Why Spurs Don't Win Trophies (Yet)

The socioeconomic class analogy for football 'success' on aristocratic terms.

Spurs going without a major trophy since 2008 is a source of banter and frustration, but few seem to understand how such a wealthy club could fail to win silverware for so long. In what follows I provide a methodical answer to this question.

The first thing to understand is that winning a major trophy is extremely difficult to do, i.e. extremely improbable. In a knock-out competition, so much is down to chance: what kind of draw you get, when the ties fall within your league (and other tournament) schedule, home or away, whether you have a fit squad or key injuries, and so on. Much of this is outside any club’s control, and in some cases you’re even punished for success, as when qualifying for European competition or going deep in one cup means you have schedule compression and tired or injured players for another.

Let’s put some figures to this claim. In the Premier League era (from 1992-93 onward), we’ve had 32 completed seasons. Just looking at Premier League titles, out of 32 seasons, just two clubs—Manchester United and Manchester City—account for 21 titles, or 66% of all possible titles. If you add Chelsea, that’s three clubs accounting for 26 of 32 titles, or 81%. Throw in Arsenal, and that’s four teams accounting for 29 of 32 titles, or 91%. In the Premier League era, just three other teams have won titles—Blackburn Rovers, Leicester City, and Liverpool—for a total of just 7 title winners over 32 years. If you take what I call the ‘legacy clubs’ on this list—teams with massive historical wealth and brand advantages, such as Manchester United, Arsenal, Liverpool, and more recently Chelsea and Manchester City—you’re left with 30 of 32 titles—94% of titles—going to just five clubs in the Premier League era.

Statista

What if we add to this Premier League titles breakdown the other major trophies up for grabs, such as domestic and European cups?

In the Premier League era, again among 32 total FA Cup titles up for grabs, the five ‘legacy’ clubs—Manchester United, Arsenal, Liverpool, Chelsea, and Manchester City—have won 28, or 88% of FA Cups. Those same five clubs also account for 23 of 32 EFL Cup titles, or 72%.

European cups—such as the UEFA Cup, UEFA Cup Winners’ Cup, Europa League, and Champions League titles—are of course harder to come by for English clubs. The only English clubs to claim any such titles in the Premier League era are, as you might have guessed, among the usual suspects: Arsenal and Chelsea have each won a Cup Winners’ Cup, while Manchester United and Liverpool have each won a UEFA trophy, and Chelsea have won two.

Where does this leave us? Well, if you add up the total number of domestic trophies up for grabs in the Premier League era—the league title, the FA Cup, and the EFL cup—you have 96 possible trophies since the 1992-93 season. Just five clubs—and by now you know the ones—account for 81 trophies. That’s 84% of all possible domestic league honors over three decades.

And things have only become more concentrated on the latter end of this timeframe. In the last 10 years, legacy clubs have won 9 of 10 league titles (among which two for Chelsea and 6 for Manchester City). Legacy clubs have also won 9 of the last 10 FA Cups and 10 of 10 EFL Cups. That’s 28 of 30 trophies over the past 10 years—93%—claimed by just five clubs.

How do they do it?

84% of three decades’ worth of honors—and 93% over the past 10 years—concentred among just five clubs in all of English football is a pretty strong signal of significant competitive advantage accrued over time. You might just think ‘Good for them!,’ i.e. that’s just how the meritocracy works. But I don’t think it’s quite so simple.

Recall the conditions under which teams compete in a knockout competition (arguably even harder to maintain for a whole season to claim a league title): the luck of the draw, the timing of ties versus league fixtures and other competitions, the fitness of players at any given time in the schedule, and so on. If you think about how much has to align for any given team to win a trophy—let alone for just five clubs to win 84% or 93% of them—there’s one obvious solution that a club can employ to maximize its chances of winning trophies. And before you say it, no, the answer is not bribe the refs or undertake a criminal conspiracy.

No, the answer is much more boring: consistently build a large or deep enough squad of players the manager can trust and who can be rotated across multiple competitions, whether for rest, for specialized tactical reasons, or to cover for injuries. That’s really all it is. If you can do that, you have a significant competitive advantage in trophy competitions, because you’re in a better position to respond to the vicissitudes of a long season, the many things that outside of the club’s control that have to align for a consistently good shot at silverware.

It’s easier said than done, of course. Because to build that kind of squad, you need three things in particular:

1. You need a lot of money to buy the right players, even when they sometimes cost upwards of £100m, and even when you accidentally bought the wrong players for that much money.

2. You need a competitive wage structure to attract players.

3. You need to lay credible claim to the possibility of wining honors, thus going deep into multiple competitions, so that your many high-quality players, not all of whom can fit on the pitch at once, can stay satisfied with their minutes and their contributions to the team.

Now it should become clear what I mean by ‘legacy wealth and brand advantage.’ If you have a longstanding club brand, such as Manchester United, Liverpool, or Arsenal, you have a level of built-in global revenue that few others can match. You also have a track record of winning trophies because of said historical advantages, which means you can lay credible claim to future honors, which means you have an edge in signing players even without guaranteeing them a spot in the first 11. Similarly, if you have less of a historical legacy, but a massive, generational injection of funding and infrastructural support—as with Chelsea since their previous owner or Manchester City under current ownership—you can build such legacy and brand advantages, which only compound over time.

To give a concrete example, Manchester United have won two trophies in the past two seasons, despite a general consensus that they’re not very good. This is a club that spent upwards of £100m on Jadon Sancho before exiling him, then £100m on Antony before deciding he isn’t the right man for the job, then ended up playing 20-year-old Alejandro Garnacho in place of both of them. That is, the level of spending, wages, and ability to attract players even to club that isn’t very good lately means they can afford multiple £100m mistakes in the same position and still buy enough depth to reach deep into cup competitions and come out with something.

The Situation with Spurs

Now compare this with Spurs, an illustrious club to be sure, but not one that’s ever enjoyed the kind of advantage that comes with early dominance like Manchester United, nor one that’s ever had the level of financial backing that Chelsea or Manchester City have in their more recent rises to periods of dominance. Likewise, it’s only relatively recent that Spurs have consistently crashed the party at the top of the league table or gone far in major European competition. We’re a rich club, but, as in any area of life, there are levels of ‘rich,’ and we’re not paying second, third, or fourth options £230,000 / week in our wage structure. Our legacy club competitors routinely bring in players signed for as much as or more than our club record transfer fee, set recently for Dom Solanke for £65m.

What this means is Spurs are not yet in the position to consistently challenge for honors. What many seem to misunderstand is that with any low-probability competition, such as a domestic cup, there’s no silver bullet you can fire right away to ‘win trophies.’ You don’t just sign Eze or Gyökeres and ‘win trophies.’ If you’re Spurs, the way you win trophies is by building up to the level that other clubs have reached—fairly or not—in their legacy eras. Even getting bought out by an oil state isn’t a guarantee of success these days, because FFP / PSR regulations make it at least a little bit challenging to turn things around right away (we’ll see what happens with Chelsea when all the spending is said and done, or how much wiggle room Newcastle can muster).

I don’t say this to beat up on Spurs. Because of the kinds of things the club have been doing to sure things up financially, and because the footballing side of the club has really gone up a level in the past 15 years or so, I think Spurs are closer to any other club outside the legacies to being able to compete consistently for honors. But it’s that closeness—that idea that Spurs have started to show up where the legacies think we don’t belong—that makes the competition so focused on trophy banter.

An Analogy

In a way, the situation with the Premier League—the stratification of wealth and of levels—is very similar to ordinary socioeconomic stratification. An analogy I like to use is socioeconomic: Manchester United, Arsenal, and Liverpool are aristocrats; they’ve been sitting on advantage for a relatively long time and that only feeds more advantage. If your great grandfather was a Duke, you may have access to some land that I can never buy, no matter how much money I make. Chelsea and City are like minor aristocracy who bought their peerages. And Spurs are like recently successful investment bankers with no important family lineage to speak of and no good references for country club membership. I’m being a little tongue in cheek, but in football it plays out roughly as it does in life. If you inherited millions, you stand a better chance at becoming a successful investor and entrepreneur than someone with less of a head start. If you didn’t inherit wealth, you can certainly build it, but that doesn’t mean you’ll be accepted among the aristocracy and granted access to all the resources aristocrats use to maintain competitive advantage over others.

So, when we complain about Spurs not winning a trophy for so long, we should put such complaints in context. There’s a group of Premier League clubs with significant advantage when it comes to collecting honors, and the Wigans and Leicester Cities of the world are minor exceptions that prove the rule. Spurs could roll the dice and get lucky too—certainly we’ve had plenty of opportunities in cup finals—but to be consistently challenging for honors, Spurs need to continue building a club infrastructure (not just in the literal sense) that makes possible the kind of squad building that top competition have been doing for a long time now.

So, the reason Spurs haven’t won a trophy in a while isn’t ‘spursiness’ or lack of desire. It’s because the trophy game is rigged in plain sight—as in stacked against all but five legacy clubs, for decades, because of the advantages that historical status confers upon them—and changing that for Spurs is a multi-year project yet, not simply a matter of splashing on a couple more expensive players or trying extra extra super hard to focus on this competition or that.