Probably Tim Sherwood put it best, speaking on Sky Sports about the through-the-looking-glass world of Tottenham Hotspur and magic bean relegation remedies. “They need an arm round the shoulder,” Sherwood said. “I’d tell Xavi Simons he’s the new Luka Modric. Obviously he’s not but I’d tell him he was. I’d tell him: ‘Save us from relegation and you can go to Real Madrid next season.’ Obviously he won’t but I’d tell him that.”
Sherwood has had a good Tottenham crisis period. “The Premier League has smacked him in the mouth,” was his verdict on Igor Tudor, pre-sacking. While every proper football man will like the sound of this, of the Premier League being large and unassailable, Tudor deserves a little sympathy.
Only the hardest heart could fail to wish Spurs’ latest ex-interim well as he departs the job that should never have been. Hopefully, he will now have time to collect himself, to settle in somewhere more suitable and sane (ie, anywhere). Perhaps the internet will even grant him the right to be forgotten, his entire 44‑day Tottenham spell expunged from human history. The man has suffered enough.
The only lasting memory of the Tudor era is the transformation in his demeanour over those few short weeks. Here is a manager who walked in looking like a renaissance duke on his way to a corporate golf day – pointy beard, glowing eyes, skinny jeans, gleaming leisure trainers – and who left wearing an indissoluble rictus of sorrow, the look of a man who has stared deep into the abyss and found the abyss staring straight back into him. Welcome to Spurs, Igor, and also farewell. How was it for you?
Naturally, everyone is now very keen to move on. Tottenham’s executive, for obvious reasons, will want to move on more quickly than anyone else. So much so that even the names linked initially with the manager’s post felt a bit like misdirection, a case of simply shouting out distracting words.
How about a man who does betting adverts. Or a man who has already been dead for a bit. Gareth Southgate, managing via LinkedIn live hangout. Don Howe’s pork pie hat. Maybe Spurs should have a different manager for every game, treat them like T20 cricket match‑ups. Who has the best record against Sunderland? Who is the best for Everton away?
Even the likely hire of Roberto De Zerbi – a good coach at the right level – feels weird and bodged in these hands. Do you trust them now? Can you be sure they’re not thinking, well, we went for an ageing bearded angry man. Let’s try a younger bearded angry man. Do the opposite! That sometimes works!
In reality De Zerbi is another panic-driven 180-degree turn at this stage. The basic outline of Tudor the firefighting fly-by-night at least made sense. Hiring an unyielding systems fanatic with seven games to go and one of the all-time relegations on the cards? It may still work. But it makes no logical sense.
With this in mind, it isn’t quite time to move on just yet. First because the people who brought you Igor Tudor: anatomy of a shit‑show are still very much in place, still managing the response to the chaos they created.
Second because this is a story that tells you almost everything about modern football, from the culture‑death and the hollowing out of purpose, to the astonishing fact football still allows itself to hire its most important members of staff with so little care. To the basic question of how incompetent do you actually have to be to lose your job as a football executive?
This thing is like a giant corporate onion full of upwards filling beer glasses. The more you peel it, the more it stinks.
Small things first. To be fair to Tudor, he was hired to “make an impact” at Spurs, and he did exactly that. They got worse. Forty-four days, no league wins, a Champions League exit, various thrashings, including one at home against a relegation rival. There were obvious mistakes. Nobody could accuse him of not trying enough formations. He seemed to have never heard of the England central midfielder Conor Gallagher before. In the course of 17 first-half minutes he managed to semi-ruin not one but two goalkeepers.
Yet what did anyone expect? These are not Igor Tudor mistakes. They are structurally inevitable mistakes, mistakes that belong entirely to the people who hired him, nominally, it has been reported, Vinai Venkatesham and Johan Lange.
The sheer stupidity of that hire is still startling. Something somewhere – data, Wikipedia, a smooth-talking agent – convinced these highly paid executives that Tudor was the perfect man for this role, based apparently on his experience of four games at Udinese, some other semi‑plausible short-term spells and never having gone anywhere near English football or an entity as nuanced as Tottenham Hotspur.
So why should anything change now? It is still tempting to state that Spurs won’t go down. This is a four‑way shootout with West Ham, Nottingham Forest and Leeds. Three wins in seven games may be enough. Spurs have a fair hand of what the market has deemed to be good footballers.
But this is also the kind of statement that will continue to appal Spurs fans, like telling someone leaning out of the window of a burning house that everything appears to be fine because you still can’t really see much smoke.
There is a wider narrative here, a genuine sense of death‑wish‑ball around the club. The media are often accused of wanting Tottenham to go down (surprise: the media like stories). But Tottenham seem to want Tottenham to go down. The board seems to want it, given its self-immolating behaviour. The players often look as if they want it and perhaps one or two are insufficiently desperate at the prospect of a clean break.
Above all there is the feeling of hollowness in the institution, an entity that has been torn down and rebuilt, while retaining a sugar‑frosting exterior as a football club. And of course the club is the thing, not the interim manager, not the jaw-droppingly poor choices, but the sense of basic institutional confusion.
What is Tottenham Hotspur exactly? It doesn’t seem to be an organisation concerned primarily with glory, the winning of football matches, or making its fans happy. One of the odd parts of the Tudor exit shambles has been hearing people say nobody could have predicted this. But Spurs finished fourth from bottom last year. The relegation battle is not a random black swan event but a swishing back of the curtain to reveal the deep, dark cheese room of the soul beneath, and a destiny that may well await other clubs of this scale.
Players who appear to have no connection with the club, who don’t actually need to care, because elite football is just an industry to be staffed. An executive that feels absent, that sees the creation of a multiplatform leisure brand as its priority, to the extent the club has been consistently sailing close to the wind, toying with fine margins on the pitch, being just good enough.
There is some confusion over Daniel Levy’s degree of responsibility for the current crisis. Certainly Levy was present as the team were fed with mid‑range punts while other clubs improved and invested. Levy has two points in his favour: he was undeniably a brilliant administrator and builder of worlds; he was also good, rather than bad, at juggling the needs of the team, good enough, most likely, to ensure this would simply have been a mediocre season rather than the dance with the devil it has become.
Seven games to avoid one of the all‑time relegations, and a failure that feels like a judgment on a system, a set of priorities and the basic entropy of community clubs, the life and the passion at the heart of this thing. The fans still have this, crave it, and value it above all else. Does everyone else here?
