Researchers from the Austrian Academy of Sciences and University of Vienna last year discovered a way to reset a quantum particle to its prior state, effectively rewinding time for a single atom or electron. Now, another breakthrough in time travel has been made: there is a portal at the Tottenham Hotspur stadium which takes those who enter it back precisely two-and-a-half years.
Spurs have unveiled a new manager, Roberto De Zerbi. Having deployed a classic relegation “firefighter” in Igor Tudor – only to discover he was an accidental arsonist – they have pivoted 180 degrees to another front-footed, progressive coach, who is more in line with the club’s preferred identity.
One of the first things Thomas Frank said after taking over as Spurs boss at the start of this was: “One thing is 100 per cent sure, we will lose football matches.”
Hardly screams Audere est Facere, does it?
The contrast with De Zerbi is already clear; the Italian says he wants to win the Premier League with Tottenham and stay at the club for many years.
But the question is now being asked: will he get enough time to bed down his ideas?
Which is the same question asked about Ange Postecoglou when he first arrived at the club in July 2023. The difference is that the club is now in a far worse position; so bad that, if you actually could travel through time and went back then to tell someone, they wouldn’t believe you.
West Ham’s 4-0 win over Wolves on Saturday morning (AEST) has bumped Spurs down to 18th. For the first time in his Premier League career, De Zerbi is manager of a club in the relegation zone. They have not won a league fixture in 2026. He has seven matches to get them out.
When Spurs sacked Postecoglou at the end of last season, just days after he steered them to victory in the Europa League, the club declared that a “change of approach” was needed to “compete on multiple fronts”. Now they have changed back to essentially the same approach, and De Zerbi will try to build again what the club decided to tear down.
His football and “Angeball” are not the same, of course, but they are so close that De Zerbi referred to Postecoglou directly as an inspiration for his own aspirations with Spurs.
“I want to keep the ball,” De Zerbi said in his pre-match press conference, ahead of their clash with Sunderland on Sunday (11pm AEST).
“I want to see again the Tottenham I watched with Postecoglou because in my second season in Brighton, there was Postecoglou here with a lot of these players, and it was one of the best teams in terms of quality of play.”
Time continues to reveal what was obvious to many at the time: getting rid of Postecoglou was a spectacular miscalculation. The full impact could be severe.
It is still hard to imagine a club of Tottenham’s stature being relegated, but the breathtaking lack of defensive fight showed over the course of this season is a counterweight to the optimism brought by De Zerbi. He needs to get a tune out of a group of players who Frank and Tudor could not; this squad seems emotionally shattered, as well as physically demolished, and fans have accused some stars of having already checked out.
The cost of failure, for the club, is up to $500 million.
That number, in Australian dollars, is the rough total of the revenue hit Spurs would suffer if they dropped to the Championship for the first time since the foundation of the Premier League in 1992.
This season, the club received almost $250 million in broadcast rights from the Premier League and an additional $135 million for qualifying for the UEFA Champions League; in the second tier, they would instead receive no European money, and just over half of their domestic rights income, in the form of ‘parachute payments’ designed to soften the financial blow for relegated sides. And those payments decrease on a sliding scale over several years.
Match-day revenue would also go down; Spurs’ ticket prices are among the highest in Europe, but what they charge would have to drop those substantially in a world where the Charlton Athletic, Preston North End and possibly Lincoln City are visiting north London, and not teams like Arsenal, Manchester City and Liverpool. Kieran Maguire, a football finance expert, estimated in an analysis for the BBC that this income stream would go from about $250 million to $150 million.
And so too would sponsorship go south. It’s not known what clauses are in place between the club and its corporate backers, but they raked in $512 million in commercial income last season; even a 20 per cent reduction, which would be conservative, would amount to another $100 million cut.
One saving grace is that their brilliant stadium – which hosts NFL games, concerts and other events – generates tens of millions of dollars that are largely insulated from any on-field matters.
While their operating expenses would remain about the same, some outgoings would drop, albeit not enough to account for the damage – and only thanks to the guile of deposed former chairman Daniel Levy. He reportedly negotiated a 50 per cent relegation clause in almost all player contracts – which would have been happily accepted by players and agents who probably thought the idea of Spurs being in the Championship was so inconcievable that it was not worth pushing back.
Levy appears to have actually planned for this; what that says about Tottenham’s ambition under him, and how they arrived at this situation, is an interesting question.
But he’s gone, and now De Zerbi’s at the wheel. “Now we have to push altogether, all players and staff in the training and all fans inside the stadium, to achieve our goal,” he said.
“And then we will see.”
Good luck.
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