Romero, Vicario or Van de Ven – which injured stars have Spurs missed the most this season?

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Ranked by PPG 

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Tottenham Hotspur will welcome AZ Alkmaar to North London for the second leg of their Europa League play-off with high hopes of overturning a 1-0 deficit in the first leg and progressing to the next round of the competition. But for manager Ange Postecoglou and his wary squad, the match also stands as their last opportunity of winning silverware this season. And that point wasn’t lost on the Spurs manager ahead of the game. 

“They’ve got the goal advantage but playing at home, if we can play with the intensity and tempo that we did in the weekend then I think we will have an opportunity to progress,” said the Tottenham boss in his pre-match press conference. And when he was asked about the need to win a trophy this season, Postecoglou rejected any notion that his team felt any added weight to this game. “No, no extra pressure,” added the Australian tactician. “We were obviously disappointed with our performance in the first leg. The important thing is we didn’t make the tie impossible for us to get back into, it’s still very tight.”

One major bonus for Tottenham ahead of the game will be the return of a number of key players from injury, including Ben Davies, Cristian Romero and Micky van de Ven. Three defensive stalwarts that have often made up three quarters of Postecoglou’s preferred back four. And when we take a look at Tottenham’s record without and without Van de Ven in particular, we can quickly see just how much they’ve missed the towering Dutch defender. 

Prior to Van de Ven’s long-term hamstring injury, Tottenham had won four and drawn one of their opening nine games of the season, which had the club sitting in seventh place. However, since then Tottenham have gone from bad to worse in the Premier League, falling as low as fifteenth in the table and now sit in thirteenth place. To no great surprise, Postecoglou’s side have performed far better with Van de Ven in the side, averaging 1.4 points per game when the Dutch defender has featured in a league game this season. In stark contrast, in the 18 league games that the 23-year-old defender has missed Tottenham have managed on average just 1.1 points per game. 

In fact, when we consider the points per league game average of every player in the Tottenham squad this season, we can see that only two players that have played at least 10 games in the Premier League this season have a higher average than Van de Ven. At the top of the list is the club’s first-choice goalkeeper Guglielmo Vicario, followed by full-back Djed Spence in third place. To his immense credit, young star and relatively new signing Archie Gray has clearly made an instant impression at the club, ranking fifth in the squad when it comes to points per game when he’s on the pitch. Romero, often considered Tottenham’s best central defender, ranks seventh in the squad with an average of 1.31. 

Naturally, these stats also point to the players that have had the least amount of luck in a Tottenham shirt this season. Whether it be James Maddison, Pape Matar Sarr, Dominic Solanke or Radu Drãguşin, a number of Postecoglou’s big-name players have either experienced first hand the club’s trials and tribulations this season and been incapable of stopping their tumble down the league table, or have been one of the main culprits of the club’s poor season to date. But, unfortunately, no player seems to be as cursed as Timo Werner, with Tottenham winning on average just 0.83 points per game when he’s on the pitch. Which is almost half the return of the club’s best players in this metric.