It was 13 years ago that Tottenham were involved in one of their most thrilling climaxes to an English season in the modern era. Harry Redknapp’s freewheeling side — Luka Modric, Gareth Bale, Jermain Defoe and the rest — were trying to qualify for the Champions League for the first time in Spurs’ history.

Statement wins over Arsenal and Chelsea at White Hart Lane gave them hope, setting up a decisive away game against Manchester City, less than two years after they had been bought by Abu Dhabi. It was effectively a play-off for fourth place, with everything that entailed.

When Peter Crouch’s late header won the game and secured Champions League football, it felt at the time like a decisive moment. Even if almost every event since then has suggested that it was not.

Not many would describe the finish to this Tottenham season as a thrilling climax. But as Cristian Stellini’s side prepare for its final seven games, there is something familiar about their position. Again they are chasing a fourth-place finish and Champions League football. Again they have a huge away game coming up against their nearest rivals for that position. And again those opponents are in their first full season of being owned by an oil-rich Gulf state.

For Manchester City and Abu Dhabi in 2010, read Newcastle United and Saudi Arabia in 2023.

Of course, the situations are not precisely the same: that 2010 game was the penultimate one of the season and was genuinely decisive. Spurs will still have six matches left after Sunday’s trip to St James’ Park. Nor is this one a two-team contest: Brighton and Hove Albion, Liverpool and maybe even Aston Villa will have a say as well over the season’s final five weeks.

But again Tottenham find themselves competing with a team who, by virtue of having the mineral wealth of a nation behind them, can move faster than they can ever hope to. Suddenly, Spurs’ patient building and self-sustaining model look underpowered. This is not limited to them either: every club who do not have state funding behind them are threatened by those who do. And the damage that City did to all of their rivals just over a decade ago could be soon replayed by teams in different colours.

Everyone associated with Tottenham has happy memories of that night at the Etihad 13 years ago. This was back when Spurs would have a go in big games: Redknapp played 4-4-2, with Bale, Modric, Tom Huddlestone and Aaron Lennon as his midfield. It was brave at the time, and looks even less familiar now after four seasons of negative football under Jose Mourinho, Nuno Espirito Santo, Antonio Conte and now the latter’s former lieutenant Stellini. And Redknapp did it against a team that already had far more money than Spurs.

Even though this was less than two years on from the Abu Dhabi takeover, there were players in that City team far beyond what Tottenham could afford. They had Carlos Tevez, signed for a hugely complicated £47million transfer the previous summer. They had Emmanuel Adebayor and Kolo Toure, signed from Arsenal for a combined £41m. They had hand-picked Craig Bellamy and Gareth Barry from other top-half clubs. Roberto Mancini had been in charge less than five months but they were on their way to being a very serious team.

Up against all that, Spurs’ win was a triumph. Even in the less stratified world of 2010 it was still an achievement for that team to finish ahead of City, Liverpool, Villa and Everton.

And yet with the benefit of historical hindsight, that moment was the ultimate example of winning the battle but losing the war.

Yes, that night is a memory Spurs fans will cherish forever. And it led to many more memories in the next season’s European campaign, particularly those famous games against the two Milan clubs. But ultimately it did very little to buttress Tottenham against the great sky-blue wave that was coming from the east of Manchester.

Because ever since this moment, City have spent and improved and won, and spent and improved and won, again and again and again.

They have qualified for the Champions League every season since the one when Crouch denied them. They have finished above Spurs in 10 of the past 12 years, and it will soon be 11 out of 13. (Those two seasons under Mauricio Pochettino when Tottenham finished ahead of City feel very far away now, and look like an even bigger achievement today than they did at the time.)

And in that time span, City have won six Premier League titles (and are chasing a seventh), two FA Cups (and are chasing a third) and six League Cups. Tottenham have won nothing in those 13 years.

City’s successes have come at the expense of everyone else. That is how sport works: there are a finite number of trophies to go round. Whoever wins them, everyone else misses out. And yet of all the teams in the Premier League to have been impacted by City’s rise over recent years, Tottenham have paid as big a price as anyone else.

Just imagine for a second what would have happened if City had not been taken over by Abu Dhabi in 2008. And let’s assume for a minute that they had continued as a mid-table Premier League side. If City had not won any of their six titles, and they had been won by each season’s second-placed team instead, three would go to Manchester United and three to Liverpool.

But if City had not been in the Champions League places at all over the last 13 years, that would have allowed another team in each time.

Tottenham have qualified for the Champions League six times in all, first in 2010 and five more subsequently — four straight years under Pochettino and then last season under Conte. But in four additional seasons, they finished one place away from Champions League qualification: fifth under Redknapp in 2010-11, fourth the following season (when they lost their place because Chelsea won the Champions League having finished sixth), fifth in 2012-13 under Andre Villas-Boas and fifth in 2014-15 in Pochettino’s debut year.

Four seasons, then, where Spurs were one rung on the ladder away from Champions League football, with all the huge financial and prestige benefits that would have brought. (For a more recent example of the same phenomenon, Leicester City finished fifth in both 2019-20 and 2020-21, and might wonder what could have been if they’d been able to build on Brendan Rodgers’ progress in those seasons with two years of Champions League revenue.)

Of course, it is impossible to write a counterfactual history of modern English football without the Abu Dhabi takeover of City. You would have to remove too many contingent links to have any idea how things would shake out, which managers or players would end up where and who would win what. If Tottenham had kept qualifying for the Champions League under Redknapp and Villas-Boas in the first half of the 2010s, for example, who knows whether they would have turned to Pochettino in 2014 and enjoyed their best spell of the modern era under him.

But what we can say is that City’s Abu Dhabi era has been so successful that it has transformed the landscape of English football. And that of all the clubs who have seen the ground move beneath their feet, Tottenham have found that they have lost more than most. The memories gained from that one Wednesday night in May 2010 — and their subsequent victories over City, of which there have been many — have not been able to stem the tide of the latter’s dominance.

How could a club such as Tottenham — or any with a similar financial model — hope to compete with the resources of a state?

Spurs do have a very rich owner in Joe Lewis, but he does not behave like one. When Lewis’ company ENIC raised £150million for an equity injection into Tottenham last summer, it was the first such fundraise since 2004. City meanwhile have enjoyed hundreds of millions of investment from their owners in the past 15 years.

While Tottenham’s revenues are growing fast since the new stadium opened four years ago, they will still find it hard to catch up with City. The 2023 Deloitte Football Money League has City at the top of its revenue table with a 2022 revenue of €731million (£619.1m). Spurs, by the same ranking, are ninth, with 2022 revenues of €523m (£442.8m).

The key point is that while City paid £354million in wages for 2021-22, and routinely pay the most in the league, Spurs are way back at just over £200m per year, which puts them sixth. Many fans will argue that given their increased revenues, Tottenham should start growing their wage bill to bring them closer to Arsenal or maybe even Liverpool. But they simply could not click their fingers and start competing with City, Chelsea and Manchester United at the top.

There have been many fair criticisms of Levy’s decision-making over recent years, of the string of failed managerial appointments, the lack of any obvious football strategy at the club, and the sense of four wasted years since Spurs reached the 2018-19 Champions League final. But all criticisms of Levy should be placed in the context that he has improved Tottenham’s standing in the Premier League while being financially outgunned, first by Roman Abramovich’s Chelsea and then by City.

Which brings us to Newcastle.

They have improved with great speed since their Saudi takeover in October 2021. That much was clear in the second half of last season as January signings Bruno Guimaraes, Kieran Trippier and Dan Burn improved the team and helped them move clear of relegation. This season they spent big again on Sven Botman, Nick Pope, Alexander Isak and most recently Anthony Gordon.

Newcastle’s rise is clearly a challenge to every club they are seeking to overtake. They are currently fourth, three points ahead of Tottenham, having played a game less. Right now they look well set to be in the top four after their final game away to Chelsea on May 28, and even if they do not achieve Champions League qualification this season, they are not going to give up.

The challenge for the rest of the league is that if Newcastle do cement themselves in the Champions League, they will become a hugely attractive option for players to join. It will not take long before they are competing with the very biggest clubs for talent. If this is Newcastle’s version of City’s 2010 or 2011, it is not hard to envisage their 2012 being not too far around the corner.

And if Newcastle do force their way into a seat at the top table then there is naturally less space for everyone else. If City and Newcastle are to become Champions League regulars, that will only leave two places for Premier League clubs who do not have Gulf states behind them. And it is not a huge leap to imagine a Qatar-backed Manchester United consistently taking a third place.

Yes, we are just over a year away from a fifth Champions League spot likely coming to the Premier League. But the competition for them will be tougher than ever.

Levy will know this better than anyone. When he spoke to students at the Cambridge Union last month, he was asked about the threat of state ownership to clubs such as Spurs. He pointed to the new UEFA sustainability rules which limit spending on wages and transfer fees, linking them to clubs’ turnover. He said it will have “quite a big impact on the financing of football”, and the implication is that it may slow down spending by benefactor- and state-owned clubs.

Maybe Levy is right and Newcastle will not be able to spend their way to the top quite like City did. But right now it looks like they are threatening to leap past Spurs into the top four.

If Tottenham do win at St James’ Park this weekend, maybe that will revive their chances of playing Champions League football again next season. But the sad lesson of history is that, even if they beat Newcastle on the day and even if they do pip them and those other clubs to fourth, the inevitable logic of state spending will have its say in the end.

(Top photo: Adam Davy/PA Images via Getty Images)