Tottenham Hotspur finished the Premier League season by routing former champions Leicester City and then Hull City on their home pitches by a combined score of 13-2, completing one of the most remarkable runner-up campaigns in the history of the league.
Dubious?
What if I told you a club would suffer significant injuries to seven of its starting XI from the previous season? That three of its back four—including the center half voted its player of the season in ’15-’16—would miss a combined 33 matches, its defending Golden Boot winner would miss two months’ worth of matches, and a starting winger coming off his best season would not play past October?
Then what if I told you this club went undefeated on its home pitch and qualified for Champions League by finishing second in the league, with a point total (86) that would’ve won the league in 9 previous seasons, including the inaugural one, when a season was still 42 matches long? While scoring the most goals and allowing the fewest for a goal difference of +60, the best of any Premier League runner-up and the fourth-best overall? And won 26 matches, as many as their North London rivals Arsenal have ever won in any Premier League season—including the “invincibles” season from 13 years ago their supporters look back to with increasing nostalgia?
Then consider this: In the richest league in the world, Spurs reportedly rank a distant 6th in wages (121.2 m pounds) at less than half the average of the richest (Manchester City, 225m) and poorest (Hull City, 25m) rosters this season. Antonio Conte, the manager of the newly crowned champions Chelsea, might have been speaking with tongue in cheek when he said, “I think this season it’s very important to understand that it’s not always about who spends more money who wins”—a statement that might remind us of the quip from fictitious woman-on-the-street Lacey Swain following the Red Sox World Series victory in 2004. A perennial big spender and an almost-perennial title contender since Roman Abramovich bought controlling interest of the club in 2003, Chelsea are firmly in the top three in both wages and net transfer spending, behind only the two super-rich Manchester City clubs, and were able to shell out big last summer for key starters Marcus Alonso, David Luiz, and former Leicester hero N’Golo Kante. (Without Kante, last season’s miracle winners fell to 12th in 2016-17.) Tottenham, on a budget and funding a new stadium to open in 2018, have been 19th in net spending among this season’s 20 clubs over the past five years. Yet Spurs were the only club to mount any challenge against the bully on the block and finished with more points than anyone not owned by a Russian oligarch. (Insert electoral college joke here.)
This is how you budget.
Tottenham lost to West Ham in a classic “trap” match on May 5 to effectively end its surprising title pursuit the Goliath. One Sky Sports commentator smugly termed it a “proper bottle job,” a sentiment happily echoed by trolls across the Twitterverse, seemingly dismissing the feat of the club having won its nine previous nine matches. If losing one in ten is “bottling” it (Spurs would stretch that to one in thirteen by season’s end), one wonders where the equivalent derision was when Manchester City allowed 4 goals each in road defeats to Everton and Leicester while failing to take any points from away matches with the other Top 4 clubs; or when Liverpool lost to relegation candidates Hull City and Burnley on the road or to Palace and Swansea at home.
Manchester United, picked by many to contend for the title in manager Jose Mourinho’s first season with the club, lost away to Chelsea, Tottenham, and Arsenal by a combined score of 8-1, plus a 3-1 loss to Watford. And Arsenal suffered seven defeats away from home, including a 3-0 collapse to Crystal Palace and a lifeless 2-0 loss in the North London Derby that saw Spurs defender Jan Vertonghen outshoot Alexis Sanchez. Surging Spurs surprised many by cutting Chelsea’s late-season lead from 10 points to 4 before tripping up. Oh, the crime of finishing second while challenging the historical hierarchy.
Credit where due: While City, Liverpool, and Arsenal ended up fighting for the last two Champions League spots, and Mourinho conceded the domestic league to focus on CL qualification through the Europa League, Chelsea played great football once they switched to a back three—which Tottenham’s Mauricio Pochettino had utilized at times last season with the versatile Eric Dier seamlessly shifting from midfield to center-back positions. In a copycat league, Arsenal also switched to a back three this spring to shore up their Swiss cheese defense. They made a late run at the top four but finished outside for the first time since 1996.
Spurs surrendered only 35 goals in 2015-16, tied for fewest with Manchester United, on the strength of the best center-half pairing in the league in the Belgian duo Vertonghen and Toby Alderweireled, fullbacks Danny Rose and Kyle Walker, and elite keeper Hugo Lloris. Spurs didn’t have the best luck with their summer acquisitions this season, save for one notable exception in defensive midfielder Victor Wanyama, a dominant presence who allowed Pochettino the freedom to use Dier in the back line of a 3-4-2-1. Tottenham hit a rough patch—dropping eight points over four successive draws—when Alderweireld missed eight matches in the fall, coinciding with an injury to striker Harry Kane; this stretch alone would prove the difference in Chelsea’s seven-point margin at the end of the season. Vertonghen missed time from an injury in January, then Rose went down just before the midpoint and would eventually require an operation, leaving Ben Davies to deputize. Even Walker, despite being named to the PFA XI, would lose his grip on a starting spot by season’s end to the emerging Kieran Trippier. Yet thanks in large part to a peerless midfield rotation from among Wanyama, Dier, and the unassailable Mousa Dembele, who can look like the club’s best player on his day, Tottenham surrendered just 26 goals this season.
Ironically, Spurs’ most impressive display of midfield dominance might have come in their 4-2 loss to Chelsea in the FA Cup Semifinals. Although Chelsea pulled away in a back-and-forth match with two late goals, Kante (who took home both PFA Player of the Season and FWA Football of the Year as a defensive mid) and company spent most of the match backed up in their own third of the pitch and had only 38% of the ball. When the Chelsea midfielder won PFA honors, one Twitter user commented, “Nice gesture from Dembele to let Kante out of his back pocket to collect award last night.”
The user might just as well have been citing the teams’ meeting at White Hart Lane in January, when a Dele Alli header in both halves won it for Spurs. Many supporters were surprised when Dele, who would finish with 18 goals and 7 assists, was not named among the PFA Player of the Season finalists; he instead settled for winning the Young Player of the Year for the second season in a row.
By many accounts, Tottenham played the most attractive football in the league, and Dele, who has scored the club’s goal of the season in successive years, brings the stardust to the attack as a midfielder who drops in behind striker.
That striker, Harry Kane, has grown into the best in Britain, now with two scoring titles and 75 league goals in the last three seasons. He might’ve even hit the 30-goal mark in just 30 league matches this season if not for the groundskeeper at St. Mary’s. Son Heung-Min took advantage of winger Erik Lamela’s absence from a hip injury and tallied 14 goals and 6 assists against Premier League competition.
With Kane, Dele, and Son, Spurs were the only English club to boast three players with 20+ goals in all league/cup matches. But it was midfielder Christian Eriksen, the architect of the attack, whom THFC supporters named their club’s player of the season. His impressive stats (8 goals, 15 assists) aside, Eriksen often covers the most ground of any player on the pitch. The Dane with the deft touch upped his game this season, fulfilling the potential he showed upon his debut with the club in 2013, and stitched everything together for Tottenham with a highlight reel’s worth of world-class passes.
It would be equally hard to pick the team’s performance of the season. They announced themselves in October with a 2-0 win over Manchester City; beat the leaders Chelsea by the same score in January; and then dented Arsenal’s top-four hopes with yet another 2-0 victory in April. The final North London Derby at White Hart Lane was almost anticlimactic in its one-sidedness, yet the triumph confirmed a shift in power as Spurs clinched a higher finish for the first time in 22 seasons. On the most emotional day of the season, Spurs beat the eventual Europa League champions in Manchester United 2-1 to nail down second in the table and close down The Lane in magical finale anointed by rainbow.
Or was it more illustrative of the team’s grit when they shook off a bad performance at The Etihad in January to score two late goals and escape with a draw? Or when they finished with a 3-goal barrage after the 87th minute at Swansea in early April to turn a devastating loss into a decisive win?
Or perhaps it was even the twin triumphs at the end of the season, after all had been settled, when Spurs spiked Leicester and Hull with a touchdown in each. The previous season, Tottenham seemed to lose interest after Leicester clinched the crown and Spurs subsequently dropped their final two matches to Southampton and Newcastle to land in a strangely disappointing third spot, their best Premiership finish to that point.
This season, Pochettino’s blue-and-white army finished like men among boys, providing an ascendant coda to the season—and perhaps a sign of things to come after having put together the club’s best top-flight campaign in 50 years.
Much like last season, high-scoring Spurs finished second to a club that played fewer matches due to not having qualified for either European cup competitions. While they played 53 matches to Leicester’s 42 last season, they again played 53 matches to Chelsea’s 46 in 2016-17. Last season, Chelsea finished 20 points behind Tottenham in 10th place. Leicester made a nice run in their debut Champions League campaign this season but looked more like a relegation candidate again in the league. Spurs, in contrast, have achieved a sense of consistency, winning the most points by far in the Premier League over the past two seasons under their magic-man manager.
Cynics and haters have tried to rain on the rainbow, shouting upward that Spurs have no trophies to show for any of this. Such a narrative seems distinctly out of place in European soccer, in which success is measured according to club and context—by winners’ trophy, Champions League, Europa League, finishing top-half, or even avoiding relegation. If trophies are the only marker of success for a supporter, after all, then most supporters are wasting their time the majority of seasons. Yet if style points truly do matter in this, the “beautiful game,” how can one not admire this remarkable runners-up season by Spurs?