When Tottenham Hotspur appointed Ange Postecoglou as their head coach 18 months ago, the dream was that he would bring back the sense of unity and togetherness the club had misplaced. That a fanbase which had been turned off by negative football on the pitch and negative energy from the dugout would be powerfully re-energised.
And there were certainly moments last season — and a few in this one — when it felt like that dream had come true.
On a good day, those where Postecoglou’s Spurs were at their intense, expansive best, the crowd and the players would feed off each other’s energy. Everything felt aligned again.
But now, halfway through the Australian’s second season, all that talk of unity and alignment sounds like wishful thinking from another age. Not just because Spurs are down in 11th place in the Premier League table, currently on course for their worst league season for a generation (14th in 2003-04). But because so much of the optimism, hope and positivity has drained out of the fanbase over the last few months.
Speak to any Tottenham supporter about the state of their club right now and the one word that keeps coming up is “apathy”.
The fans are tuning out. Saturday’s home league game against Newcastle United could be one of the flattest atmospheres of the season. Many have tried to sell their tickets for the match on the club’s official Ticket Exchange. On Thursday, 48 hours before kick-off, there were still broad swathes of purple on the club website’s stadium map, indicating available seats.
Spurs fans protest against chairman Daniel Levy ahead of last month’s game against Liverpool (Catherine Ivill/Getty Images)
Most of those will probably be taken up between now and the match starting tomorrow lunchtime. And it is worth remembering that Tottenham have another home game on Wednesday night — a Carabao Cup semi-final first leg against Liverpool. In the context of Spurs’ season, the Liverpool match is far bigger than the Newcastle one. And Tottenham fans who can only afford to attend one of the two games so soon after Christmas may understandably choose to forego Saturday’s Premier League offering.
Then there is the fact that Newcastle’s visit is a Category A fixture — a status it acquired at the start of last season when the men from St James’ Park were a Champions League side. This means that match tickets for Spurs vs Newcastle cost between £71 and £109. If you successfully sell your ticket on the exchange, you can in theory afford to take a whole family to the Liverpool cup tie, where adult tickets are £37 and juniors’ just £10.
Many Tottenham supporters talk about the atmosphere in the club’s new stadium, which opened in the spring of 2019, not being as good as they had hoped. Some fan groups have tried to work with the club to improve this. Spurs have been keen on this too, setting up the matchday atmosphere working group at the start of last season, trying to implement the fans’ ideas where possible, such as a singing section for the recent Europa League match against Roma.
But recently, some of that work has fallen apart.
Last month, Matty (he chose not to give his surname), the head of THFC Flags, which organises the tifo presentations at the ground, stepped aside from the role after years of tiring negotiations with Tottenham about planned displays. Two days after that, @SpursSongSheet wrote on X that it would stop working with the club, saying the two were “misaligned”. And a further two days later Return of the Shelf, a 1,600-strong group, said it had “unanimously voted to step away” from its relationship with Spurs.
But this is not just about especially-motivated fans’ groups. There is something bigger going on here, broader than specific issues with choreography, ticket prices and scheduling, as real as they are. And that is the sense that supporters are not just selling their match tickets, but are emotionally disengaging from this particular campaign.
Some reported feeling more apathetic rather than angry at Spurs’ past two home games: a 6-3 defeat by Liverpool just before Christmas that should have been even more lop-sided and Sunday’s 2-2 draw with Wolverhampton Wanderers where Spurs conceded an 87th-minute equaliser.
Under normal circumstances, you might expect fans to be furious about results like those, specifically with the players and the manager, but that is not the mood right now. Even though results over recent months, or even the past year (Tottenham have 37 points from their last 30 league games going back to March) are worse than those that got previous managers Jose Mourinho, Nuno Espirito Santo or Antonio Conte the sack.
A pro-Postecoglou banner at a game last season (Alex Pantling/Getty Images)
Spurs followers are not as unanimously pro-Postecoglou as they were last season — how could they be? — but there is still a broad range of opinion among the fanbase. And there are plenty out there who take the view that the struggles of the team this season are the fault not of the coach but of the board and of the recruitment (sending Postecoglou into the 2024-25 season with only three specialist centre-backs, without senior reinforcements in midfield and without enough reliable goalscorers are the main criticisms). The fact that Postecoglou has to defend club strategy in public twice a week, rather than any of Spurs’ leading executives, also makes people more sympathetic to his cause.
GO DEEPER
Tottenham Hotspur Transfer DealSheet: What to expect from the January window
Perhaps this is the biggest single shift in the fanbase this season.
Opposition to chairman Daniel Levy has always been a fringe view, but one that would at times go mainstream. Like at the end of the 2020-21 season, when Spurs tried to join the mooted European Super League. Or again at the end of the 2022-23 season, when Spurs sacked Conte, and then, four games later, his assistant turned replacement Cristian Stellini.
But the discord of spring 2023 was effectively solved by that summer’s appointment of Postecoglou. Or so it felt at the time.
Supporters at December’s Liverpool game making their feelings clear (Charlotte Wilson/Getty Images)
The hope inside the club was that the fans’ anger was specifically about the defensive style of play under Mourinho and then Conte. Change that, give them some “free-flowing, attacking and entertaining” football, and then Spursworld would be a happy place again. And maybe that felt true last season, as fans fell in love with what they were watching, and fierce opposition to the board became a fringe view again.
GO DEEPER
The player at each Premier League club who needs a move this transfer window
This feels different.
Nobody would doubt that Spurs’ football is “free-flowing, attacking and entertaining”; in fact, it is often now excessively so. But that alone has not pacified the fans, and it has not spared Levy from their criticism. In fact, the striking thing about right now is that the failures of the team are being pinned as much on Levy by the fans as on Postecoglou himself. That was never the case with Mourinho or Conte. And maybe that dynamic will grant Postecoglou more time to turn things around.
It is perhaps telling that his name has still been sung at matches in recent weeks, including in the second half of that Liverpool defeat.
But the most widely-heard chant on the terraces has been about this season’s star man, and the chairman: “I don’t care about Levy. He don’t care about me. All I care about… is (Dejan) Kulusevski.”
Spurs fans making it clear how they feel about Levy pic.twitter.com/6WiQMkkGi7
— Jay Harris (@jaydmharris) December 15, 2024
At least as far as matters on the pitch are concerned, this brief winter of discontent may soon pass and be replaced by sunnier times. If Cristian Romero, fellow centre-back Micky van de Ven and goalkeeper Guglielmo Vicario can all get fit after injuries then suddenly Tottenham, and even Postecoglou, look like a different proposition.
GO DEEPER
Tottenham Hotspur’s 2024: Dejan Kulusevski comes to the fore but inconsistency lingers
Whenever Spurs have been in choppy waters in the recent past, they have tended to find a way out. And maybe all of these questions about ‘atmosphere’ are fundamentally downstream from the simple fact of whether the team are winning matches or not.
But there is another possibility too, which is that they do not snap out of this, and do not turn results around. And that this bad form becomes a bad year. And what now just feels like a cold snap could be a long winter indeed.
(Top photo: Alex Pantling/Getty Images)
