According to BBC Sport, Tottenham have launched a formal internal audit into their injury crisis – an audit led by performance director Dan Lewindon, who joined from the City Football Group earlier this year. The review comes after a 2025-26 season so comprehensively wrecked by fitness failures that the club required a final-day 1-0 win over Everton to avoid relegation. That is the sentence that should follow every announcement of a shiny new structural initiative this summer.
Scale of the damage
The numbers are grim and deserve to be stated plainly. Average squad availability last season was approximately 77%, with players absent for a combined total of more than 2,000 days. James Maddison, Wilson Odobert, and Xavi Simons all suffered long-term ACL injuries during the campaign. Dejan Kulusevski – whose long and miserable injury saga we’ve been tracking for over a year – missed the entire season after knee surgery carried over from 2024-25.
Four key players, serious knee injuries, three managers in under twelve months, and a near-relegation. The full weight of what this injury crisis cost us – in results, in squad depth, in players’ careers – is still being counted. The club has acknowledged, according to the BBC, that they sustained more ACL injuries than they should have. That is not a minor admission.
What the review actually needs to answer
Lewindon’s audit is reportedly examining pitch conditions at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium and the Enfield training centre, medical protocols, and the disruption caused by three managerial changes inside twelve months. Those are the right areas. Whether the findings will be acted on honestly is a different question entirely.
Because this is not the first review. After the injury-heavy first season under Ange Postecoglou, the club conducted a thorough examination of their medical methods, long-serving head of medicine Geoff Scott departed, and two senior appointments were made from Brighton and Wales respectively. Less than twelve months later, Postecoglou was reportedly requesting a second review after a fresh pile-up of soft-tissue injuries – many of which came from players breaking down on return. Two reviews. No meaningful improvement. Now a third.
Postecoglou said at the time that “a lot of the injuries are just the way we train and play.” That was an honest if self-incriminating observation. The question Lewindon’s audit needs to face directly is whether successive high-intensity coaches have been given squads – and training loads – that their bodies simply cannot sustain. Recruitment profiling, conditioning demands, return-to-play protocols pushed beyond medical advice: all of it needs to be on the table. The BBC also reports that Roberto de Zerbi‘s staff will be more formally integrated into rehabilitation decisions going forward, which suggests the coaching-medical disconnect has been identified as a real problem. Good. It should have been fixed two years ago.
There was also the footage of Simons being allowed to put weight on his injured knee during on-field treatment – a moment that crystallised supporter fury at the time. The club says it is confident no additional damage resulted. That may be true. It still looked like exactly the kind of chaotic, under-resourced response you’d expect from a medical department that has been firefighting for three years straight.
Is the infrastructure actually fit for purpose?
The proposed reforms – individualised player profiles, greater flexibility for external rehabilitation, a full-time head of psychology – are sensible on paper. They are also things a well-run club should have had in place before the crisis, not as the response to it. The target of 90% availability and fewer than 1,000 combined absence days is ambitious, and BBC Sport notes the club itself acknowledges it may be difficult to reach ahead of next season. Honest, at least.
The early-season availability numbers next autumn will be the only meaningful test of whether this review produced anything real. We’ve had the audits. We’ve had the appointments. We’ve had the statements of intent. What we need now is a fit squad and a club that has finally – finally – worked out how to keep one together.
