Tottenham Hotspur is a very different club now.
For most of the 1990s, Holsten adorned Spurs shirts, becoming one of the Premier League’s most iconic sponsors. Before gambling and insurance companies began investing millions into the precious front-of-shirt real estate, Tottenham could consider it a good deal to earn around £600,000 ($800,000) per year from the German beer company. Nowadays, Tottenham generate hundreds of millions of pounds in commercial and television revenue, with one of the most lucrative front-of-shirt sponsorship deals in the country.
When Tottenham paid £6million for Les Ferdinand in 1997, breaking the club’s record transfer fee, they were signing an established international who had scored 41 league goals for Newcastle United over the two previous seasons. In 2024, Spurs paid 10 times that amount to sign Dominic Solanke from Bournemouth, who had not played for England since winning his first cap as a second-half substitute in 2017. Even their home is different, having moved into the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, built on the same site as White Hart Lane, in 2019, at a cost of around £1billion.
Money and global attention have almost changed Tottenham beyond recognition, but their status as a Premier League club has remained. However, with just one point and two places separating them from the relegation zone, Spurs face a genuine relegation battle. To secure safety, it may be helpful to rewind 30 years or so.
Tottenham’s players have often looked bereft of confidence in recent months (Justin Setterfield/Getty Images)
Having lost four of their past five matches, Spurs went to Oldham Athletic in their penultimate game of the 1993-94 season, knowing a win would be enough to secure their Premier League status for another term. Like this weekend’s meeting between Tottenham and Nottingham Forest, it was a true ‘relegation six-pointer’, with Oldham sitting in the drop zone and needing a result to boost their chances of survival.
“It was a horrific season for injuries, and we got to the last couple of games and needed some points,” says David Howells, a boyhood fan who developed in the academy before making 277 league appearances for Tottenham. He now co-owns Peek, an app that connects fans with athletes. “We went up to Oldham, it was a Thursday night game. We had to go there and win, really. If they’d have beaten us, we’d have been in dire straits, but we managed to get a win.”
Tottenham won 2-0 at Boundary Park, with goals from Vinny Samways and Howells. Before that game, Howells remembers club legend Steve Perryman, Ossie Ardiles’ assistant manager at the time, addressing the group about the long-lasting torment and humiliation of relegation.
“We were lucky back then, because we had Ossie’s management. We also had Steve Perryman as assistant manager. And Steve, obviously an icon of the club, was in the team that got relegated in 1977. He said the stigma and shame of that stayed with him forever, despite winning numerous trophies and being remembered as one of the club’s greatest captains. It was a stain on his career. So he shared that experience with us, and it was quite invaluable to have him there with us.”
Like Howells, Darren Anderton was part of two Tottenham teams that narrowly escaped relegation. For that second scrap, in the 1997-98 season, there was no such inspiration from Tottenham legends to motivate the players for the run-in. Gerry Francis, a popular figure at the club who guided them to upper mid-table finishes in his first three seasons in charge, resigned in November 1997 and was replaced by Swiss coach Christian Gross, who had no experience coaching outside his native country.
Christian Gross had no previous experience of English football (Ross Kinnaird/Getty Images)
After a 2-0 defeat against Chelsea on April 11, 1998, Tottenham were 17th, one point clear of Barnsley and Bolton Wanderers in the relegation zone. Buoyed by the returning Anderton, who spent much of that season sidelined, they went unbeaten in their final five matches, including a 1-1 draw at Barnsley.
For Tottenham to end the season similarly this term, Anderton believes the situation calls for players to drive the dressing room and take accountability.
“You can have as many managers as you want, but the players have to be accountable,” says Anderton, who spent 12 years at Tottenham, establishing himself as an England international and winning the League Cup in 1999. “You can play against a player, and he’s not anywhere near as good as you, but he will work his socks off to make things difficult for you, because he knows he has to do that.
“Some players think they are better than they are, and they are not willing to put in the work to reach that level. That’s awful. That’s poisonous. If you can’t change that mentality, then you’re in big trouble. You are not good players at the moment, and you’ve got to accept it, and you’ve got to work your socks off to get anything out of games.”
Evidenced by last season’s Europa League campaign, Howells believes Tottenham’s players have the capacity to turn up for the biggest games — as they did against Oldham in 1993-94 and in an important 6-2 win against Wimbledon in May 1998. In an interview with Gary Neville on The Overlap, Micky van de Ven suggested that he and centre-back partner Cristian Romero encouraged Ange Postecoglou to change his tactics for knockout games in the Europa League, and that the leaders should take charge again.
Jurgen Klinsmann scores his third against Wimbledon in 1998 (Tokm Hevezi/Getty Images)
“We would have meetings — just the lads,” says Howells. “We would sit down and ask, ‘What can we do as a group?’. Forget the coaching and the management side of it. They’ll be doing their best to find solutions and ways to earn points. ‘Are we doing everything we can?’. Maybe that’s something that they need to do as a group of players. Get together, and that’s all of them, even the ones who aren’t fit, and maybe should get together and have that sort of talk.
“They did get together last season, and it led to a marked difference in the attitude and performance in Europe. Eintracht Frankfurt away when they ground out a 2-0 win, the two games against Bodo/Glimt, the final… they didn’t play in their style. They dug in, defended, and ground it out. That came from the players, and that’s what needs to happen now. Big players have the mentality. They know when it’s their time to do it, and they invariably do it, and that’s why they’re big players.”
The fans will play an important role, too. Change for Tottenham, a supporters group, has campaigned against the owners and board and its members were set to stage another protest for this weekend’s match against Forest. Instead, those plans have been shelved to encourage a united front in the stands for the remainder of the season.
“It got to a point where the fans realised we’re not going to get anywhere having a go at the manager, the board and singling individual players out,” says Howells. “We all need to pull together. They’ve been very vocal now, and there have been some really awkward and hostile atmospheres at home in some of the defeats.
“It’s going to have to go the other way. The fans have realised the danger we’re in, and booing and singling people out for criticism won’t work. Everybody needs to get together now and get through the end of the season before letting it all back out into the open.”