Paul Fennessy

IT’S NOT OFTEN that a standalone game is guaranteed to drastically alter the perception of a team’s season.

The two sides competing in this year’s Europa League final face the prospect of either abysmal failure or qualified success.

As Mick McCarthy might say, both teams would bite your hand off if you had offered them Champions League qualification at the start of the season.

But how one will achieve this feat has been unspectacular, to put it mildly.

Domestically, Man United and Tottenham have had one of their worst-ever performances.

In the Premier League, Spurs are 16th and on course for their weakest display since getting relegated in the 1975-76 campaign.

They have equalled their record for most Premier League defeats this season with 19, and (per The Athletic’s Jack Pitt-Brooke) one more defeat would see them emulate their nadir for a 38-game season, which stretches back to the 1912-13 campaign.

Man United are just a point above Tottenham in the Premier League table and have had a similarly disastrous time.

Some critics, including their manager Ruben Amorim, have suggested the current side are “maybe” the worst Man United team in history.

Should they fail to finish higher than their current position of 15th, it will be their poorest performance since their infamous relegation at the end of the 1973-74 season.

There are plenty of contrasts as well as similarities with these big English clubs’ predicaments.

Despite their lowly top-flight positions, reaching the Europa League final can hardly be considered an overachievement.

Man United were fourth in the latest Deloitte Football Money League while Tottenham were ninth, dwarfing the resources of Thursday night’s beaten semi-finalists, Athletic Bilbao and Bodo/Glimt.

Uefa Conference League finalists Chelsea were the only other side in the top 10 who weren’t competing in this season’s Champions League, while of the remaining top 20, only Newcastle, West Ham, Lyon and Marseille failed to make the cut for Europe’s premier club competition.

Both Europa League finalists have significant sections of their fanbases calling for the owners to step aside, albeit for slightly different reasons.

Spurs chairman Daniel Levy is not a popular figure at the club, and some fans were especially unimpressed when it emerged in the aforementioned Deloitte figures that the beleaguered team had the lowest wage-to-turnover percentage of all the clubs assessed at 42%. Aston Villa, by contrast, were at 96%. There is a widespread sense that, from a financial viewpoint, they are efficiently run, but on the pitch is a different matter.

On the other hand, United’s hierarchy have hardly been shy to spend lavishly on players.

Since the Alex Ferguson era ended, they have signed countless footballers with big reputations — Paul Pogba, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Cristiano Ronaldo (the second time around), and Angel Di Maria, to name a few.

But few have worked out, though there have been occasional smart acquisitions like Bruno Fernandes and Amad Diallo that have contributed to sporadic successes.

Since Ferguson’s departure, they have won two FA Cups, two League Cups and one (for now, at least) Europa League.

Spurs have claimed nothing of note during that same period. Their last major trophy was the League Cup in 2008, during Robbie Keane’s time at the club.

Yet the prevailing perception is that the North Londoners have, in a sense, had a more progressive last decade than United, having been in the wilderness for so long (their last league title win was in 1961).

They had turned themselves from Premier League also-rans to Champions League regulars, with the high point of the 21st century undoubtedly their appearance in the final of the latter competition in 2019.

Yet for the most part, they have been on a downward spiral since then.

There was regular tension between Levy and Mauricio Pochettino, their most successful manager of modern times.

The Argentine coach wanted to overhaul a squad coming to the end of its cycle following that memorable 2018-19 campaign.

But there is a feeling that the manager was never fully backed, and a mixture of poor signings and misguided faith in players past their best contributed to their subsequent decline.

The summer of 2019 was a watershed for the wrong reasons — they spent approximately €120 million alone on two signings, Tanguy Ndombele and Giovani Lo Celso, neither of whom worked out, as well as a further €61 million on Ryan Sessegnon and Steven Bergwijn, both of whom were peripheral players at best.

United’s many misguided purchases (Antony, Jadon Sancho, Donny van de Beek are among the more recent examples) have been well-documented.

But perhaps the most costly example was the decision to retain Erik ten Hag last summer and award him with a new contract, after a surprise FA Cup triumph that papered over the cracks exposed by an eighth-place league finish.

More damagingly, Ten Hag was allowed to spend over €200 million in transfers last summer before being dismissed in October as results failed to pick up.

While the North London club have not quite been as excessive in their transfer business, they could face a near-identical dilemma in the coming months.

Ange Postecoglou is under similar pressure with Spurs set for their worst-ever Premier League finish. 

The 59-year-old former Celtic coach has been widely tipped to follow in the footsteps of the three post-Pochettino failures — Jose Mourinho, Nuno Espírito Santo and Antonio Conte — and become Tottenham’s fifth managerial dismissal in six years.

But improbably, they are one game away from ending a 17-year wait for silverware.

The rational decision would be to learn from United’s mistake last year and part ways with Postecoglou regardless of the outcome, given that most of the evidence points to the Australian being ill-suited to the role.

But the Ten Hag situation last year served as a reminder that in football, emotion often trumps logic.

Another trophy win in his second season would substantially alter how Postecoglou is perceived — among the North Londoners’ supporters at least — and it is not inconceivable that it would also save his job. 

Given their far greater trophy haul both historically and in recent times, the Red Devils will perhaps be slight favourites to prevail.

That said, Spurs have emerged triumphant on the three previous occasions the teams have met this season, with an 8-3 aggregate score in their favour.