Normally the moment a club’s relegation fears crystallise - the moment distant angst turns to terror - is neatly captured in a single incident but on Thursday night the realisation seemed to dawn on Tottenham Hotspur supporters in a slow, seeping fog that suffocated different pockets of the stadium at different times.
There were those already resigned to catastrophe long before kick-off, showing up out of duty and nothing else.
For some, Micky van de Ven’s red card was the moment the nightmare became real, for others it was the Ismaïla Sarr goal that made it 3-1 to Crystal Palace and triggered a mass exodus before half-time.
Whenever the exact moment, by the end it was clear everyone inside that stadium - including, perhaps, Igor Tudor and his players - felt an icy hand on their shoulder.
Never before has a Premier League club of Tottenham’s resources looked so broken, so incapable of controlling their own destiny. There is nothing left. The fans have passed through anger and are now onto apathy, awaiting the result they are sure is coming.
The speed of Spurs’ descent is almost unbelievable.
Hiring Tudor was a huge gamble and it has proved to be a dreadful one, just the latest in a long line of managerial decisions that have gradually sunk Spurs into the mire, and yet only 16 months ago – in November 2024 – they were on 19 points from 12 matches, in touching distance of second and preparing for a better second year under Ange Postecolgou.
The eulogies in May will sift through years of mismanagement from INEOS and Daniel Levy to form a coherent story that dates back to at least Mauricio Pochettino, but that won’t really be accurate or fair.
This is a catastrophe that has struck like a thunderbolt out of the blue. Spurs won the Europa League ten months ago. They are in the Champions League. It almost defies logic.
Tottenham’s injury crisis has played a significant role in their fall, as has the relative strength of those in the relegation battle this season, making 40 points the target to stay up.
But even that doesn’t really explain it, doesn’t let us comprehend why the players are staggering around the pitch like they’re trapped inside a nightmare.
Being at Tottenham these days does has a nightmarish quality, the billion-pound stadium and its bombastic pre-match rituals clashing incongruently with the feelings of the fans and players to create something a little uncanny.
This disconnect is where we might find the best explanation for Spurs’ demise. Here is a club with Super League pretensions unwilling to spend the money required to meet their own bluster, leaving them trapped in limbo, devoid of meaning.
“When you walk into Tottenham what you see everywhere is ‘to dare is to do’, and yet their actions are almost the antithesis of that,” as Ange Postecoglou put it on the Stick to Football podcast shortly after Thomas Frank was sacked.
Ange was complaining about the lack of resources and the infamous wage cap. Frank might instead point to the incoherence of Tottenham leaning heavily into their mythos of attacking football while hiring a pragmatist.
Everywhere you look: contradictions, paradoxes; a club stuck between two identities, destined to fall apart.
"They're not a big club!" 😯
— The Overlap (@WeAreTheOverlap) February 12, 2026
Ange Postecoglou gives his verdict on Spurs’ current situation after the sacking of Thomas Frank! 📣 pic.twitter.com/5SpXGhAKpI
But it isn’t too late.
The financial imbalances in English football still make the relegation of the 9th richest club in the world a near-impossibility as long as the chief executive Vinai Venkatesham keeps pushing buttons and pulling levers at random.
One of them is bound to do something.
The first jab should be obvious. Tudor has to go.
A manager with no experience in English football, who favours the back-three formation that Ruben Amorim has turned into a bit of a joke in the Premier League, and who is known for banging heads together and playing a hard-pressing game should not have been hired by a desperate Spurs side lacking fitness or the basic dressing room cohesion required for the tough-love approach to work.
Premier League relegation odds (via Sky Bet)
- West Ham - 5/4
- Tottenham - 7/4
- Nottingham Forest - 3/1
- Leeds - 13/2
Odds correct at 16:45 GMT (09/03/26)
There are nine rounds of Premier League games left, enough time for Spurs to get the four wins they need. Ryan Mason, twice a successful interim before, is the right person to invigorate the dressing room and put round pegs in round holes, simplifying the formation and the tactics Michael Carrick-style.
Tudor has done nothing like that, instead confusing everyone with a wildly new tactical approach befitting a top-half Serie A side but not whatever this Spurs rabble has become.
Reports suggest Tudor will remain in post for the two Champions League games against Atletico Madrid and the league matches against Liverpool and Nottingham Forest, allowing the club to make a change, if necessary, during the three-week break that follows.
That would be a cataclysmic mistake. This is no time to let embarrassment take precedence over action, to double down on an error by ploughing on towards the bottom three.
If Spurs lose those two Premier League matches (and it feels almost certain that they will) there won’t be time for Mason or some other interim to turn things around.
Only in extremely rare circumstances should head coaches not be shown patience. This is one of them.
Tudor needs to be put out of his misery now - before it’s too late.
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