Tottenham are languishing in 16th place in the Premier League table.
One hundred days. That is the length of time that has elapsed since Tottenham last won a Premier League match. For context, that is longer than most continental European summer breaks. Longer than the entirety of someone’s holiday entitlement in most office jobs. And yet, here we are, with Spurs still waiting for three points.
One hundred days is 2,400 hours, 144,000 minutes, or approximately 8.64 million seconds of Spurs footballing misery. That is a lot of time to contemplate what exactly has gone wrong.
To put matters into perspective, when Spurs last won a league match, an average Premier League team would have gone on a winning streak, collected silverware, and probably qualified for Europe. Instead, Tottenham have managed to draw five and lose eight of thirteen league games since the new year began.
To dare is to think of winning?
These guys have to dare to win a game, for the love of god. Not a single other club has managed to match this level of sustained mediocrity and failure. Liverpool would have a game or two by now. Manchester City would have hoisted a trophy. Arsenal would have done…well, something other than this.
What makes this century-long drought particularly amusing is that it is not as though Spurs are a newly promoted side struggling to find their footing in the top flight. These are professionals. These are men who, in theory, possess the ability to kick a ball into a net with greater accuracy and precision than the average person. And yet, for one hundred days, they have collectively decided that keeping the ball out of this net and in that net is something they do not know anything of.
Roberto De Zerbi arrives at a club that has become the human embodiment of a perfectly executed joke with a punchline nobody asked for. One hundred days. One hundred days to ponder, to suffer, and to wonder what exactly would need to go catastrophically wrong to actually stop this madness.
The worry is not whether Spurs can turn it around. The worry is what happens when De Zerbi realises that you cannot turn around something that has apparently decided turning is no longer in the job description.