Every manager who has occupied the dugout at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in recent memory has cited the injury list as the decisive factor in their struggles.
When Ange Postecoglou presided over the worst league campaign in the club’s history — a 17th-place finish, 22 defeats, and a slide of 12 places from the previous season — he was not wrong to point to the treatment room.
The numbers were genuinely alarming. In 2024-25, Tottenham suffered twice as many injury setbacks as Liverpool, recording 41 separate injury cases across the campaign and finishing second only to Brighton in the Premier League’s injury table.
At one point in February of that season, every player in the squad except five had been forced to miss at least one competitive match.
Thomas Frank, his successor, walked into the same chaos, with key players such as James Maddison and Dejan Kulusevski missing large portions of the 2025-26 season.
Wilson Odobert sustained an ACL tear that ended his season entirely, while Rodrigo Bentancur required surgery after suffering a hamstring injury in January.
At some point, sympathy has to give way to scrutiny. The injury crisis at Spurs is not new. It is not a streak of catastrophic luck that two seasons of careful management have failed to reverse. It is a pattern, and patterns, by definition, have causes.
Bad luck visits every club. Bad luck that visits the same club, in the same form, under three different managers, across two consecutive seasons, is not bad luck at all. It is a management failure, and it deserves to be named as one.