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Tottenham Hotspur, a club with a billion-dollar stadium and Champions League aspirations baked into its DNA, just celebrated climbing to 17th place in the Premier League. That sentence alone tells you everything about how this season has gone.
A 2-1 win over Aston Villa on May 3 pulled Spurs out of the relegation zone for the first time in weeks, ending a 15-game winless run in the league. Goals from Conor Gallagher and Richarlison were enough to lift the club above West Ham United, who had already lost earlier in the day.
The numbers behind the nightmare
Tottenham now sit on 37 points from 35 matches. For context, that is the kind of tally that typically gets a newly promoted side polite applause. For a club of Spurs’ stature and spending, it is a crisis dressed in a football shirt.
The 15-game winless streak was the longest drought of Tottenham’s modern era. Before Saturday’s result, the very real possibility of Tottenham being relegated for the first time since 1977 was not a joke on social media. It was a line in the bookmakers’ odds.
Roberto De Zerbi, who was appointed manager on March 31, has been tasked with performing the most thankless job in English football: keeping one of the league’s wealthiest clubs out of the Championship. Seven points from his first four matches represents a dramatic improvement over what came before him.
The Villa win was the most important of those results by a wide margin. West Ham’s earlier defeat meant three points would be enough to leapfrog them, and Spurs delivered when it mattered most. Gallagher opened the scoring before Richarlison added the decisive second, and a late Villa consolation goal was ultimately irrelevant.
How Tottenham ended up here
Multiple managerial changes plagued the campaign. The instability at the top filtered down to the pitch, where results went from disappointing to dire. The 15-game winless streak was not a sudden collapse. It was the slow, grinding accumulation of draws that should have been wins and losses that exposed a squad lacking cohesion, confidence, or both.
What happens next
Three matches remain, and Tottenham are not safe yet. Sitting in 17th with 37 points, they are above the dotted line but hardly comfortable.
The financial implications of relegation for a club like Tottenham would be staggering. Premier League television revenue, commercial partnerships, and the ability to attract top players all depend on top-flight status. A drop to the Championship would not just be an embarrassment. It would be an economic earthquake for a club still servicing debt from its stadium build.
Tottenham ultimately avoided relegation, finishing the season with a home victory over Everton that granted them 41 points — a record of 10 wins, 11 draws, and 17 losses, and a goal difference of -9 — leaving them two points above the relegation zone. West Ham United were relegated by that same two-point margin.
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