to convincingly argue that Spurs have not played better than their point total suggests and this despite all the injuries.

Any reasonable distribution of points from their performances would put them somewhere around 35 points, which would put them in ninth place and hardly rock any worlds, but nobody would be calling for Postecoglou’s job if he had managed this crisis to three points off Manchester City for fifth while thriving in every cup competition. And this with the injuries.

Dismiss the underlying numbers or ideas of luck all you want, but the last time a team from the top four leagues had this much of a gap between their performances and results, Borussia Dortmund and Klopp parted ways. That’s not to say that Postecoglou is Klopp, but it is a stark reminder that sometimes rotten luck is just that - the product of a silly sport where billions of pounds and even more hearts are invested in 22 men in short shorts chasing around a ball that sometimes goes in the goal off an unsuspecting man’s butt - and not an indictment of a bad manager who doesn’t know how to win.

The argument for firing Postecoglou is amazingly thin, unless you believe he became an irreversible bad manager in the last 10 weeks independent of the injuries. The only case for firing him is if the dressing room quits on him, and to this point the eyes and reporting says he still has the players’ full backing.

Does that mean Postecoglou is a sure-fire brilliant manager who will certainly lead Spurs to greatness if he’s given the time? No.

Postecoglou remains the fairly unproven man in European football that he was when he was hired. He’s shown the ability to get a fair amount out of a deeply flawed squad, as he did to finish fifth last season, and an ability to develop young players. There have been flashes of greatness and if his ability never shows beyond flashes then Spurs will be right to move on in a year or two, but casting aside the promise, the foundation building and the development of the team because of a hellaciously unlucky, unbelievably injured spell with a squad not up to the task under the best of circumstances would be silly.

All rebuilds look like this at some point. Arsenal were in 10th place or lower for 10 straight weeks in 2020 and Liverpool had three wins in their first nine of 2017.

This rebuild, with any manager and any squad building, was going to hit the skids at some point, but only a successful rebuild believes in its foundations enough to see it through.

A new manager won’t find a good way to use Sergio Reguilon. Won’t find a Harry Kane replacement in Brennan Johnson. Won’t turn Yves Bissouma into a reliable midfielder. Won’t fix Richarlison’s lower body. Won’t win with a gameday squad of eight teenagers. Won’t manage 60 games with 22 players.

Tottenham’s problems begin and end with the squad. Being able to ask whether they have the right manager to take the club to the upper reaches of the table is a luxury they can only dream of right now.

So where do Spurs go from here?

Getting fit aside, it starts with Lange and Co. undoing their mistakes and getting the rebuild back on track.

The signing of Kinsky at the start of January was a godsend after another summer failure delivered a month of Fraser Forster calamities, but Lange desperately need to sign someone capable of playing left back before the window is up.

The market isn’t ideal, but this is the hole they dug themselves and if that means overpaying to get someone in then so be it. That’s the point of becoming a top six team, building a stadium and hosting Beyonce concerts. You’re rich now and can afford to overpay when needed.

But the real work begins in the summer, when it will be time to press the gas pedal on this rebuild. They foolishly brought back Yves Bissouma and Rodrigo Bentancur last year, despite neither being especially good, both being older and both having two seasons left on their contract. The reasoning was the market for a replacement wasn’t good.

The club didn’t like the market on another winger either, which is why they opted for another year of Timo Werner.

So instead of addressing their biggest needs at two of the most important positions on the pitch last season, they opted for sub-par players who have failed to deliver and now have to do all that work this summer. And now, they don’t have the luxury of pushing things off again if they don’t love the market. They need to do the work they opted against last summer.

That means two central midfielders, a winger with star potential who you can run an attack through as non-negotiable priorities and anything short of two of them by the start of next season is an outright disaster. The third has to be in by the summer of 2026, along with fortifying depth all over the team.

That sounds like a lot, and it is. It’s really more than you want to be forced into in a single summer, but the club forced it on themselves when they slow played last season.

That won’t be easy, likely without Champions League football to sell. That means you’re not picking from the cream of the crop, but they are one of the 10 or 12 richest clubs in the world. The money does a lot.

And that money can’t go to a bunch more teenagers. It can’t go to another 28-year-old. It has to go to players in their early 20’s, who you think can step into the starting lineup immediately and have the potential to be stars in a year or two.

If we want to look at Liverpool and Arsenal again, for the most recent examples of successful rebuilds, Tottenham need their Sadio Mane, Georginio Wijnaldum, Odegaard and Gabriel. All players who signed when the clubs were outside of the Champions League and were able to both lift their teams right away, but also continue to develop into part of the backbone of title-contending teams down the line.

Difficult surely, but that’s what rebuilds take.

The case for optimism

To begin with, the squad will get healthier at some point. Romero and van de Ven are expected back soon, and with the two of them in the center of defense Tottenham have played like a top four team ever since Postecoglou took over.

Bissouma and Bentancur aren’t much further behind and we are nearing Udogie and Vicario’s returns. Solanke’s injury also appears to be less severe than originally feared.

By the time Spurs go to Anfield for the second leg of the Carabao Cup semifinal, they might have something that resembles a respectable first choice team.

Ah yes, those cups.

Remember all the consternation, from inside and outside of N17, that Spurs prioritized finishing fourth over trophies?

Suddenly, trophy runs are all the rage on the white side of north London as Tottenham have moved closer to each of the three cups on offer to them.

And while past windows have put the club’s rebuild behind the pace, one smashing summer can put them right back on a timeline to be fully out of the rebuild and ready to compete in September 2027.

The club also have more tools to work with than before, with the data and scouting teams nearly fully built out since beginning construction when Scott Munn was named Chief Football Officer in 2023. Postecoglou will be better supported too, and the players hopefully better kept intact, with the sports science and medical teams in place shortly.

A club that has been a decade behind their rivals in entering the modern age of robust football operations is finally catching up and that should begin to pay dividends.

The remaining question is when will Tottenham spend. They’ve paid fairly big transfer fees (albeit not particularly wisely), but despite a massive increase in their wage bill over the last decade, it still trails all of their rivals. However the problem is not so much an across-the-board unwillingness to spend, but a lack of players making over £200,000-per-week.

At the moment, though, Tottenham don’t have players worth paying those kind of wages. They’re not in the team at the moment and, absent the Champions League, they’re not going to be able to sign the type of player who demands those huge wages off the bat, so it’s not really a problem right now.

What Spurs have to do is continue to grow their own talent so someone like van de Ven, Odobert, Bergvall or a new signing who comes in on average wages gets so good they need to be paid those top end wages, the way Arsenal did with William Saliba and Odegaard, or Liverpool did with Mane. Then, when they are back in the Champions League and are appealing to the best players, they can move for the missing piece at a huge fee on big wages, like Arsenal with Declan Rice and Liverpool did with van Dijk.

Whether Levy sanctions the big wages when the time comes remains an unknown, and until he does any skepticism that he will is deserved, but, he has increased spending across the board in recent years so there’s reason to think he’ll spend when the time calls for it. As is the case with everything at the club now the problem is pretty simple - they lack great players, and the solve is finding the top end talent worthy of opening up the checkbook.

Spurs are a rich club now. They have built the infrastructure. Their floor is much higher than it has ever been. Now it’s just about getting to their ceiling, and the vision for it is very much still there. It’s time for Lange to give the manager a team that can do that. And a little help from the football gods every now and again wouldn’t hurt either.