When Cristian Romero leads Tottenham Hotspur in Udine on Wednesday evening, he will take them to an unexplored territory.
The Spurs have never played before in UEFA Super Cup, the glamorous opening evening of the season of European clubs. This is by definition an elite event, a table of High-Rollers invitation only. UEFA does not let anyone enter behind the velvet rope. You must look like you belong to it.
And when the emerging emerges of the Stadio Friuli tunnel, they can be briefly dazzled by the brilliance of money. They will see the Europa League trophy they won in May, their membership for this match. They will see the super cup trophy, the pot they organize at night. And the Champions League Trophy too, which Paris Saint-Germain brought with them. Tottenham will participate in this during this season, aimed at going to Budapest in almost 10 months to win it by themselves.
During each match that Tottenham plays in the Champions League this season – and there will be at least eight – they will have a badge on the good round of their shirt, which will be seen for the first time on their entirely white kit on Wednesday. UEFA calls it the “badge of the Europa League” and that will remind the world what Tottenham has achieved in Bilbao and why they play these games.
Spurs will fight PSG for UEFA Super Cup Wednesday evening (Tullio Puglia / Getty Images)
On Wednesday, Wednesday is in a sense of the loot of victory, the awards for having beaten Manchester United in this famous final. No one can challenge the idea that they deserve Being there. But in another sense, it is a test. Spurs are back among the elite here, facing the best team in the world. It will be a severe test of their references. And while deserving to be invited, there is one thing, membership At the upper table is another.
For an opportunity like this, you want to arrive at your best. But the problem for Spurs is that they will have to align a team about the level that fans would like this year. Their two best creative fields, James Maddison and Dejan Kulusevski, were both released. They did not sign n ° 10 to replace them. Their move to Morgan Gibbs-White stalled in July, and the supporters were frustrated by the failure to move to other targets.
While Mohammed Kudus and Joao Palhinha are both good additions, spurs clearly need more and the mood of the fans base has become negative. Combine this with the departure of the son Heung-Min and the Tottenham team who takes the ground will not seem exactly intimidating on the paper. Certainly compared to the teams of spurs in the recent past, who would enter the big European matches with Son and Harry Kane in advance. If Thomas Frank’s team has to obtain a result on Wednesday, they will have to be blunt, ingenious and imaginative. They can no longer count on individual qualities.
This makes you think about how Spurs will compete with teams like PSG this season. For years, this has been one of the big unanswered questions about Tottenham Hotspur: are they a really elite club? Is it their authentic level, in competition with the richest and the best teams in the world, for the largest trophies?
Some would say that they are now one of the giants of the world game. They certainly have strong reasons to be in parentheses. The stadium, which houses NFL and Beyonce. The training field, one of the best in Europe. The world’s fans base, with particularly popular spurs in the United States and Southeast Asia. The proud story, admiring some of the real greats of the game. The assortment of brilliant players and managers they have had in recent years. When the European Super League was briefly offered in April 2021, Tottenham had a seat at the table, not that the club likes to sing proudly on this subject now.
On the other side of the argument, you have heard everything before. People could indicate the relative shortage of major trophies, the 17 -year gap between the 2008 League Cup and the Europa 2025 League, the fact that their last League title took place in 1961.
Perhaps the biggest problem, the biggest question about the question of whether Tottenham settles at the top, concerns the last years of the Champions League. When the Spurs reached the Madrid final in 2019, it looked like one of the great moments in modern history of the club. Especially to come less than two months after the opening of the new stadium. He felt a short time as if Tottenham was now the center of the football world. You can see the 2020s travel in front of you, Spurs constantly welcoming the Champions League matches in their new house. Their elite status would be unambiguous.
The reality was different. Tottenham’s impact on the Champions League since the 2019 final in Madrid was at the best negligible. They had two campaigns after the 2019 final, not to mention the one starting next month. The two were completely forgettable. The twice, they drink in the last stage, against RB Leipzig in 2020 and Milan in 2023. There was almost nothing happy, neither memorable, nor even interesting. The sad truth about these last two campaigns in the Champions League is that the most memorable game lost 7-2 at home against Bayern Munich, in the dying days of the Mauricio Pocsettino era.
Spurs slowly took out the 2022-23 Champions League in Milan (Rob Newell / Getty Images)
And during these years, whether outside the Champions League, or by doing nothing, the Spurs began to lose part of this status they have built at the end of the last decade. They started again to look further from the level at which they always aspire. In the 2023-24 campaign, they did not play any European football. There is nothing for the bruises of the ego of any club like a midweks season spent at home watching European football on television. Even the Europa conference league is starting to be exotic and glamorous after a while.
One of the many good things about the Spurs that win the Europa League is that they don’t have to worry about the long slog of the conference league or the Europa League this year. They are back in the Champions League, for the first time since the last days of the Antonio Conte era. If the end of last season is something to pass, they can face carpins to find out if they deserve their place there, if winning the Europa League justifies its place.
This is why Wednesday’s match could be so important. It’s not just Tottenham need To bring this trophy back to northern London. Spurs have never even played for it before. And this club has already lasted 143 without ever hanging on to the Super Cup. Whatever happens to Udine, Burnley on Saturday afternoon will become the dominant question early.
What could be more important than the trophy itself is the ego boost that comes from victory. All questions about the question of whether Tottenham deserves to be here in the VIP section, deserves to be back in the Champions League, would be silenced in an instant. All they have to do is get out and beat the best team in the world.
This is a big demand for any side. Especially for a team of Spurs playing their first competition game under a new manager, which for all its many forces has little experience in the top of the European game. And for a team of Spurs who added only two players to the first 11 window, while selling a son and losing Maddison to a knee injury. This is probably now the side of the spurs with the slightest quality of a star during a generation.
The danger is that they present themselves in Udine short of quality, short of us, short of everything you expect from a team that knows what it takes at this level. They will just have to find a way to stay in the game, keep it tight, prove that they belong to this upper table after all. It could even be a larger price than a trophy at the end.
(Top Photo: Valerio Pennicino / UEFA via Getty Images)
