This is the most competitive Premier League in years – and that’s very bad news for Spurs | OneFootball

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As Igor Tudor walked into the Tottenham Hotspur dressing room after that defeat to Arsenal, he carried the air of a man realising just how big this challenge is. His message to the players was much the same as the one he relayed to the media: it’s time to look in the mirror. Because right now, that squad is staring at something that had still seemed impossible for so long. They’re in a relegation battle. Spurs, one of the Super League founders and currently among the wealthiest clubs in the world, could go down.

Some Tottenham fans reading this will no doubt be screaming that they’ve been warning of this for months, that the club has long been in real danger of sleepwalking into relegation. In attempting to take a non-supporter view, though, it was hard not to think the squad simply had too much quality. The wage bill was too high, suggesting there was just enough individual class.

Except the reality is that the situation has now gone far beyond that. This is no longer about quality. As Tudor rightly intuited, this is about psychology, about emotion, about the swirl engulfing the club.

There is also another element, running parallel to Tottenham’s form, further squeezing the club.

There is now considerable evidence to suggest this is the most competitive Premier League in a decade, since Leicester City’s title season of 2015–16. And we’re beyond simply a more difficult league, as discussed in Inside Football recently. There’s more to it – something the Premier League should actually be delighted about. Its unique selling point is back, and has never been more evident.

And that could yet create more havoc.

Taking the most immediate metric – and one that Spurs inadvertently contributed to – the 36 points between first place and the relegation zone is the lowest at this stage, after matchweek 27, since 2015–16. Back then, it was 32. Now, it would be 35, had Arsenal’s away match against Wolves not been brought forward due to the Carabao Cup final.

The nature of that 2-2 draw was rightly seen as a mini-crisis for Arsenal, to the point that Mikel Arteta spent a long time discussing it even after the 4-1 win over Spurs. But it can also be true that a draw away to the bottom team isn’t necessarily the defining result in the way it would have been in previous seasons.

Wolves are, after all, the 29th wealthiest club in the world. They might have only won one game so far this season, but they haven’t lost badly. Their worst defeat was 4-0 on the opening day, against Manchester City, before the managerial switch that stabilised the side. As referenced earlier in this newsletter, and in a stat that has conspicuously barely changed, that game is one of only six Premier League matches this season to involve defeats of a four-goal margin or higher.

This is astonishingly low for this late in the campaign, with 11 matchweeks left. By comparison, even “the Leicester season” saw 20 such results, and the number was as high as 32 in 2023–24.

This shows the gaps between teams aren’t as wide but it has another effect too. The top teams – especially those chasing the title – can’t take their foot off the gas. They can’t simply make four substitutions to rest players when cruising. They have to stay fully switched on, as witnessed in Arsenal’s draw with Wolves and in so many of Man City’s recent matches.

That only deepens the physical and mental fatigue caused by a congested calendar. And it’s impossible not to see how this contributes to another telling statistic. City’s nervy win over Newcastle United was their third in a row, which put Pep Guardiola’s side on the longest winning streak in the Premier League. Only Liverpool are currently even on two wins in a row.

The low stakes of these streaks have been a feature of the season. Stumbling Aston Villa – whose late equaliser against Leeds United might still prove crucial in the race to secure a Champions League place – have the longest streak at just eight. After that, it’s City on six, and Arsenal and Liverpool on five each.

This only proves how difficult it is to generate momentum. Teams can’t put winning runs together in the same way as previous years. There’s a high degree of fallibility, which makes for greater unpredictability – anyone can beat anyone.

The reasons for this are fairly clear, and almost mirror what happened after 2015–16. Then, much of the focus was on how wealthy clubs responded by appointing the biggest managers in the game, when Pep Guardiola and Antonio Conte joined Jose Mourinho, Jurgen Klopp, and Mauricio Pochettino. But they were also doing something more significant.

They were involved in discussions that drove even more Champions League prize money to the wealthiest clubs, as the “Super League” group exploited the vacuum at Uefa and Fifa following the 2015 fall of Sepp Blatter. This directly paved the way for the Super League and influenced the new Champions League. The wealthy clubs got what they long wanted – but it might be too much.

They may genuinely have bitten off more than they can chew – at least for now. The expanded Champions League has become an unintended balancing factor in European football. The greater number of games mitigates the effect of wealth, due to fatigue.

In the Premier League, there’s been a further counterbalance from the massive influx of money over the past 13 years. Even clubs at the bottom have sophisticated coaching staffs and squads that could steamroll most of Europe. Wolves are difficult to break down. West Ham United have gained new respectability. Nottingham Forest have a solid mid-table squad.

There’s even an argument that Burnley are performing better than Spurs. All of which is bad news for the one-time Super League club, even if they were always considered a junior partner.

The sheer competitiveness of the Premier League could see them fall, sleepwalking into relegation as Middlesbrough did in 1997, West Ham in 2003, Newcastle in 2009, or Leicester in 2023 – but potentially on a much greater scale. The second half of that Arsenal defeat was alarming in that regard.

Sunday’s trip to Fulham may now be the biggest fixture of the weekend, revealing what Tottenham can actually achieve under Tudor.

The message from the rest of the league, however, is clear: you’ve never had to be sharper.

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