Tottenham's Identity Crisis: Keep Van de Ven or Accept Drift?
Tottenham’s long drift from the Premier League’s sharp end has started to feel less like a blip and more like a new reality.
Back-to-back 17th-placed finishes have left the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium subdued, the late-season anxiety now an annual ritual in north London. Ange Postecoglou briefly changed the mood, delivering Europa League glory and ending a 17-year wait for major silverware, but that triumph only masked deeper structural problems. The league form never truly recovered, the slide continued, and the gap to the very top kept stretching.
Thomas Frank and Igor Tudor came and went without leaving a meaningful footprint on the pitch. Their tenures blurred into one long underachievement. It took Roberto De Zerbi, parachuted in from Brighton, to apply the brakes. He didn’t transform Spurs, but he steadied them just enough.
The final day laid bare the new order. Tottenham clung to survival by the thinnest of margins while, across north London, Arsenal lifted the Premier League trophy. One club celebrating staying up, the other parading the title. The contrast could hardly have been more brutal.
This summer now carries a different kind of tension. Not about survival, but about identity. Are Spurs rebuilding as a serious force, or bracing for another year of drift while their best players eye the exit?
Micky van de Ven sits at the heart of that question.
The Dutch centre-back, a rare bright spot in a bleak period, has already attracted heavyweight attention. Liverpool have been heavily linked. Yet for former Spurs full-back Alan Hutton, speaking to GOAL, the idea of cashing in on Van de Ven is unthinkable.
"That's one guy that I think they have to keep, in my opinion," Hutton said. For him, Van de Ven is not just a good defender; he is a cornerstone. "If they want to build and be stronger for next season, he's your captain in waiting because I think [Cristian] Romero will probably be off. So they need to keep these kind of guys to build around."
The logic is stark. Sell Van de Ven and Tottenham are not just losing a centre-half, they are tearing up the foundations of any serious rebuild. Replacing that profile – pace, power, composure – in this market would be expensive and uncertain. And Spurs have already spent too many windows patching holes rather than building a structure.
"If you did cash in on him and he goes to another Premier League team or whatever, you have to replace that guy and that's not going to be easy," Hutton warned. "So it's a difficult situation because these guys want to play at the highest level possible and it's going to probably take a number of windows, I feel, for Spurs to get back to that sort of level, but they have to keep the likes of Van de Ven if they want to do that."
The pull of the Champions League looms over all of it. Van de Ven has shown he belongs on that stage. Hutton is in no doubt about the defender’s ceiling.
Pressed on the Liverpool links, he did not hold back. "He'd be an outstanding signing. I really like him as a player. Strength, his running power, his speed, some of the goals that we've seen him score - I know it doesn't happen every week, but it's quite incredible.
"He's good with the ball, technically good. He literally ticks all the boxes. He should be playing with a Champions League team, in my opinion. So I think that's the number one priority, to try and keep hold of him."
That is the crux for Tottenham. They want to behave like an elite club, but elite clubs keep their best players and build around them. They do not repeatedly sell their most valuable assets to rivals and then wonder why the gap grows.
The debate runs deeper than one defender, though. It cuts into the club’s sense of status. For years, “Big Six” felt like a closed shop, and Spurs were in it. Stadium, revenues, European nights, star names – the badge carried weight.
Now? Hutton is blunt.
Asked whether Tottenham still deserve that “Big Six” tag, he said: "I don't think so, if I'm totally honest. I think you have to show that mentality of a squad that can go and compete regularly at the top end of the table and they've not done that. It's quite as simple as that."
The books might look healthy. The stadium is full. The business model, Hutton admits, is impressive. "Probably if you look at the finances and money that's coming into the club, you'd say the business side of it has been run really well, but unfortunately that's not gone onto the pitch for them and they've really struggled. So at this moment in time, I don't see them as a ‘Big Six’ team."
That is the uncomfortable truth facing Tottenham as another transfer window approaches. The club that once aimed to crash the title race now fights to prove it still belongs in the conversation at all.
Keep Van de Ven, resist the raids, and build a team around players of his calibre, and the climb back might just begin. Lose him to a rival chasing Champions League glory, and the question becomes unavoidable:
Are Spurs rebuilding a contender, or quietly accepting life on the outside looking in?
