“I left Newcastle to sign for Tottenham – I soon realised I had made a mistake,”

When Tottenham Hotspur signed Les Ferdinand for £6 million in 1997, it looked like a huge statement of intent. The transfer fee was a club record for the north London side at the time, and Ferdinand had already established himself as one of the Premier League’s real stars during his time at Newcastle United.

But the transfer was never the success many had expected. Ferdinand struggled to find his way back to the goal-scoring form of his Newcastle days during his years at White Hart Lane. In five seasons at Spurs, he scored 39 goals in 149 appearances – a far weaker record than both his time at Newcastle and his time at QPR, where he had delivered goals on a continuous basis.

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Injuries definitely played a role. Ferdinand never made 30 Premier League appearances in any of his five seasons at the club. But he himself has pointed out other conditions off the pitch that may have affected his performance.

Tottenham are struggling again this season, before Sunday’s away meeting at Anfield against reigning Premier League champions Liverpool they are one point above the relegation zone.

“It just wasn’t professional enough at Tottenham”

In today’s Premier League, the differences in infrastructure between clubs are rarely huge. But in the 1990s, when the league was still young, the clubs developed at very different paces. Newcastle, who were fighting at the top at the time, had invested heavily in facilities. Tottenham lagged behind.

Ferdinand explained in the podcast High Performance:

“When I went to Spurs, I thought: ‘Have I made a mistake?’. Because it was simply not professional enough. Nothing about it was professional enough. I had quite a few injuries at Spurs, but the training ground itself and everything they had achieved, it was not at the level I had expected from Tottenham Hotspur.

“We were sponsored by Pony at the time, and it was really quite fitting. Because I just felt that so much more could have been done. In my first five years I had four different managers and a change of board – that says everything about how troubled that club was.”

Read Ferdinand’s Premier League stats – season by season

“My career went downhill after I left Newcastle

Ferdinand’s reflections on the transfer are twofold. On the one hand, he is still a popular figure among Tottenham supporters – not least because he grew up as a Spurs fan and later returned in an administrative role after his playing career. From a purely sporting point of view, he is nevertheless honest that the transfer to his childhood club may not have been the wisest career choice.

“In retrospect, I wouldn’t have made that decision to leave Newcastle if I had known what was going to happen. As much as I wanted to play for Spurs and live out my childhood dream, it just went downhill from there – both career-wise and the feeling that I still had so much more to give.”

The decline in goal tally is undeniable, and Tottenham never finished higher than ninth during his years at the club. Whether the blame can be placed solely on the club’s unstable framework is still worth discussing. Ferdinand was 31 years old when he arrived in North London, and age and natural wear and tear probably also played a role. Already in his last season at Newcastle, he had scored nine fewer goals than the year before.

What could have happened if he had stayed at Newcastle, we will never know. Shortly after Ferdinand left the club, Alan Shearer suffered an ankle injury that could have made Ferdinand the clear first striker for much of the following season. At the same time, Newcastle drifted down the table and were never able to convert their talented squad into trophies.

Perhaps he didn’t really miss out on much – even though Newcastle later qualified for the Champions League in 2001/02.

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