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Only two teams are yet to score after four matches of the new Premier League season.

Tottenham Hotspur and Coventry City have now gone 360 minutes, plus stoppage time, without finding the net.

As a newly promoted side, Coventry have their own problems to sort out. Spurs, though, have spent heavily in a bid to improve on the dreadful Premier League results of the last two seasons, and a scoreless start has not been made any easier by collecting just a couple of points from two 0-0 draws.

Roberto De Zerbi’s Spurs have entered the history books for the wrong reasons after failing to score in each of their opening four matches.

The 2026/27 season is the first time in Spurs’ history that they have begun a league campaign with four successive goalless matches, and the last time they had to wait until their fourth game to score was in 1974/75, when a goal against Manchester City came after blanks against the same opponents, along with Ipswich Town and Carlisle United.

Remarkably, that campaign was also the last time they failed to score in their opening match of a season until the very first Premier League season, 18 years later.

Spurs were also goalless in the first two matches of that 1992/93 campaign. Until now, that was the last occasion on which they had to wait until game three to get their first goal of a new season.

The 2026/27 season is the 13th in the Premier League era in which Spurs have failed to score within 90 minutes of the opening whistle, but that historical comparison feels far less important than the immediate concerns facing the team now.

Spurs do at least have those two points. Of the five Premier League teams still without a win, only Bournemouth have recorded more draws. De Zerbi will believe his side have a good chance of claiming their first victory on Saturday, when Aston Villa visit them at home.

After all, it is still early in the season.

The Spurs manager can also take encouragement from the prospect of having more of his sharpest attacking players available on a regular basis. Even at this early stage, only three players have started all four matches, with Jan Paul van Hecke and Sandro Tonali the only outfield players to do so.

Spurs and Coventry, among others, can take some comfort from the fact that time often helps in the modern Premier League.

With transfer deadline day arriving several weeks into the season, the situation is especially unhelpful for clubs making changes that go beyond the cosmetic during the summer. For some teams, not being fully ready at the beginning of the campaign is increasingly becoming part of the market calculation.

Spurs do not necessarily fit neatly into that bracket, but so much about the opening month of a season is temporary that there is a growing case for giving underperforming teams a bit of leeway. Whether such a historically poor start in front of goal means Spurs should be denied that patience is a question for the fans.