I’ve shared on many numerous occasions how I inherited quite a bit from the DNA of my maternal grandfather, the least concerning of which was his male pattern baldness. I also inherited his passion for soccer, especially that for his boyhood favorites, Tottenham Hotspur. He knew I was a Mets fan, and I quickly learned that the Spurs are to London East Enders in comparison to the tonier fanbases and neighborhoods of Arsenal and Chelsea what the Mets’ more blue-collar and Long Island-centric supporters are in comparison to the Yankees and the SES characteristics of theirs. Truth be told, more often than not they had a lot more to cheer about than either of us.
Then again, we’ve both had our moments of glory along the way, although my Poppy never did quite make it to the most recent Mets’ world championship in 1986 and I hadn’t yet matured enough to appreciate when the Spurs last won a Premier League title in 1961. Even in the wake of last year’s mutually disappointing seasons for both franchises there were positives. The Mets did indeed go belly up over the last half of the season to wind up missing the post-season entirely, and even in the wake of a 17th place finish in their 20-team league last season’s edition did wind up winning the Europa League final against a far more typically successful Manchester United squad. To put it into perspective for the otherwise unaware, it’s just a slightly more meaningful title than the Knicks’ winning the 2025 NBA Cup. But hey, it’s something, right, Knicks fans?
That aside, things look even more dire at this season heads into the home stretch, and this past weekend sure didn’t help, as THE SPORTING NEWS’ Joe Wright took note yesterday in an impeccably British manner :
The north London side suffered their 15th defeat in 31 league matches on March 22, losing 3-0 at home to fellow strugglers Nottingham Forest. The result left them just one point outside the relegation places. The mere fact that relegation is even being mentioned is hugely embarrassing for a club named the ninth most valuable soccer team by Forbes in 2025.
And ESPN’s Tom Chambers tallied up a few more sobering stats to wash down one’s Guinness with:
The scale of Spurs’ disarray is so large that it’s almost hard to get your head around — cold, hard facts are the easiest method by which to survey the damage:
- Tottenham have taken just 34 points from their last 40 Premier League games, and 13 from their last 22.
- They have failed to win 13 successive league games for the first time since 1935
- With just two home wins in the Premier League, only relegated Championship side Sheffield Wednesday have a worse home record than Spurs in the English football league this season
- Spurs have still not won a game in 2026 — they will not play again until mid-April
- Only three teams have had longer runs without a win from the start of a calendar year, all of whom were relegated: 2007-08 Derby (18), 2002-03 Sunderland (17), 2016-17 Middlesbrough (14)
- Relegation rivals West Ham have earned 14 points from their last 10 games and Nottingham Forest have 14 from their last 11. Spurs have taken one point from the last 21 available.
Yeah, that pretty much falls right in line with the way the second half of 2025 looked at Citi Field. So I get why Chambers is crowing much like Chicken Little:
Relative to financial security, sporting expectations and basically any other metric you could care to mention, this Tottenham season has more than a fair shout at being the worst by any team in English football history….Spurs supporters have been ringing the alarm bells for months, but their distress signals had often fallen on deaf ears. With the business end of the season having arrived, rivals have now woken up to the club’s plight, but, to continue to borrow Thomas Frank and Igor Tudor’s analogy, many of them have only come to revel in watching the ship sink.
Did the club’s downward trend start with the lack of spending that accompanied the stadium move? Mauricio Pochettino’s sacking five months after the Champions League final defeat in 2019? Or was it more recent? The series of ill-advised managerial appointments that started with José Mourinho and now leaves them with Igor Tudor? The behind-the-scenes upheaval highlighted by the Lewis family’s ousting of Daniel Levy at the start of this season? The fact that most of their players are always injured? There’s certainly plenty of blame to share around.
It kind of makes the hue and cry about Carlos Mendoza and Jeremy Hefner’s mismangement seem downright petty, doesn’t it?
And thanks to the time-honored concept where the bottom three clubs in any table drop downa level, as Wright reminds we’re looking at some pretty daunting potential history being made:
In the Premier League era, Tottenham have never been relegated from the top flight. The last time Spurs dropped out of the top division was back in 1977, when they were relegated to the second tier under manager Keith Burkinshaw.
That was the same year the Mets’ descent from falling one victory short of a second World’s Championship in five years reached its nadir with a cellar finish and the mid-season Midnight Massacre that saw The Franchise, Tom Seaver (not to mention more recent fan fava Dave Kingman) both run out of town and the most notable ensuing event of that horrific summer was on a night when surviving pitching great Jerry Koosman had fanned 11 of the first-place Cubs in the first six innings an infamous blackout suspended the game for what turned out to be more than two months. Poppy and I commisserated quite a bit that summer.
Yet in the same breath Wright is urging one steers their Bet 365 chips toward the side of optimism:
Tottenham have a relatively elementary run-in to the 2025/26 Premier League season. They face ‘big six’ clubs just twice from the start of March through the final two months of the campaign, with visits to Liverpool on March 15 and Chelsea on May 17. Six of their final 10 matches are to come against clubs in the bottom half of the standings as of March 1, with games against fellow relegation candidates Nottingham Forest, Wolves, and Leeds United the most critical of the matches remaining.
Yep, that rosy opine was authored at the start of the month, and you’ve already read how they fared against Nottingham Forest. A lot worse than Robin Hood, to be sure.
So while I’ve chosen to ignore the Spurs’ purge into purgatory until now I’m kinda forced to now pay more attention. I’ve championed the concept of relegation as a potential solution to the NBA’s current issues with tanking teams, and after watching the ways the Pacers, Wizards and Nets have played since the All-Star break (before last night’s shocking win by Indiana in Orlando those teams had combined for 39 consecutive losses) I’m all the more sold on it being something that should be seriously looked into. 
But I don’t have as much skin in those teams–not even the Nets, who my nephew made the mistake of adopting as his fave when growing up with them in New Jersey and somehow thinking the “B” in their logo when they moved to Brooklyn would make a cool design for his Bar Mitzvah swag.
Based on my own experience with fandom I did try and talk him out of it. Natch, he ignored me, just like I should have paid less attention to my grandfather when I was at the same lifestage of being young and impressionable. I honestly don’t know how much he’s still paying attention at this point; medical school does supercede pretty much all us. But even if he is still a fan it’s his cross to bear, cuz thanks to both the Spurs and the Mets I’ve got my plate more than full. And thankfully he genetically takes after his father’s side of the family, so his hair ain’t going anywhere.
Courage…