Mark OgdenMar 20, 2026, 05:59 AM ETCloseMark Ogden is a senior soccer writer for ESPN.com. Read his archive here and follow him on Twitter: @MarkOgden_.Follow on XMultiple Authors
play0:41Tudor: Tottenham’s win vs. Atletico Madrid important for moraleIgor Tudor reflects on Tottenham’s Champions League exit after their 7-5 aggregate loss against Atletico Madrid.
play2:17Gibbs: Tottenham draw Liverpool’s ‘story of the season’Kieran Gibbs explains what’s going wrong at Liverpool this season following their late draw vs. Tottenham in the Premier League.
Will the loser of Tottenham vs. Nottingham Forest be relegated? (1:46)Julien Laurens and Nedum Onuoha look ahead to a huge game in the race for Premier League survival, when Tottenham host Nottingham Forest. (1:46)
Tudor: Tottenham’s win vs. Atletico Madrid important for moraleIgor Tudor reflects on Tottenham’s Champions League exit after their 7-5 aggregate loss against Atletico Madrid.
Igor Tudor reflects on Tottenham’s Champions League exit after their 7-5 aggregate loss against Atletico Madrid.
Gibbs: Tottenham draw Liverpool’s ‘story of the season’Kieran Gibbs explains what’s going wrong at Liverpool this season following their late draw vs. Tottenham in the Premier League.
Kieran Gibbs explains what’s going wrong at Liverpool this season following their late draw vs. Tottenham in the Premier League.
LONDON — The Champions League anthem was played at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium on Wednesday. Atletico Madrid were in town, and Spurs were playing in football’s premier club competition with the prize of a quarterfinal against Barcelona at stake.
Despite a 3-2 second-leg victory for Igor Tudor’s team, Spurs suffered a 7-5 aggregate defeat that ended their Champions League dream. Heading into the weekend, they’re now faced with a relegation battle to save their Premier League status.
“Nottingham Forest on Sunday is the biggest game in the club’s history for a long time,” former Spurs goalkeeper Paul Robinson, who suffered relegation from the Premier League with Leeds in 2004, told ESPN. “It would just be an absolute disaster for the club from top to bottom if they were to be relegated.”
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Spurs last suffered relegation in 1977. They bounced back after just one season, but in those pre-Premier League days, there was no financial hammer blow to dropping down a division. Clubs could ride it out, often keeping their team together and barely feeling the pain, but in the modern game, relegation can mean an instant £100 million hit and a player exodus. For a club the size of Spurs, the implications would be enormous.
However, they are not too good to go down. Spurs haven’t won a Premier League game in 2026 — their last league win was a 1-0 victory at Crystal Palace on Dec. 28 — and since the start of last season, they have lost twice as many league games (36) as they won (18). Tudor, appointed as head coach until the end of the season last month, is the club’s sixth appointment since Pochettino’s exit in November of 2019, and he has taken just one point from four league games in charge.
There has been turmoil off the field too, with Daniel Levy’s 24-year reign as chairman coming to an abrupt end last September. Sporting director Fabio Paratici followed Levy out the door in January.
All of the ingredients of a club in turmoil are there. Bad results, underperforming players, managerial change, instability in the boardroom and supporter unrest. But still: could Spurs really go down?
The consensus among many connected with Spurs is that the 2019 Champions League final defeat against Liverpool in Madrid was the fork in the road, with the club ultimately picking the wrong direction.
Pochettino’s team included Harry Kane, Christian Eriksen, Son Heung-min, Hugo Lloris and emerging talent Dele Alli. The coach wanted to take Spurs to the next level, turn them into winners rather than challengers, but the summer transfer window saw potential, rather than proven, talent arrive in the shape of Jack Clarke, Tanguy Ndombele, Giovani Lo Celso and Ryan Sessegnon. By November, Pochettino was out and in came Jose Mourinho, a change that triggered the downward spiral.
“By the time Mauricio left, it was clear he had to go,” a boardroom source told ESPN. “He and Daniel [Levy] just weren’t getting along, I think they were both worn out by each other.
“But Daniel was listening to too many people, wrong people, and I think he was seduced by the idea of having Jose as his manager. Jose is a great manager, but he inherited a squad built for Pochettino — young players who need encouragement and development — and he is just too volatile and aggressive for a young squad. Spurs needed another Pochettino type after Mauricio left, but they went in another direction and it’s never been the same since.”
Ricky Sacks, who hosts the “Last Word on Spurs” podcast, echoes that perspective, saying that the failure to develop Pochettino’s team was the root cause of the problems the club’s now attempting to deal with.
“The club has gone round and round in circles since 2019,” Sacks told ESPN. “There has been no clear idea or identity, nobody knows what they want to do, because they have gone from one style of coach to another.
“They sacked Mourinho four days before the 2021 Carabao Cup final against Man City, failed to back Antonio Conte, and then went from Ange [Postecoglou] to Thomas Frank who, although he seems a good guy, was just never equipped to upscale from Brentford to a club like Spurs. It’s just been a mess.”
Alongside the managerial churn, Spurs have consistently failed to compete at the top end of the transfer market. Tottenham’s biggest-ever signing — forward Dominic Solanke arrived from Bournemouth for a £65 million fee in August, 2024 — is by far the smallest record-transfer among the ‘Big Six’, who have all spent in excess of £100 million for a player with the exception of United, whose record signing is the £89.3 million deal for Paul Pogba from Juventus in August 2016.
Spurs’ owners, ENIC, which is run by the Lewis Family Trust, injected £100 million of new capital into the club last October, but ongoing speculation of a potential sale has not gone away despite ENIC’s denials that they are looking to sell what is, off the pitch at least, a major football club.
It is the magnificent 62,000-capacity stadium, the club’s century-old history and their huge fanbase, both in London and globally, that earns Spurs their place in the ‘Big Six’, but former manager Postecoglou recently questioned whether they deserve to described as a “big” club.
“Obviously, they’ve [Spurs] built an unbelievable stadium, unbelievable training facilities,” Postecoglou told “The Overlap,” a popular podcast. “But when you look at the expenditure, particularly in the wage structure, they’re not a big club.
“I saw that when we were trying to sign players, because we weren’t in the market for those players. I was looking at Pedro Neto, [Bryan] Mbeumo and [Antoine] Semenyo and Marc Guéhi, because if we’re going to go from fifth to there [challenging for trophies], that’s what the other big clubs would do in that moment.”
Instead, Spurs went for Archie Gray, Wilson Odobert and Lucas Bergvall — players for tomorrow rather than today, just like Ndombele, Sessegnon and Lo Celso were in 2019.
Despite the poor recruitment and managerial changes, former Spurs goalkeeper Robinson believes that Levy has been unfairly labelled as the major reason behind the club’s fall from grace.
“I think Daniel was badly advised at times, maybe listening to a lot of people as the club grew, but to his credit, he listened to the fans when they were clamoring for trophies and employed two ‘win-now’ managers in Mourinho and Conte. He just didn’t back them enough with win-now players to get them where they wanted.
“You can’t deny that recruitment has been really poor in recent years, but Spurs have also waved goodbye to their top scorers — Kane, Son and Brennan Johnson — from each of the last three seasons.”
Tudor: Tottenham’s win vs. Atletico Madrid important for morale
Tottenham’s failure to sign the players wanted by the manager at the time proved to be an issue right until the end of Levy’s time at the helm. Last summer, Frank wanted Crystal Palace forward Eberechi Eze, Forest midfielder Morgan Gibbs-White and his former Brentford striker Bryan Mbeumo, but the club missed out on all of them. They also tried and failed to Antoine Semenyo in January, with the Bournemouth forward opting instead to move to City.
Wednesday’s 3-2 win against Atletico on the back of last Sunday’s 1-1 draw at Liverpool have lifted the mood in and around Spurs, but the Forest game continues to generate anxiety among the club’s fan base.
“It feels like a genuine relegation six-pointer and the momentum from winning or losing will be huge,” Sacks said. “The last two games have raised morale, but they were free hits in some ways.
Despite Spurs being regarded as a sensible, well-run, but cautious, club — something for which Levy has been praised and criticized in equal measure — the financial catastrophe of relegation cannot be overstated.
Tottenham’s losses led CEO Venkatesham to warn the fan advisory board of a need to monitor the club’s compliance with Financial Fair Play regulations, so there is no question that relegation would create severe difficulties for the club.
They would be the biggest club to go down since Leeds in 2003-04 and relegation led to a financial meltdown at Elland Road and the mass exodus of players. It took the club 16 years to return to the top flight.
“I think it would be more alarming and an even bigger story than Leeds if Spurs go down,” said Robinson, who was part of the 2004 Leeds team. “Spurs have been a regular European team, they reached the Champions League final seven years and won the Europa League last year, so it would be much bigger.