What happens if Tottenham Hotspur and West Ham United finish level on points and goal difference?

Tottenham Hotspur have struggled badly in 2025/26 — Tottenham remain in the bottom three despite winning at Wolves (Image credit: Getty Images)

The battle to avoid the Premier League drop looks set to go to the wire this season.

With Wolves and Burnley already having their relegation to the Championship confirmed, there is one more spot to fill, with four teams nervously looking over their shoulders.

If the two sides finish level on points, who gets relegated from the Premier League?

Konstantinos Mavropanos of West Ham United celebrates scoring his team's first goal with Axel Disasi during the Premier League match between West Ham United and Wolverhampton Wanderers at London Stadium on April 10, 2026 in London, England. — West Ham sit two points ahead of Spurs (Image credit: Justin Setterfield/Getty Images)

That leaves London rivals West Ham and Tottenham seemingly in a scrap to avoid dropping down, with the Hammers on 36 points, two clear of Spurs, who currently occupy the final relegation spot. Roberto De Zerbi’s side have the edge in goal difference, but it’s close, with Spurs on -10 and West Ham on -16.

With a nerve-shredding finish on the cards, this is a relegation battle that could be settled by the thinnest of margins, so should Spurs and West Ham be level on points and goal difference, how will relegation be decided?

As with the rest of the division, points scored is the first criterion to decide these matters, followed by goal difference.

It’s then onto goals scored, with Spurs having netted 43 times and West Ham 42, making this another wafer-thin differential between the two relegation-haunted London teams.

Should the two sides find themselves locked on points, goal difference and also goal scored, their place in the table - and likely relegation, unless Leeds or Forest are dragged back into it - would be settled by the two teams’ head-to-head record.

Specifically, Premier League rules dictate that the team who collected the most points in the two sides’ head-to-head matches settles the tie breaker, followed by the team who scored the most away goals in these head-to-head matches.

So, it’s back to this season’s two matches between Spurs and the Irons.

Roberto De Zerbi, Manager of Tottenham Hotspur, applauds during the Premier League match between Sunderland and Tottenham Hotspur at Stadium of Light on April 12, 2026 in Sunderland, England. — Spurs brought in Roberto De Zerbi after their short-lived Igor Tudor experiment (Image credit: George Wood/Getty Images)

Way back in September, Tottenham claimed a 3-0 win at the London Stadium against the ten-man Hammers, before the Hammers got their revenge with a 2-1 win at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.

With the two teams claiming three points apiece in their head-to-head, it would then go down to the away goals scored rule.

That would then mean that Micky Van de Ven’s 64th-minute strike in Spurs’ win at West Ham, which on the day seemed like the cherry on top of a comfortable win for Spurs, could end up being one of the most important goals in the club’s modern-day history.

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For more than a decade, Joe Mewis has worked in football journalism as a reporter and editor. Mewis has had stints at Mirror Football and LeedsLive among others and worked at FourFourTwo throughout Euro 2024, reporting on the tournament. In addition to his journalist work, Mewis is also the author of four football history books that include times on Leeds United and the England national team. Now working as a digital marketing coordinator at Harrogate Town, too, Mewis counts some of his best career moments as being in the iconic Spygate press conference under Marcelo Bielsa and seeing his beloved Leeds lift the Championship trophy during lockdown.