Have Tottenham been unlucky to never win a Premier League title?

During the Premier League’s recent years, there has been an increasing motion that Tottenham Hotspur are one of England’s top footballing clubs. Often found in the latter stages of tournaments and lauded for an attacking style of football, the club have become a member of the Premier League’s elite ‘Big Six’. However, a surprising fact remains: Tottenham haven’t won a trophy since the League Cup in 2008.

It has been over ten years since Tottenham’s last major crown, where Juande Ramos successfully guided Spurs to a 2-1 win over rivals Chelsea, in what was the first final to be played at the new Wembley Stadium. Since then, Tottenham have seemingly gone from strength to strength, especially since appointing Mauricio Pochettino as manager in 2014. However, they have still yet to claim a Premier League title, or even more alarmingly, any major trophy in over a decade. For a team of such high expectations, incredible squad talent and constant media praise, should this be deemed as a failure?

The masters of applying the pressure

In what has become a meme of recent years, Tottenham have become associated with ‘applying the pressure’ in Premier League campaigns, before eventually fading away without a real challenge and allowing the eventual winners to claim an easy victory. Below, are two recent examples where Spurs could have made a significant challenge for the Premier League. However, were comfortably outdone in their efforts.

Firstly, we travel back to the 2016-17 season where Chelsea ran out eventual title winners. Tottenham ultimately finished second (and remarkably released a ceremonial DVD of their season, leading to a large social media backlash), six points behind Chelsea. It was Antonio Conte’s debut season in the Premier League, Manchester United had just rid themselves of Louis van Gaal’s bizarre reign, Jurgen Klopp was still in the early days of developing Liverpool’s heavy metal football and Pep Guardiola had just taken charge in the blue side of Manchester. This could have been the perfect season for Pochettino to put forward a significant title challenge given a summer of change and uncertainty for his rivals. Instead, Chelsea waltzed to their fifth Premier League title with relative ease under Conte, gaining an impressive 93 points over the campaign.

Secondly, there is the part Tottenham played in one of football’s greatest ever fairy tales. Leicester City’s title win during the 2015-16 season, which was at odds of 5000/1 before the season began, is now commonly accepted as one of football’s most heroic greatest underdog stories. However, it is also often regarded as another missed opportunity for Tottenham to have won their first Premier League title.

With the likes of Man City, Man Utd, Chelsea and Liverpool all having below-par seasons, and Leicester typically fielding a team that might have struggled in the Championship, this would have been the perfect year for Tottenham to launch a serious and compelling title challenge. Instead, Leicester won the league by a more-than comfortable ten point margin, and Tottenham even managed to finish a humiliating third, behind fierce rivals Arsenal due to some poor results late in the season.

Leicester were handed the win thanks to the deplorable scenes at Stamford Bridge during ‘The Battle of the Bridge‘, where Tottenham amassed a Premier League record nine yellow cards (yet remarkably, no red cards). Eden Hazard, who had endured a poor season in comparison to the current campaign, slammed home a late equaliser and ensured the city of Leicester was sent into jubilant scenes of celebration, and Tottenham’s title challenge came to an abrupt halt.

Were Tottenham unlucky?

The above two seasons were the closest Tottenham have come to challenging for the Premier League, and Harry Kane’s recent injury has cast serious doubts over their ability to surmount a serious challenge this year, but is there a case for them being unlucky? The notion of ‘bad luck’ is a common theme in football. A bad deflection can result in an unlucky goal conceded or a poor refereeing decision could lead your team to an unlucky defeat, but can you be unlucky to not win a league title?

It has been suggested that Chelsea and Leicester’s absence from European competitions gave them a distinct advantage in their title challenges, and whilst this does result in fewer games throughout the season, it seems quite a leap to suggest that is the direct reason either won the league in place of Tottenham. Fewer games would typically offer fewer injuries and less fatigue enabling you to play your strongest team more frequently.

However during the 2015-16 season, potential injuries or fatigue caused by an added amount of games did not seem to impact Spurs’ team selection. Talisman Harry Kane and defensive linchpin Toby Alderweireld both appeared 34 times in the Premier League campaign. Kyle Walker, Christian Eriksen and Dele Alli were all close to 30 appearances themselves.

During the 2016-17 season it was a similar story, where eight first team regulars notched up over 30 appearances during the campaign. This doesn’t appear to have been a team that was particularly unfortunate in regards to injuries or fatigue. Instead, it appears to be a team showing the repercussions of club chairman Daniel Levy’s infamous wage structure and Spurs’ strict transfer policy. A smaller reliance on key players and higher levels of squad rotation may have been a tactical oversight by Pochettino.

It would certainly seem that unlucky injuries or fatigue were not the reasons behind those particular seasons’ failures, but it does raise the question of Tottenham’s squad depth and how their club is run internally. Additionally, it also makes one consider the various seasons Tottenham have not been competing in Europe, should they not have had a more sustained title challenge in those years if this is to be decreed as such a clear advantage.

A discredit to other clubs

Aside from the issue of Chelsea and Leicester not playing Europe, to suggest that they were lucky to win those particular league seasons is nothing short of a severe discredit to their accomplishments. A typical football fan may accept that their club was unlucky to not win a cup competition, where one-off results or decisions can have damning results. However, over the course of a 38-game season, the best of the best will (in the vast majority of cases) run out as deserved winners.

Leicester were a staple of consistency and team work during their remarkable win, Chelsea benefited from Conte taking the Premier League by storm due to acute tactics and sheer tenacity. To advocate that either team was lucky to claim that particular title whilst Tottenham’s failure was unlucky, is pure indignity.

There is nothing in football quite like deflating the distended and overblown delusions of grandeur possessed by Tottenham Hotspur.

— Dan Levene (@danlevene) August 20, 2017

The reasoning behind Tottenham’s failure to win a Premier League title, is simply down to them not being the best team throughout a whole campaign. It is beyond a shadow of a doubt that Spurs have improved vastly in recently years, and Pochettino has done wonderful work on a limited budget in comparison to their rivals, but the fact remains that Tottenham are yet to come close to a Premier League title.

Do they deserve one?

In a recent interview, Tottenham star Son Heung-min claimed that his team have been “a bit unlucky”  to have not won a title thus far, and that himself and his teammates “deserve to win something”. The notion of ‘deserving’ a Premier League title seems a strange one. When Liverpool came closing to winning their maiden Premier League title during the 2013-14 season, many pundits were claiming that the Merseysiders deserved to win the title due to an attacking nature of football, and spending less than rivals Chelsea and Man City. Now without being mistaken, playing attacking football has never been a prerequisite for winning a title, nor does it solely depend on the amount of funds a team is able to spend on their squad.

The characteristics attributed to Liverpool during that season are often bestowed upon Pochettino’s Tottenham side. That they ‘play football the right way‘ and have splashed out considerably lower amounts than their rivals. However, the idea that these features mean that a team deserve to win a title completely destroys the notion of football. The team that deserves to win a league title, are the team that  have been consistently the best throughout the season, regardless of playing style or expenditure. Some of the most successful and trophy-laden teams of all time have been built on a defensive core, a quality that some football fans may blast as anti-football. But those holding the winners’ medals at the end of the season will not mind.

In short, Tottenham (and Liverpool) would have won a Premier League title had they deserved to. The only reason that they have not by now, is that they have not been good enough over the entire course of a season. It is not a case of being unlucky.

Featured image credit: “Final North London Derby at White Hart L” (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) by Dave Anteh