What happened the last time Spurs were relegated and are there lessons to learn?

It was a big shock when Keith Burkinshaw’s talented side went down in 1977 – but will the current team avoid the same fate?

Glenn Hoddle was in tears in the dressing room. Others sat in disbelief, wondering what the future held.

Tottenham were the first English club in the 20th century to win the league and FA Cup Double, in 1961, and the first to lift a European trophy when they won the Cup Winners’ Cup two years later. They were renowned for playing attractive football and the goals of Jimmy Greaves.

Under their manager Bill Nicholson, they added two League Cups and the Uefa Cup at the start of the 1970s. And now they had been relegated.

Confirmation arrived on 7 May 1977 via a 5-0 thrashing at Maine Road by Manchester City, who were challenging for the First Division title. Peter Taylor was in the dressing room that day and remembers the “shock” and a “rubbish feeling”.

Hoddle, a promising teenager just breaking through, wrote in his autobiography of being “overcome by guilt after failing to save my boyhood club from relegation and letting the fans down. It was a dreadful feeling, scarring me inside.”

What happened to reach this catastrophic point? How had one of the country’s biggest clubs dropped out of the top flight? And can lessons learned from Spurs’ unlikeliest relegation help the current team, who are sucked into a struggle with Igor Tudor unable to halt the freefall?

“Sad Spurs hit rock bottom,” read a headline in the Sunday Mirror the day after relegation. Pat Jennings, considered the best goalkeeper in the world, told reporters: “Relegation has not just happened today – it’s been happening for three years.”

He was referring to Nicholson’s resignation after losing the first four games of the 1974-75 season, ending a 16-year managerial reign and sending “shock waves through the dressing room”, Jennings recalled in his 1983 autobiography. In truth, the Spurs empire had been crumbling in the seasons before that, mainly owing to an inability to replace players.

In the mid-60s the captain Danny Blanchflower retired, the forward John White was struck by lightning on a golf course and died, and the winger Terry Medwin’s career was ended by a broken leg – the links to that great Double team breaking apart.

Terry Neill, who spent a decade as a centre-back for Arsenal, succeeded Nicholson and the club finished 19th – one place and one point above the relegation zone in a 22-team league. After guiding Spurs to an improved but still disappointing ninth, Neill left unexpectedly in the summer of 1976 to manage Arsenal.

In stepped Keith Burkinshaw, previously a first-team coach, to take charge of a team weakened by the departures of more key players, including Martin Chivers.

They lost the first two games of the season and never recovered. In mid-October they travelled to Derby and were thrashed 8-2. Taylor, who signed from Crystal Palace that September, says rows were “pretty normal” back then and recalls heated reflections most Monday mornings that season.

“We certainly had some honesty,” Taylor says. “I don’t know if they’ve got that now. Steve Perryman was the best captain you could ever play for. Pat Jennings wasn’t the noisiest, but if he spoke you listened. Terry Naylor was loud and determined. You couldn’t get a more honest worker on the pitch than John Pratt.”

There were blazing rows. Hoddle recalls the defenders blaming the attackers and the attackers blaming the defenders. Taylor, a winger, says: “We conceded 72 goals that season. I think we had 10 times more flair players than they have now but conceded too many goals.”

Already melancholic fans were quick to turn on the players at White Hart Lane. “Home games were a struggle,” Hoddle reflected. “The crowd were on top of the team and it wasn’t ideal when a bad pass met with jeers.”

Occasionally, there were flashes of hope. They beat the champions Liverpool at home in March and many believed it would spark a turnaround. They won twice in the subsequent 11 games. In a final stand they beat Aston Villa 3-1 at home and believed again. But a week later they travelled to Maine Road and it was over.

“I suppose it could be a good thing for us provided we come straight back,” Jennings said that day. The Guardian’s chief football correspondent, David Lacey, wrote that Burkinshaw had taken “down the most promising Tottenham side, from the point of view of individual ability, for several seasons”.

They finished on 33 points, when it was still two points for a win. Three more points would have saved them. When Taylor checks the 1976-77 Division One table on his iPad, he still can’t “believe we only got that many points”.

The gravity of the situation was still sinking in when they played the last game of the season, beating Leicester 2-0 at White Hart Lane. Fans turned up in droves, “cheered every kick” and swarmed on to the pitch.

“It was a trifle eerie in the circumstances, for I expected them to go home quietly instead of kicking up the kind of din you usually get when a team has won something,” Jennings recalled. “When a club has been in the First Division for 27 years it is accepted as a right, and I think most of the lads that afternoon had the nasty feeling we had let down previous Spurs teams – especially the famous ‘Double’ side.”

Jennings left for Arsenal, insisting he was pushed out of the sinking ship rather than jumped from it. But the core stayed and Burkinshaw survived.

“This is one of the biggest differences now,” Taylor says. “The players that stayed wanted to play for Tottenham Hotspur. They wanted to get the club back. Steve Perryman and Glenn Hoddle were closer to the club than most people. Terry Naylor, Johnny Pratt, loads of others – they were Tottenham lovers.”

He adds: “They’re horrible memories, but thankfully the people who stayed had the character to get back up again.”

They outscored everyone on their way back, but still scraped promotion in third place on goal difference.

Burkinshaw then adopted an innovative approach, signing Argentina’s Ossie Ardíles and Ricky Villa after they had won the 1978 World Cup, at a time when foreign players were rare in English football, and introducing a sports psychologist. He went on to become one of the club’s greatest managers, winning two FA Cups and the Uefa Cup within the next six years.

“They need to realise some of the things, like recruitment, that have not been done properly and that’s why they’re in this situation,” Taylor says. “I’m still keeping my fingers crossed they get a couple of wins and scrape home. But if they don’t it’s going to give them a kick up the backside.”