Vinai Venkatesham has admitted Tottenham drew up a plan for relegation last season, saying it would have been “irresponsible” not to, and now he says the club’s target is to win the Premier League and the Champions League.
The Spurs chief executive was speaking on The Sports Agents podcast, and he was open about how close the club came to the Championship. Tottenham finished 17th for the second season running and only stayed up with a 1-0 win over Everton on the final day, a result that sent West Ham down instead.
Three managers came and went in that campaign. Thomas Frank was sacked in February, Igor Tudor had a short spell in charge, and Roberto De Zerbi arrived in March to drag the club to safety.
Did Tottenham plan for relegation?
Yes. Asked whether a plan had been put in place for going down, Venkatesham said: “Yeah, you have to. You can’t not. To not make that plan would have been irresponsible.”
He called it “a really, really challenging period for the club”, and picked out two things he took from it. The first was the fans: “I think our supporters were unbelievable. The last six or seven games, when they had faced probably the worst season they have ever faced, they got completely behind the team and the head coach and dragged us over the line. This is not normal.”
The second was what it did to the people inside the club: “Sometimes going through something as traumatic as we went through last season bonds people. It puts even more fire in everyone’s belly to make sure something like that never happens again.”
Venkatesham on Thomas Frank
Frank lasted just under eight months, with two league wins in 17 matches before he went. Venkatesham wouldn’t go into what was said when the Dane was let go, but he spoke warmly about him.
“It’s really tough, because you form a relationship with people. Obviously, Igor wasn’t the coach for long, but Thomas, we worked together really, really, really closely, went through some really difficult times,” he said. “I want to sort of, you know, respect the privacy of that conversation with Thomas. But what I can say is that he was the complete gentleman that you would think he would be.”
Frustrated, but not worried
Spurs spent almost £400million in the summer, and Venkatesham said Mateus Fernandes was “absolutely the number one target” for the midfield. “If I’m honest, we achieved more than we thought we might do, and that was really because so many of our number one targets we were able to land,” he said.
It still took time. Tottenham were winless and bottom after six games, and Venkatesham admitted that hurt: “It was frustrating. I wasn’t worried, but I was definitely frustrated. Did we think we were going to make this many changes and everything would gel straight away? Of course we didn’t. But did we think we’d be hovering around the position of the league that we were in the international break? Of course we didn’t either.”
Three straight wins over Coventry, Chelsea and Crystal Palace have since lifted De Zerbi’s side to ninth, which is why so many fans are asking whether Spurs are finally back.
Can Tottenham really win the Champions League?
That is where Venkatesham wants the bar set. “If you work for Tottenham, when we talk about being here to win, that means we’re here to win the Premier League. That’s what this football club wants to do. It wants to win the Premier League and it wants to be consistent in the Champions League and it wants to ultimately win the Champions League,” he said.
“Can I tell you what year that’s going to happen in? Obviously I can’t but that’s what we’re aiming for and that’s what I want every single person that works for this club to think about every single day. I want them to never settle and I want us to be completely relentless in that pursuit.”
Verdict: honest, but the ambition has to match the table
There is something refreshing about a chief executive admitting the club planned for the Championship. Plenty would have dodged that question. It also explains why the summer spending was so aggressive: Spurs had looked over the edge and didn’t like what they saw.
Talk of winning the Champions League will raise eyebrows from a club that finished 17th twice in a row, and De Zerbi himself said on Friday that his team are “not good enough yet” to look beyond the next game. That is the right tone. The next test is Leeds at Elland Road on Saturday, and the run after it, mapped out in our look at the fixtures before the north London derby, will say far more about Venkatesham’s ambition than any podcast.
