After all the positivity of the early weeks of Tottenham Hotspur’s season, their penalty shootout exit from the Carabao Cup at Fulham gave a stark reminder of the work that still needs to be done. And it’s not just new signings that are required.
There are three days left of the transfer window, and yet there is still uncertainty — to varying degrees — surrounding Hugo Lloris, Japhet Tanganga, Eric Dier, Davinson Sanchez, Sergio Reguilon, Tanguy Ndombele, Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg and Harvey White.
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Of those players, Sanchez started at Craven Cottage on Tuesday but endured a difficult evening and then saw his penalty saved, Hojbjerg was also in the initial XI and didn’t do a great deal to impress, while Lloris, Tanganga, Reguilon, Ndombele, Dier and White didn’t even make the bench (indeed, none of those six have made a matchday squad yet this season).
The day had at least seen Tottenham come to an agreement over a season-long loan for Djed Spence to Leeds United, now of the Championship.
For the others though, the hours remaining until Friday night’s deadline will see Spurs pushing to find agreements as they attempt to make new head coach Ange Postecoglou’s squad more manageable (their difficulties in shifting players were explained by The Athletic last week).
This matters for several reasons.
Postecoglou said a few weeks ago that “we can’t just keep accumulating players,” and this is partly because they already have a squad that is too big. Players need to go out before they can come in, and Tuesday’s tie was a reminder that, despite their positive start this season, Tottenham still need to strengthen. Postecoglou made nine changes from the weekend’s Premier League win away to Bournemouth and watched a disappointingly disjointed performance.
“We need to trim the squad to get it to a more manageable state, and we’ll see what’s available for us to then bring in players to strengthen the squad in a couple of areas where we may need them,” was his summary after the game.
And the reality is that this first-hurdle Carabao Cup exit, coupled with no European football after last season’s eighth-place finish, means there will be even fewer opportunities for Spurs’ fringe players over the next few months. They are in a strange position of having a huge squad but very few minutes to go around.
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The Premier League is now the only first-team competition they’ll be competing in until January, when the FA Cup starts for top-flight sides, and its rules state that clubs can name a squad of up to 25 players after the transfer window closes on September 1, and that a squad cannot include more than 17 non-homegrown players.
The remaining players must be homegrown — defined as “a player who, irrespective of nationality or age, has been registered with any club affiliated to The Football Association or the Football Association of Wales for a period, continuous or not, of three entire seasons, or 36 months, before his 21st birthday (or the end of the season during which he turns 21).”
Spurs during their penalty shootout loss (Jacques Feeney/Offside via Getty Images)Spurs have 31 players in their first-team squad, not including Spence or the young goalkeepers Brandon Austin and Alfie Whiteman, but including this summer’s teenage signings Alejo Veliz and Ashley Phillips.
Veliz, 19, and Phillips, 18, do not eat into the 17 non-homegrown players as they can be included in a separate under-21 list. The same is true of 20-year-olds Pape Matar Sarr and Destiny Udogie, who both meet the criteria of having been born on or after January 1 2002. England Under-20 international Dane Scarlett can also be added to the under-21 list, and the striker’s impressive second-half performance at Craven Cottage was one of the few positives for Spurs on an otherwise miserable night. However, the 19-year-old, who spent last season on loan to Portsmouth of League One, could be loaned out again in the coming days.
But it is their excess senior players that Tottenham really need to move on, or they will have no option but to leave some unregistered for the Premier League squad, with no other possibilities for first-team minutes until the transfer window reopens on New Year’s Day.
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As it stands, Spurs have 20 non-homegrown players, which, if none are moved on, would mean leaving three of them out of their Premier League squad.
Lloris, if he stays, would surely be a leading contender for this indignity. As it stands, the 36-year-old has been unable to find a suitable club in Europe where he would be the No 1 goalkeeper, leaving him with the dilemma of choosing between two options that wouldn’t be ideal for him: being the backup at a European club or moving to the Saudi Arabian league (if the interest there from May is rekindled).
Dier, Reguilon and Ndombele would also be in the running to miss out on being registered, given they all count as non-homegrown (Dier, who along with Spurs is hopeful of a resolution to his situation before the window closes, spent his formative years in Portugal) and haven’t been in any of Postecoglou’s four matchday squads so far.
It would be a far from ideal situation having any of those players still at the club if they were excluded, but the former club captain and No 1 goalkeeper of 11 years Lloris, France’s World Cup-winning skipper five years ago and who played in that same showpiece game last December, hanging around the training ground not even eligible for selection would feel especially uncomfortable.
This raises the question of whether, as the days drag on, the club would consider taking the nuclear option and terminating the contracts of any of their unwanted players.
This is something they have done previously, with Serge Aurier in 2021 and Matt Doherty in January this year: Aurier had a season left on his contract, Doherty six months with Tottenham holding the option of an extra year. The latter had initially been slated for a loan move but Spurs had already reached their limit on those and so they mutually agreed to terminate his contract.
Tottenham are not alone in having done this in the last few years. Chelsea terminated Ross Barkley’s contract last year, while Real Madrid did the same thing this summer with Eden Hazard. Arsenal ripped up all of Mesut Ozil, Shkodran Mustafi and Sokratis’ contracts in the same window at the start of 2021 and then Sead Kolasinac’s a year later.
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But there are downsides to taking this option.
It’s a sizeable one-off payment in and of itself and has the potential to set a precedent whereby potentially interested clubs think they can risk holding off trying to buy players knowing there’s a chance they’ll have their contracts terminated anyway and soon be available for nothing. Likewise, players might not be in a rush to move on if they think there’s a chance they’ll be effectively paid off if they sit tight.
All of which is why terminating a contract is very much a last resort for any club. But that’s the dilemma Spurs would face with someone like Lloris if Friday’s deadline (and indeed the Saudi Pro League’s window closing six days later) comes and goes without a resolution.
That it might even be considered is a reminder of how hard Tottenham have found it to shift their unwanted players this window.
The performance at Fulham, meanwhile, was a reminder of their difficulties in building a squad with the necessary depth to compete on even two fronts.
(Top photo: John Walton/PA Images via Getty Images)
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