Igor Tudor lasted just 43 days as Tottenham manager, and has left them staring at a first relegation since the 1970s. Could this have gone any worse?
When Igor Tudor was appointed as Tottenham manager in mid-February, the club were already sliding towards the abyss, but there was more than enough time for him to ensure the unthinkable was avoided.
Spurs were 16th, eight Premier League games without a win, but still five points clear of the relegation zone. There were 12 games remaining in 2025-26 for Tudor to do what he had done at a handful of clubs in Italy and provide enough of a new-manager bounce to complete the job he was hired to do.
It was a curious appointment at the time given the complete absence of Premier League experience from his CV, but he had improved results everywhere he had gone, and any kind of improvement at Spurs would have seen them calmly drift to safety.
the shortest reigns in Premier League history
Premier LeagueThe Shortest Managerial Reigns in the Premier League
3 hours ago Matt FurnissNow, 43 days on, his time with Spurs is up. It isn’t the shortest managerial reign in Premier League history but it is surely the most disastrous. Three managers have lasted less time at a club than Tudor did in north London, but with just one point from five games and a catastrophic, embarrassing and deeply damaging first leg in exiting the Champions League, he leaves Spurs in a far more perilous position. Relegation is now a scarily real possibility. When he came in, the Opta supercomputer rated Spurs’ chances of relegation at 3.2%; on the day he left the club, those chances were up at 25.9%.
He becomes the first person to manage Tottenham for at least two games and fail to win a single match. A win rate for the much-maligned Christian Gross of 34.6% from the dark days of the mid-1990s dwarfs his 0%. Even Cristian Stellini won one of his four games in charge.
Spurs had the worst Premier League record over his five games in charge, with only Burnley and Leeds also failing to win a game in that time.
It isn’t all his fault. Spurs have deep problems, from the scarcely believable scale of their injury crisis to the shattered confidence of their players after Thomas Frank’s doomed reign.
But Tudor also made so many mistakes that his contribution to this awful situation cannot be ignored.
This mainly manifested in frankly bizarre selection choices, with players consistently played out of position. There was the decision to field Conor Gallagher on the right side of midfield and then drop him from the team entirely. There was the call to play Pedro Porro at right-sided centre-back. Archie Gray played at right wing-back and left-back before finally being able to play in his best position in central midfield.
Tudor insisted on playing three at the back to start with, and when he eventually gave up on that because it was so patently not going to work, he chose to play centre-backs Radu Dragusin or Kevin Danso at right-back. It’s fair to say with hindsight that none of his experiments worked.
There were many, many low points. The 4-1 defeat at home to Arsenal was to be expected given the gulf between the rivals, but was still hard to take for the fans, while the 2-1 loss at Fulham and 3-1 defeat to Crystal Palace came after truly dreadful displays and were both thoroughly deserved.
But the nadir for Tudor was surely the mauling at the hands of Atlético Madrid in the Champions League, when he chose to drop first-choice goalkeeper Guglielmo Vicario and give the error-prone Antonín Kinsky his first start in five months away from home against one of Spain’s biggest and best teams in the knockout phase of Europe’s biggest competition. It was a total disaster, with Kinsky at fault for two goals inside 15 minutes before Tudor saw the error of his ways and replaced him. It was a disaster almost entirely of the manager’s making, and he was roundly criticised for his treatment of the 21-year-old Kinsky, whom he chose to ignore after hauling him off.
He did manage to give some hope that he could turn things around with a draw at Anfield – only the second time Tottenham had avoided defeat away to Liverpool since 2017-18 – as his side put in a spirited display at the height of their injury crisis and fought back from a goal down to earn a draw. But as well as the potentially priceless point, after five defeats from five games in all competitions, he had instilled genuine belief that this could be the springboard to saving Spurs.
A few days later, Spurs earned a first win of the Tudor era, an ultimately meaningless 3-2 win over Atlético Madrid in the Champions League second leg. Xavi Simons starred, scoring twice, and a few important players made their comeback from injury, including Lucas Bergvall and Destiny Udogie. It really felt like there was reason to believe.
However, there were more confusing changes for the visit of relegation rivals Nottingham Forest on the weekend, and Spurs were brought crashing back down to earth.
Simons was dropped, and Micky Van de Ven was shifted to left-back for the first time this season. Nevertheless, Spurs played well enough in the first half to dominate. They had eight corners before the break and had more, and the better, of the chances. They were undone by an Igor Jesus header just before half-time, but they hadn’t played poorly.
And yet, Tudor panicked and replaced Van de Ven and Djed Spence with Bergvall and Udogie. That pair had played just 38 minutes of the midweek win over Atlético after spending months out with injury.
They were unsurprisingly off the pace. The substitutions made Spurs noticeably worse. They lost any momentum and in the end fell to a deserved 3-0 defeat, which saw Forest leapfrog them in the table with their first win in eight Premier League games.
The two parties have now made the call to part ways, seemingly aware that appointing Tudor in the first place was a huge mistake. Spurs also acknowledged with their announcement that the Croat is also dealing with the bereavement of his father. It is understandable that Tudor would find it difficult to focus on his job in the circumstances.
But regardless, Spurs also surely had to act after such a woeful spell under their now-departed interim manager. He was brought in to fight the fire and ended up just pouring petrol on it.
Tottenham now have seven games to rescue this season and maintain their ever-present status as a Premier League club. One can only hope they have learned from the many mistakes that were made on Tudor’s watch.
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Igor Tudor Leaves Spurs, and So Ends the Most Catastrophic Managerial Reign in Premier League History Opta Analyst.
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