Tottenham's nosedive towards the relegation zone has forced their fans to think the unthinkable.
Relative to financial security, sporting expectations and basically any other metric you could care to mention, this Tottenham season has more than a fair shout at being the worst by any team in English football history.
Spurs supporters have been ringing the alarm bells for months, but their distress signals had often fallen on deaf ears. With the business end of the season having arrived, rivals have now woken up to the club's plight, but, to continue to borrow Thomas Frank and Igor Tudor's analogy, many of them have only come to revel in watching the ship sink.
Did the club's downward trend start with the lack of spending that accompanied the stadium move? Mauricio Pochettino's sacking five months after the Champions League final defeat in 2019?
Or was it more recent? The series of ill-advised managerial appointments that started with José Mourinho and left them with Igor Tudor's 44-day reign? The behind-the-scenes upheaval highlighted by the Lewis family's ousting of Daniel Levy at the start of this season? The fact that most of their players are always injured? There's certainly plenty of blame to share around.
The most important thing now, however, is not to work out how all this misery started -- it's how it will end.
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Why Tottenham will get relegated
Plenty of seasoned international footballers will be playing in the Championship next season, should Tottenham's relegation from the top-flight be confirmed. Justin Setterfield/Getty Images What had once seemed like another lost season in the annals of Spurs' recent history, has turned into the worst in living memory.
It's reached the point where it's tough to envisage where Spurs might get the points that will save their season. More than a quarter of the campaign has passed since the north London club last won a league game.
Relegation rivals West Ham have earned 14 points from their last 10 games and Nottingham Forest have 14 from their last 11. Spurs have taken one point from the last 21 available.
The scale of Spurs' disarray is so large that it's almost hard to get your head around -- cold, hard facts are the easiest method by which to survey the damage:
Tottenham have taken just 34 points from their last 40 Premier League games, and 13 from their last 22 They have failed to win 13 successive league games for the first time since 1935 With just two home wins in the Premier League, only relegated Championship side Sheffield Wednesday have a worse home record than Spurs in the English football league this season Spurs have still not won a game in 2026 -- they will not play again until mid-April Only three teams have had longer runs without a win from the start of a calendar year, all of whom were relegated: 2007-08 Derby (18), 2002-03 Sunderland (17), 2016-17 Middlesbrough (14) Combine those numbers with the overriding sense of a team being dragged towards the relegation zone by some kind of unwavering force and all the ingredients are there for this team to go down.