Tottenham Hotspur supporters are used to their club and its players getting overlooked by the mainstream despite being a Big Six club, and even though they are off to a hot start this season with the third-most points in the Premier League at the October international break, Spurs continue to be underrated by the masses.
At the start of the season, The Athletic rated Spurs new transfers highly, even ranking Joao Palhinha as the best overall transfer of the summer window, to the surprise of even Spurs supporters.
Fast forward a month later, and Tottenham have downgraded Palhinha from first to sixteenth, even though the Portuguese international has been playing even better football since then, including netting a last-gasp equalizer about a week ago against Wolves.
Palhinha is rated below Ladislav Krejci, Malick Thiaw, and Kiernan Dewsburry-Hall, among others. Now, there are a few great signings who do deserve to be rated above Palhinha, but it seems like there was an awful lot of bias towards more expensive transfers like Nick Woltemade and Gianluigi Donnarumma. When looking at the cost of the deal to acquire Palhinha on loan, you really have to say 16th is a terrible ranking, especially since The Athletic have no reason to be less high on them than when they ranked him first.
Joao Palhinha's snub is the worst offense
Their logic is highly flawed, too, as they state that Palhinha is downgraded in a "culture war" among Spurs fans. (What on earth does that even mean? Do they even know what a "culture war" is?) Their explanation is that Palhinha doesn't fit with Rodrigo Bentancur, but that's simply not the case. The problem in the Spurs midfield is that Bentancur shouldn't be starting, because the midfield works great when Palhinha is in their with Lucas Bergvall or even Archie Gray.
Palhinha wasn't the only snub, though. While a ranking of fourth seems great on paper for Mohammed Kudus, we are talking about the Premier League's leader in dribbles completed and assists. The fact that he's ranked behind Estevao Willian and Adrien Truffert is a snub. Those two players are amazing, and Willian is a better overall signing since he's been class as a teenager. But for the right here, right now, Kudus has been outperforming both and has been making a bigger impact for Tottenham than Estevao has thus far at Chelsea; this isn't a ranking based on future potential.
Because if it were, Xavi Simons would have no business being rated as low as 46th. Granted, he hasn't been as good as he can be, which The Athletic note as the crux of their low ranking, but rating him that low is blasphemous. Clearly, the people doing this ranking are looking at the box score and not the actual matches, because Simons has made a clear positive impact on Spurs; he's just often being played out of position. Simons is being ranked behind forwards who aren't even starting, which is wild.