Tottenham are battling relegation, but only the two Premier League title chasers have won more points away from home than them. Is that a good recipe for survival?
The 2025-26 season has been so miserable at Tottenham Hotspur that it is difficult to find any measure by which they rank high up in the Premier League. And of the few there are, most come alongside something negative.
Spurs rank second in the top flight this season for duels won (1,871), but they are also second for duels lost (1,930). Only Arsenal (17) have scored more goals from corner situations than them (16), but only a handful of teams have scored fewer than them in open play (27).
Another more noteworthy measure by which Spurs rank favourably, meanwhile, is for their away record. Just looking at results on the road this season, Tottenham have been the third best team in the entire Premier League.
Yes, really.
Relegation-threatened Spurs have earned more points away from home (26) than every other team in the top flight this season aside from Arsenal and Manchester City (32 each), the best two teams in the country.
It’s difficult, given how poor Tottenham have been almost all campaign, to comprehend that this might be true. How can the Champions League chasers, the perfectly solid mid-table sides, even the teams also fighting relegation who have so clearly been better than Spurs all year, all have worse records than this Tottenham team? Somehow, it really is the case.
It’s worth pointing a few things out here. Spurs are third in terms of points won, but they have played one away game more than many of the teams around them. On a points-per-game basis, they drop to sixth.
Also, seven teams are within one result of Spurs’ away-points total, so they could quite feasibly drop down this particular table by the end of the season.
However, Spurs’ points tally on the road is noteworthy regardless of what other teams have done this season. It is most significant in the context of their own terrible home form.
In 2025-26, Spurs have earned just 11 points on home soil. No team in the league has won fewer, and only relegated Burnley have as poor a record. Spurs are only off the bottom of the Premier League home table by dint of their goal difference of -10, which is just a single goal better than Burnley’s -11.
It has been a wretched campaign for Tottenham’s home fans. In a stadium where tickets are about as expensive as any other in the country, Spurs have provided only two home Premier League wins from 17 matches. One of those was their first game of the season (a 3-0 win over Burnley) and the other came in December (a 2-0 win over Brentford). They are currently on a nine-game run without a home Premier League win.
It means they have earned 70.3% of their points this season in away games. That is the highest proportion by any team in any season in Premier League history. The Tottenham team of 2025-26 are more reliant on away points than any other side the competition has ever seen.
Only six teams have ever earned more than 60% of their points in a Premier League season in away games, and Spurs are three games away from becoming the first team to break the 70% mark.
However, if they are to survive, they will probably need to even things out a little, the reasons for which are two-fold.
Firstly, two of their three remaining games are at home, and those two – against Leeds next Monday and Everton on the final day of the season – look kinder on paper than the 19 May trip to Stamford Bridge, where Spurs have won only once in any competition in the Premier League era.
Tottenham are likely to need to win at least one of their last three matches, and even without considering fixture difficulty, they have twice as many opportunities to earn home points as they do away ones. Survival may well require them to improve their home record.
Secondly, teams who win a large majority of their points away from home have historically been relegated. The four teams with the highest proportion of their points earned in away games in completed Premier League seasons have all gone down. Clearly, it isn’t a positive to rely quite so heavily on away results.
If they do stay up, fixing their home form will have to be a priority, because history suggests that winning a majority of your points in away games is not a sustainable model. Of the 10 teams with the highest proportion of points won away from home who were not relegated, only one improved their league position the following campaign. Two of them were relegated a year later, and five more saw their league position fall by at least four places.
One way or another, Tottenham’s home form must improve. They have won only one of their eight games against fellow bottom-half Premier League teams this season. Without making your home into something remotely resembling a fortress, it is always going to be difficult to retain your Premier League status for too long.
However, Spurs could yet become the first team to win a vast proportion of their points away from home and survive.
Their home record gives us little reason to expect them to beat Leeds or Everton. Leeds are unbeaten in their last six away Premier League games, winning at Old Trafford last time out, while Everton have taken only one point fewer on the road than Spurs, and they have played fewer games. Both of them could well prove tricky.
Chelsea, meanwhile, are on an awful run of form and have struggled particularly badly at home, failing to win any of their last six and losing the last four. Only the current bottom six have a worse home record in the Premier League this season than Chelsea. Plus, they host Spurs just a few days after facing Manchester City in the FA Cup final. Even the motivation of sending Spurs down might not be enough for the beleaguered Blues.
One win could be enough for Tottenham. In the Opta supercomputer’s 10,000 simulations of the rest of the season, West Ham ended up on an average of 39.2 points. Spurs are currently on 37 points, so there is a chance that they win at Chelsea, further boosting their away points total, and 40 points is all they need.
The turnaround under Roberto De Zerbi has been outstanding. Spurs have won back-to-back games for the first time since August, and the victory at Aston Villa on Sunday will give them renewed hope that they can add another win at Chelsea. They could survive despite only winning two home games all campaign.
Even if they do manage to win some more home points and make their record a little less lopsided, if Tottenham manage to stay up this season, their record on the road will be the reason they have done so.
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