The last international break of the season is over. We’re finally on to the home stretch. And attention goes back to the most important battle in the Premier League right now (Arsenal fans might disagree). The relegation battle that Tottenham Hotspur inexplicably find themselves in. But what chance do they have of being relegated? Well the relegation battle has been simulated 10,000 times. Rather a large sample to accurately determine what’s going to happen. Obviously, it would take too long to simulate the relegation battle 10,000 times on Football Manager, so I used FusionSim (www.fusion-sim.com)…

It’s worth quickly explaining what FusionSim actually is, because otherwise these numbers just look like they’ve been plucked out of thin air. In simple terms, it’s a simulation platform that runs entire league tables thousands of times based on team strength, form and underlying data, then tracks how often each outcome happens. So when Spurs show a certain relegation chance, it means there are literally thousands of simulated seasons where they end up in the bottom three. It’s also transparent about that process, with every percentage tied to a full table outcome rather than a vague probability model. It obviously isn’t perfect, but over a sample size like 10,000 simulations, you’re getting a much more grounded picture than guesswork.

Across 10,000 simulations, Tottenham go down 2,800 times. 28% of the time. If you ran this exact end to the season over and over again, Spurs would be relegated a little more than once every four attempts.

The interesting bit isn’t just Spurs in isolation. There’s an interesting  picture around them as well.

* Palace are completely fine

* Leeds and Forest are more or less fine

* Wolves and Burnley are basically gone

And then right in the middle of that sits Tottenham.

They’re not cut adrift like the bottom two. But also not safely clear like the teams above. West Ham, according to this, are in a worse position. But Spurs are the ones who shouldn’t be anywhere near this conversation in the first place, which is why it feels so much bigger.

Slightly. Since he came in, Spurs’ relegation odds have improved by 0.5%. It does suggest things are moving in the right direction but it’s not exactly a huge turning point.  With this kind of modelling, numbers don’t swing wildly unless something genuinely shifts.

It’s easy to either overreact to that number or dismiss it. Reality is somewhere in the middle. Spurs stay up in most scenarios. About 72% of them. So survival is still the likelier outcome. But 28% is far too big to ignore.  The useful thing about something like this is that it strips away all the usual arguments. It doesn’t care about squad value, history, or how big a club Tottenham are supposed to be. If you want to mess around with it yourself, it’s all built on the simulation tools over at www.fusion-sim.com.

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