"IT IS THE history of Tottenham," once gloated Giorgio Chiellini of Juventus after his team knocked Tottenham Hotspur out of the Champions League, Europe's top football competition. London's "Spurs" have secured just two trophies in the past 30 years, both from the relatively minor League Cup. On April 25th Tottenham will have a shot at a third, when they face Manchester City in the League Cup final. Betting markets give them just a 25% chance. Are Tottenham truly cursed? They are far more successful than most clubs, who languish in lower divisions. To be seen as cursed, a team must be good enough to inspire realistic dreams of glory, but useless enough not to fulfil them. Many supporters who blame divine intervention simply overrated their teams in the first place. To estimate the odds that some Arsenal-loving god has it in for Tottenham, we ran a study. We defined "cursedness" as the gap between a team's trophy haul and how it should have fared, based on the calibre of its players. If someclubs regularly win less than their talent implies, another factor (be it mundane or supernatural) may be at work. But if results mostly mirror players' skill, teams seen as hapless underachiev-ers may in fact be talentless underdogs.
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