So... can Tottenham Hotspur win the Premier League title?
Don't laugh.
‘The adjective "Spursy", and its derived noun "Spursiness" denotes a certain fragility in the team that consistently fail to live up to expectations and crumble within sight of victory.’
I didn’t even write that, it’s from Tottenham Hotspur’s Wikipedia page - it’s the constant joke; the unwritten rule that no matter how good Spurs look and how great a team they assemble they will always fall short.
But could this time be different?
It’s the hope that kills and for Spurs fans it’s no different. But that hope has started to run out in recent years, especially after following up the prodigal son Mauricio Pochettino with the one-two punch of Jose Mourinho and Nuno Espirito Santo.
With Antonio Conte however, the small spark that remained seems to have been reignited. So do Spurs have a shot at England’s biggest prize or is it smoke without fire?
The Competition
As much as Chelsea fans might be offended that I discount them from the title race and some Arsenal fans would like to present Mikel Arteta as the second coming of Johan Cruyff (he’s not a bad manager by any stretch but expectations need to be tempered)1, it really is a two-horse race in the Premier League currently.
Liverpool and Manchester City are the teams to beat and while some may state that the additions of Erling Haaland and Darwin Nunez are just the two clubs levering their advantage further, outgoings like Raheem Sterling and Sadio Mane are sure to be felt this season at least.
It’s not going to be a walk in the park for any challenger however, City have not won four out of the last five Premier League titles through luck and Liverpool have kept pace with them throughout, bar one minor blip (which we will talk about momentarily).
But if I thought the gap was insurmountable it would be pointless to even continue the conversation and quite honestly I don’t think it is for any team; just Tottenham are best placed to try and do it.
In a video for Tifo Football a few weeks ago, Jon MacKenzie annoyingly beat me to the punch surrounding this topic (it’s a great video I’ll link it below, my own fault for not starting this newsletter sooner), and he spoke about the chasm between City and Liverpool, and then the rest of the chasing pack.
In the 2020/21 season, Manchester United somehow finished 2nd with Liverpool dropping to 3rd - the gap between Jurgen Klopp’s side and City, 17 points. Then in the 2021/22 season, they reduced this down to only a single point as they finished second behind Pep Guardiola’s side.
Tottenham finished fourth in the 2021/22 season, 22 points behind City, so a bigger gap, but what was important to consider is that under Nuno Espirito Santo, Spurs were averaging 1.5 points per game (across 10 fixtures), under Conte (without a pre-season) this already jumped to 2.0 points per game.
So let’s talk a little more about the ‘passionate’ Italian now at the helm….
The Manager
I feel like one of the only reasons this argument has moved past the realms of ‘Lads it’s Tottenham’ to a genuine conversation is because of Antonio Conte. The man is a minor miracle worker when it comes to creating teams that are better than the sum of their parts with a steely mentality to win at all costs.
Going back to the previous statement about point gaps, when Conte joined Chelsea, they had just come off the back of a horrific season where they had finished 10th with 50 points, under Mourinho and then Guus Hiddink.
Within a season they were winning the Premier League once again with 93 points, granted some of their players had severely underperformed the season prior (Eden Hazard especially) but a 43-point improvement and the second-highest points total in Premier League history (at the time) is still a remarkable achievement for any manager.
Players like N’golo Kante, Marcus Alonso, Michy Batshuayi and David Luiz were brought in but mainly Conte just improved the team he had and got them playing to their potential with a few creative fixes i.e. the infamous repurposing of Victor Moses as a right wing-back.
But of course, one example doesn’t make a rule and many of you may be thinking that I am about to turn to Inter Milan to back my point up, and while that team is a great display of how Conte can utilise talent while creating a solid unbeatable core, I want to go back a bit further.
Juventus’ nine-year Serie A dominance in the 2010s is well documented, but before their first win in 2011/12 they hadn’t won a (legitimate) first division title since 2003.
In 2010/11, Juventus finished 7th with 58 points, 24 points behind winners AC Milan. This was of course considered not good enough, so the Bianconeri sacked veteran Italian manager Luca Delneri and turned to former player Conte, who had just earned promotion with Serie B side Siena.
And not only did Conte deliver them the title in his first season, but he also did it unbeaten.
It wasn’t a team full of stars, for every Andrea Pirlo (who AC Milan had allowed to leave the club citing he was too old) there was a Simone Pepe but they did the jobs Conte asked of them.
Alessandro Matri, signed permanently after a half-season loan from Caligari, was their top scorer with 10 goals joint with midfielder Claudio Marchisio, which showed this wasn’t a free-scoring team. They scored 68 goals in total but only conceded 20 (the real staple of a Conte side).
Overall they won 23 games and drew 15, finishing on a more than respectable 84 points.
Juventus weren’t so much the unstoppable force, they were the immovable object and if anyone can override the ‘Spursy’ mentality that his current crop of players has, it’s Don Antonio. So let’s talk a little more about the players Conte has available to him…
The Dynamic Duo (+1)
Harry Kane and Heung Min-Son are the best-attacking duo in the Premier League, add Dejan Kulusevski (or maybe Richarlison) to this and you have the best starting forward line in the competition.
No one wants to admit that because it’s Spurs but it’s unfortunately true. Son won the Golden Boot last season alongside Mohammed Salah, but unlike the Egyptian, he did it without a single penalty goal and Kane had a slow start but still ended the campaign with 17 goals (both players also registered 9 assists).
Throw in Kulusevski, who registered 5 goals and 8 assists in 1267 minutes after joining in January and you’ve really got a stew going. (Danny Corcoran did a great piece on just how well the Swede performed which you can read here.)
A free-scoring attack was central to Conte’s push to win the title with Inter in 2020/21, as Romelu Lukaku and Lautaro Martinez scored 41 goals between them, and if he is to make a push in the Premier League this will be vital as well.
It is safe to say that an injury to either would be catastrophic, and with Kane that is incredibly likely, but that is probably why Spurs spent £60m on Richarlison to ease the burden (and also start a fight in the North London Derby).
But their output will only matter if the rest of the team is able to pull their weight, so let’s talk about…
The Supporting Cast
If Kane and Son are George Clooney and Brad Pitt in this scenario, then who makes up the rest of Ocean’s Eleven.
As of the time of writing, Spurs have signed the aforementioned Richarlison, Yves Bissouma, Ivan Perisic, Fraser Forster and confirmed a deal for Clement Lenglet on loan; Djed Spence is also expected to sign. They’re not the most exciting names, but with a unexpected £150m war chest from Daniel Levy, it shows that Conte is being backed in the transfer market and he is getting the players he wants.
Perisic is a shrewd pick-up. Though he is now 33 years old, he was part of Conte’s title-winning side at Inter Milan and last season under Simone Inzaghi he registered eight goals and seven assists in the Serie A playing as a wing-back.
Rodrigo Bentancur and Kulusevski will be embarking on their first full season in London and Conte will hope that Cristian Romero will be able to stay fit in 2022/23, having missed 20 games through injury last campaign.
Hugo Lloris retains the captaincy and signed a new contract with Tottenham last season, keeping an important senior player in the side as well.
Overall there are still gaps in the side but Conte has upgraded some positions while adding depth in others, so are we ready to make the final decision on whether Spurs could challenge next season?
But wait there’s a curveball…
If this was a normal season that is where my analysis would end, but this is not a normal season. There is still the World Cup-shaped elephant in the room to discuss.
Since the decision was taken to host the competition in Qatar and the average temperature in summer tops out at around 45 degrees (it’s not that much colder in January, I know, I’ve been but we’ll discuss that another time), we are going to have a Winter World Cup.
This means that the season will be split up like the final instalment in the movie adaptations of a popular young adult novel series; Premier League Part 1 and Part 2.
There are going to be a lot of games in a short amount of time which will put a physical toll on the players. Liverpool and City’s forward lines are getting off lightly in this regard.
Salah and Luis Diaz will be staying at home for Liverpool while Haaland and Riyad Mahrez will remain for City. For Spurs, they will likely lose Kane, Son and Richarlison for the World Cup with only Kulusevski remaining due to Sweden’s failure to qualify.
The break will also give players time to recover, this season we saw Salah have a stellar first half of 2021/22, but then an ineffective backend in terms of goal contributions; most likely due to burnout. In 2022/23, he will have over a month to recharge.
It seems pre-written in the narrative that the World Cup will have a massive knock-on effect that reverberates outside the confines of just the competition, so it’s not the case of will it happen, more who will it happen to.
So can Spurs win the Premier League?
It would be a cop-out to make you read this entire article and then throw out the classic cliche of ‘well anything can happen in football’, so I think I can give you a slightly better answer than that.
Johan Cruyff once said ‘Toeval is logisch’ (Coincidence is logical)2, which means although something may seem completely random, for example, Sunderland scoring off a beach-ball against Liverpool, it is not random that ‘something’ happened. You’ve got to account for the chance that variances happen and minimise their effect.
All Liverpool needed to do to secure the 2021/22 title was win one more game; a random moment of chaos might have not given them that this season, but it might do the next one and the same goes for Tottenham.
Unfortunately, the whole of football has been handed a massive uncontrollable variance right in the middle of the season. The result could be something as obvious as an unfortunate injury or something as subtle as a player playing one more game too many and tiring for an important match later in the season.
So the question really should be over the 38 games can Conte’s men put themselves in a position to take advantage if one of the runners in the three-horse race unexpectedly falls or stumbles.
And I think they can.
They have the manager, they have the marquee names and they are assembling a solid core with a decent but not exceptional level of depth. A little bit of luck here and a bit of practicality there and you can see the makings of a strong season.
And while everyone's money may be on Manchester City to win the title, as it probably should be, as I, unfortunately, have to say again ‘anything can happen in football’.
Manchester United are in a rebuild, I have no expectations of a title challenge this season, so I’ve not included them.
If you haven’t read it, The Numbers Game has a whole chapter dedicated around this concept