Tottenham Hotspur in 2026: the closest you can get to watching a public hanging without access to the dark web or a flight to Tehran. No football club could be better suited to or more representative of its age, ever more entertaining as they collapse further in on themselves like a dying star. This is an experiment in how far upwards people can fail before they fail totally.
Their unreality has become so all-consuming and vivid that sacking a manager after four matches has become the only logical option. The floor is giving way beneath players’ feet, goalkeepers substituted after 17 minutes. Harry Redknapp is the people’s prince. Jason Cundy and Really Famous Soccer Player Jamie O’Hara are suddenly funny – perhaps the real tell that something is seriously wrong. Helicopters are circling, Karen’s threatening to take the kids. Apathy has never been quite this arresting.
It bears saying that making a struggling team tangibly worse in less than a month is actually really hard. This takes elite ineptitude, a true lack of skill. Tottenham were already operating at the lower extreme of their perceived capability. Tudor was given a free hit, which he has used to first smash up the dressing room, then repeatedly smack himself in the gonads. Forcing a team with no wing-backs and two occasionally functioning centre-backs to play 3-4-3 is a pig-headedness most tinpot dictators would be proud of. Modelling his PR policy on Ruben Amorim’s pioneering “total negging” has been inspiredly damaging, inheriting a squad with an unparalleled crisis of confidence and spending a month telling them they’re bad at everything. The only feasible reason for not sacking him yesterday was embarrassment, but we have long jumped that shark.
And yet this cataclysm was as predictable as it was preventable. There was no meaningful evidence of Tudor’s capability or suitability. Specialist interim head coach is a role Tottenham fabricated to convince themselves they were still in control, rather than hiring someone who was so provably unfit they had left their last 10 jobs within a year, managerial seat-filler.
Will the last person to leave Tottenham Hotspur please sack themselves before they turn out the lights?
Will the last person to leave Tottenham Hotspur please sack themselves before they turn out the lights?
No-one is blameless and no-one seems to be learning from their errors. The failures have metastasised with such vengeance that finding a source or cause is somewhere between futile and impossible, every organ blackened and failing, a chain of institutional incompetence previously unimaginable at a club this wealthy and prestigious.
So pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood. Burn everything. Tough on Tudor, yes, but tough on the causes of Tudor. Sack Johan Lange and Vinai Venkatesham; sack the scouts and medical team (particularly the medical team) and Chirpy the Cockerel. The kitman might be much beloved, but what happened in Madrid on Tuesday night showed it's even got him. Will the last person to leave Tottenham Hotspur please sack themselves before they turn out the lights?
This largely ignores the players, that dead-eyed bunch, well past the point of saving face or sanity, whatever they believe. James Maddison might be the closest thing to a survivor given he has not played a minute since last May, but even Micky van de Ven looks contaminated, mind and body failing. It is almost impossible to imagine a world in which this squad can ever recover, the bonds irreparably broken, trauma too deep. They play as though the only thing they hate more than each other is themselves.
Despite all this, nine league games is more than enough to salvage something, but who could enact meaningful change here? The only real obstacle to sacking Tudor is the lack of potential replacements, although it's hard to imagine total anarchy would be much worse. Redknapp has a runner in the Cheltenham Gold Cup tomorrow and a spot on I’m a Celebrity: All Stars with Jimmy Bullard and Gemma Collins next week. Do you let Sean Dyche attempt revenge on Evangelos Marinakis? What about Glenn Hoddle? A witch doctor? Bring Ange in and let him finish what he started? You suspect there are minor deities who would struggle to get a tune out of Randal Kolo Muani.
The greatest irony is that Daniel Levy’s love of doomsday planning, squirrelling away tinned goods and the Harry Kane millions, was roundly loathed. Well now doomsday is here and Levy isn’t. The falcon cannot hear the falconer, and everyone has lost their blame rod, but at least some stringent relegation clauses are in place.
Ultimately, Spurs avoiding the Championship would be in spite of themselves. West Ham’s renewed facade of functionality suggests only Nottingham Forest can save them, wracked by a similar cocktail of catastrophe and incompetence. Even then, where would survival leave Spurs? If the current decision-makers remain in post, this grim process will only repeat ad nauseum, more painful yet numbing every time. Tudor might well be the worst Tottenham head coach ever. But maybe he's only the worst so far.
Photograph by Julian Finney
More from The Observer
Newsletters
Choose the newsletters you want to receive
View more
For information about how The Observer protects your data, read our Privacy Policy