Somehow, Tottenham Hotspur survived relegation from the Premier League on the final day of the season.
I’m going to let that sit for a second, because the full weight of it deserves acknowledgement. Three managers in a single campaign. A Europa League triumph just twelve months ago — the first major trophy in seventeen years — somehow failing to paper over the cracks of a squad in freefall. A season so chaotic, so deeply troubling, that serious commentators were writing earnestly about whether Tottenham Hotspur Football Club, one of English football’s historic institutions, might be spending next season in the Championship. The most humiliating relegation in a generation. A real and genuine possibility.
And then, on the final afternoon: a 1-0 win against Everton. Safe. Breathless, undignified, unconvincing in large parts — but safe.
I’ve been a Spurs supporter long enough to have made peace with suffering. But even by our standards, this was something else entirely. And yet, as I sat with my feelings yesterday evening, I found myself thinking less about the result and more about a single moment from a few weeks earlier. A moment I was fortunate enough to witness in person.
Roberto De Zerbi was appointed Tottenham manager late in the season with the club on the very precipice of disaster. I was at his first home game in charge — against Brighton, of all opponents; the club he had left to join us. The atmosphere in the ground before kick-off was heavy. You could feel the anxiety. Sixty-one thousand people who desperately wanted to believe but had been given very little reason to.
Then the stadium announcer took to the microphone.
He held a handwritten note. Not a prepared script. Not a corporate message from the club’s communications department. A handwritten note. He read it aloud — rallying, honest, direct. The kind of address that reminded you this was a football club, not a brand. People were leaning forward in their seats.
And then he went off-script.
“We’re Tottenham Hotspur,” he said.
A pause.
“For goodness sake.”
The place erupted.
Now, on the page, those four extra words might seem slight. Unremarkable, even. But in that moment, in that stadium, they landed like something far more significant. Because what they communicated — what that small, unplanned addition conveyed — was not just pride. It was exasperation. It was recognition. It was the collective articulation of something the crowd already knew but needed permission to say out loud: we are better than this, and we know it, and it is time to act like it.
That is not motivational-poster leadership. It is not a glossy vision statement or a carefully workshopped strategic narrative. It is a human being, in a moment of genuine pressure, telling the truth — and trusting that the truth will be enough to move people.
It was. The crowd responded. Something shifted in the stadium. We drew that game. But I watched a team beginning, for the first time in months, to believe in itself again. Six games later, we were safe.
I think about leadership a great deal. It’s unavoidable when you do the job I do — Executive Headteacher of three primary schools across four sites on the Isle of Man. Leadership is not the backdrop to the work. It is the work. And one of the things I’ve come to believe, through years of experience and no small amount of trial and error, is that the most powerful leadership moments are rarely the ones you plan.
They are the unscripted additions. The pause before the word. The honest admission dropped into the middle of a prepared speech. The moment when a leader stops performing leadership and simply leads.
The handwritten note mattered. But the “for goodness sake” was everything.
Because what it did — what the best leadership always does — was close the distance between the leader and the people they were leading. It said: I feel what you feel. I know what this is. I am not going to pretend otherwise. And now, together, we are going to do something about it.
That’s the moment belief becomes possible. Not certainty — belief. There is a difference. Certainty says: everything will be fine. Belief says: I don’t know exactly how we get there, but I know we are capable of getting there, and I know we will go together.
We are entering the final half term of the school year.
For those outside education, that sentence may not carry much weight. Allow me to translate. The final half term is reports season — detailed, personalised written accounts of every child’s progress, attitude, and development, produced by teachers who are simultaneously still teaching full timetables. It is leavers’ season — assemblies, performances, transition days, end-of-an-era moments for Year 6 children who are leaving primary school forever. It is new starters season — induction visits, parent meetings, the careful, patient work of welcoming children who have never been to school before into a building that will shape the next seven years of their lives. It is planning season — the professional conversations about next year’s classes, next year’s curriculum, next year’s priorities, happening while this year is still in full and demanding flow.
And underneath all of it — woven through every report paragraph, every transition day, every induction visit — are the children. Still learning. Still needing. Still deserving every ounce of energy and expertise and care that the adults around them can offer, all the way to the very last day of term.
This is the moment school leaders earn it.
Not the September launch. Not the INSET day in January. Not the strategy meeting in March. The final half term of the school year, when everyone is tired and the finish line is visible but not yet reached — this is when leadership matters most. When the “for goodness sake” needs to be said. When the leader’s job is to close the distance, to name the difficulty honestly, and to remind the people around them of something they already know: we are capable of this. We know what we’re doing. Let’s go.
I have three schools to lead into the final stretch. Laxey, Willaston, Scoill yn Jubilee — four sites, hundreds of children, extraordinary colleagues who give everything, every day. The half term ahead will be demanding. It will be full, and fast, and at times it will be hard.
But I’ve watched sixty-one thousand people remember who they were because someone told them the truth from a handwritten note.
I know what leadership can do.
We’re teachers.
For goodness sake.
Let’s go.
