Tottenham Hotspur escaped the indignity of relegation-zone flirtation on the final day of a season they will spend the summer trying to forget, but the relief that swept through the visiting end at Goodison Park will curdle quickly. A 1-0 win over Everton, secured by a scrappy second-half header from Cristian Romero, lifted Ange Postecoglou’s side to a 17th-place finish — their lowest in the Premier League era and a full 22 points adrift of the European places they have come to regard as a birthright.
The travelling supporters sang Postecoglou’s name until their voices cracked. They waved scarves. They embraced strangers. For 90 minutes, the avoidance of catastrophe felt like triumph. By Monday morning, when the league table is reprinted in cold black and white, the mood inside N17 will shift. Spurs have finished below Brentford, below Bournemouth, below Fulham. The Europa League trophy lifted in Bilbao last week was meant to be the floor of this project. Instead, it has revealed itself as the ceiling.
A season of two faces
The numbers are unforgiving. Spurs lost 22 of their 38 league matches — the most by any Tottenham side since the 1934-35 relegation campaign. They conceded 65 goals, more than every team outside the bottom three. They won just four games at home, a tally bettered by newly promoted Ipswich Town. The injury list, frequently invoked by Postecoglou as mitigation, was real and severe: Cristian Romero, Micky van de Ven, Guglielmo Vicario and James Maddison all missed extended stretches. But every elite club carries injuries. Few collapse this completely.
What made the slide so jarring was the parallel triumph in Europe. The 1-0 win over Manchester United in Bilbao on 21 May, settled by Brennan Johnson’s first-half strike, ended a 17-year trophy drought and qualified Spurs for next season’s Champions League. Daniel Levy, the chairman whose tenure has been defined by near-misses and managerial churn, lifted the trophy with visible emotion. For 96 hours, the narrative was rewritten. Then Crystal Palace beat Spurs 4-1 at Selhurst Park, and the cognitive dissonance returned.
Postecoglou’s uncertain future
The Australian’s position is the most pressing question facing the club’s hierarchy. Postecoglou delivered the trophy he publicly promised in his second season — a promise widely mocked when first uttered — but he did so while presiding over a league campaign that ranks among the worst in the club’s modern history. Levy now faces a choice that splits opinion sharply both inside the building and across the fanbase.
The case for retention rests on three pillars:
- European silverware and the Champions League windfall that follows, projected at £60-80 million in guaranteed revenue
- The likely return to full fitness of key players, particularly Van de Ven and Maddison, whose absences correlated directly with the worst defensive and creative outputs
- The cost and disruption of a fourth managerial change in five years, at a club where instability has been the only constant
The case for dismissal is equally clear. Seventeenth is seventeenth. No manager in Premier League history has survived such a finish at a club of Tottenham’s stature. The football, particularly in the second half of the season, was structurally incoherent: a high defensive line maintained without the personnel to protect it, full-backs inverted into midfield with no obvious benefit, set-piece defending that became a punchline. Reports from training-ground sources, briefed to several London newspapers in recent weeks, suggest senior players have privately questioned the tactical direction since February.
The summer that will define a decade
Whoever stands on the touchline at the opening fixture in August, the recruitment department faces its most consequential window since the post-Pochettino rebuild of 2019. Spurs need a goalkeeper to compete with Vicario, at least two centre-backs, a defensive midfielder of genuine Premier League pedigree, and a striker capable of leading the line in Champions League knockout football. Son Heung-min, now 33, cannot carry the attacking burden for another full campaign. Dominic Solanke, signed for £65m last summer, scored 11 league goals — a respectable return undermined by the chaos around him.
The Champions League qualification, secured via the Europa League back door rather than league position, complicates rather than simplifies the picture. Tottenham will return to Europe’s elite competition having finished 17th domestically, a juxtaposition without modern precedent. They will play Wednesday-night fixtures against Real Madrid or Bayern Munich while travelling to face Burnley and Leeds on Saturday lunchtimes, with a squad whose depth was exposed across 50-plus matches this season.
Reality returns on Monday
For now, the supporters who made the journey to Merseyside have their moment. They sang about Bilbao. They sang about Postecoglou. They sang about being Tottenham, and there was, briefly, joy in that. But the league table does not care about cup runs, and the boardroom at Lilywhite House does not run on sentiment. The summer of inquest begins now, and the questions it will ask of Postecoglou, of Levy, and of a squad that has flattered and failed in roughly equal measure will be the harshest this club has faced in a generation.
Survival was not the target. It was never supposed to be the conversation. That it became one is the story of Tottenham’s 2025-26 season, and no trophy lifted in northern Spain can quite obscure it.
Sports journalist and editor at SportsPortal.net. Covers cricket, football, Formula 1, tennis, and basketball with a focus on how global sports connect with Pakistani audiences. Follows the PSL, Pakistan national cricket team, Premier League, and major international tournaments. Has reported on sports for digital audiences since 2021.
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