The less remembered Antonio Conte outburst that foreshadowed Tottenham's plight

Four years ago this week, Antonio Conte sat in a press room at Turf Moor and delivered a warning that Tottenham Hotspur chose to ignore. Burnley had just beaten Spurs 1-0, the club’s fourth defeat in five league matches, and the Italian’s patience was evaporating. “I’m ready to go,” he said, inviting chairman Daniel Levy to “make an assessment about me.” The soundbite was filed away as a momentary tantrum; in hindsight it was an early tremor of the structural collapse now threatening to drag the club into a relegation fight.

Conte would last another 13 months, his reign ending only after the infamous St Mary’s monologue in which he labelled his squad “selfish” and heartless. That March 2023 rant is remembered because it was spectacular television, yet the more instructive press conference had come a year earlier, on the eve of a home meeting with an Everton side managed by Frank Lampard and anchored to the bottom three.

Speaking on 12 March 2022, Conte forecast a bleak future for any Premier League club that presumed safety on reputation alone. “The level of this league is so high,” he said. “You have to pay great attention and it’s my forecast that in the future it will be worse… Teams that at this moment seem to be in the middle, they could slip. Everton is a good example. You look at the Everton squad, their players, and you can think it’s impossible that Everton is fighting relegation.”

He could have been reading Spurs’ eventual obituary. Within three seasons the north Londoners would finish 17th, surviving on goal difference, and this campaign they sit four points above the drop with 11 fixtures left, winless in the league since December. Harry Kane has gone, Son Heung-min has turned 32, and the wage structure that once underpinned a new stadium has become a competitive straitjacket. Aston Villa, Newcastle, Brighton, Bournemouth, Fulham and Brentford have all overtaken them.

Conte’s diagnosis was clinical: complacency at boardroom level, a squad built on “fragile foundations” and a league whose middle class was armed with ambition and petro-dollars. The day after his prophecy, Spurs thrashed Everton 5-0 and clambered back into the top-four race, allowing the hierarchy to dismiss the sermon as melodrama. The Italian, after all, had serial-winner pedigree; surely he would arrest drift simply by existing.

Instead, the drift accelerated. Kane forced his exit to Bayern Munich 16 months later, Son’s output dipped, and injuries exposed a threadbare roster. Interim head coach Igor Tudor now inherits a dressing-room low on confidence and a fixture list that offers little respite. West Ham, in 18th, have taken 11 points from their last six matches; Spurs have taken two.

Conte was hardly blameless—his tactical inflexibility and public spats accelerated discord—but he was not the root. The rot, supporters argue, can be traced to the summer of 2018, when Spurs became the first Premier League club to sign nobody in a transfer window, or to any number of pivot points where ambition was sacrificed for balance-sheet prudence. José Mourinho and Ange Postecoglou have since echoed Conte’s misgivings, Mourinho suggesting Levy prioritised profit over silverware, Postecoglou declaring Spurs “not a big club” until they compete financially.

The lesson is stark: Tottenham’s current predicament is not an aberration but the culmination of years of strategic myopia. Conte’s voice was merely the earliest to carry the warning from inside the building, a voice most chose to mute.