Filed under: coincidence
The league does not want us to win
I don't say this lightly, and I definitely don't say it for attention. I say it because I have eyes, a fixture list, and a growing sense that something is being done to us on purpose.
Start with the fixtures. Every club gets a hard run at some point in the season, fine. But look at how ours land. The tricky away days always seem to arrive right after the short weeks. The kind ones always seem to arrive for everyone else. You can call that scheduling. I call it a pattern, and patterns don't happen by accident in a league this well organised.
Then there's the officiating, which I genuinely think is the bigger issue here. It's not that every decision goes against us. It's that the ones which matter always seem to. The soft one they don't give. The stonewall one they somehow miss. Other clubs get the odd bad one, I am told. We get ours at the exact moments they cost the most, and that's the part nobody wants to talk about.
People will say we're just having a rough start to the season during a huge summer rebuild, and sure, Roberto De Zerbi has a lot of work to do and a new-look squad still learning to play for him. That part is real. It is also the most convenient cover story this league has been handed in years, and they are using every inch of it to hide the other part, the part where the league quietly makes sure the club doing things the hard way doesn't get too far ahead of itself.
Think about it logically for a second. We don't overspend. We don't get quietly bailed out. We don't have numbers in the accounts that nobody can explain. We just try to win the normal way, on the pitch, and somehow that's the club getting the tight calls and the brutal run of fixtures. Funny how that works out.
Update, 28 September 2026: Manchester City have since been reportedly found guilty on almost all of the Premier League's charges, and I went back through the seasons they cover. It reads exactly the way you would expect.
I know exactly how this is supposed to sound, because they have spent decades training you to hear it that way. A Spurs fan complaining about the officials: cue the laugh track. That laugh is not an accident either. It is the best defence the whole system has, because it means nobody ever has to answer the question. Being a broken record does not make you wrong. It makes you the only one still keeping count, while every year the same things keep happening to the same club in the same moments, and the politicians who keep promising to clean up football never once find the time to ask why.
So no, I don't think it's bad luck. I think it's a system, and I think we're the one team in it still trying to win with our conscience intact. Keep the faith. They can slow us down. They can't stop what's coming.