Tottenham Hotspur find themselves in a precarious position. The north Londoners are in the relegation places with eight games left. They are also still waiting for their first league win of the calendar year.
The prospect of Tottenham dropping out of the top flight for the first time since the 1970s is beginning to feel real.
The Unthinkable: Spurs in the Championship?
Two-time champions of England, members of the domestic game’s ‘Big Six’, reigning Europa League winners, with a £1.2billion stadium and having made it to this season’s Champions League last 16 — Spurs going down to the Championship would be an almighty shock.
But they would not be the first club to suffer a previously unthinkable relegation from across Europe and beyond.
Atletico Madrid’s Shock Demotion
Few, if any, clubs are actually too big to go down. Atletico, one of Spain’s biggest and most storied teams, realised that at the start of this century as they dropped out of La Liga.
Wracked by financial worries and a criminal investigation, Atletico tumbled out of the Spanish top flight after 65 years at the conclusion of the 1999-2000 season when they finished second-bottom of the 20-team table.
They started that season with ambition and a squad featuring international stars such as newly-signed Netherlands international striker Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink, prised away from Leeds United, Argentina’s Santiago Solari, and Spain midfielders Ruben Baraja and Juan Carlos Valeron.
However, in the December, Atletico’s president Jesus Gil and his board were suspended pending an investigation into the misuse of club funds, and the team’s form began to flounder.
Ranieri’s Departure and Atletico’s Agony
Future Premier League-winning manager Claudio Ranieri was in charge, but by March, with Atletico in 17th place, he resigned. His replacement Radomir Antic was unable to steer them clear of the bottom three.
“It was an extremely bizarre year,” says Atletico fan and DAZN commentator Fran Guillen. “It began as a very promising project and it fell apart little by little, in a very agonising way, buried by the many non-sporting problems.”
Just four years previously, Atletico had won a La Liga and Copa del Rey double. Their success even attracted the great Italian coach Arrigo Sacchi to take his only job outside his homeland in summer 1998 (though he lasted less than a year and left with them in the bottom half of the league).
It made their sudden fall from grace even more bewildering.
“It was a season so full of paradoxes,” says Guillen. “Atletico ended up being relegated despite having Hasselbaink in their squad, who finished the competition with 24 goals (only one player in La Liga scored more). Nobody could expect an outcome like that. But it is extremely unfair to analyse that season only through the football. It was a