Tottenham have not scored in the league, Aston Villa have scored once, and they meet at 5pm
Spurs are 17th with no league goal in four games, Villa 19th with one. Kick-off at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium is 5pm IST on Saturday.
Sep 19, 2026
Tottenham have not scored a Premier League goal this season. Aston Villa have scored one. The two of them meet at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium at 5pm IST on Saturday, 17th against 19th, and somebody has to win something eventually.
Four league games, no goals, and a record nobody wants
Roberto De Zerbi’s first month has produced two points and a blank column where the goals go. Spurs lost 3-0 at Brentford on the opening weekend, lost 2-0 at home to Newcastle, then drew 0-0 at Nottingham Forest and 0-0 at home with Everton. That is 360 minutes without a goal, and Sky Sports noted after the Everton game that no Spurs side had gone four league matches without scoring in 20 years.
There was a small break in it on Tuesday. Conor Gallagher headed in at Anfield in the Carabao Cup, the first goal Tottenham have scored against a top-flight opponent all season, although Liverpool still won 3-1 through Alexis Mac Allister, Cody Gakpo and a late Dominik Szoboszlai finish. De Zerbi said this week that when this team clicks it will win plenty of games. The performances do look closer than the table suggests. They are still not wins.
Villa found three goals in Bruges and have found one everywhere else
Unai Emery’s start reads worse on paper. One point from four, one goal scored, seven conceded, 19th in the table. Villa lost to Brighton and Arsenal, drew 0-0 at Hull City, and went down 1-2 at home to Forest in a game where their first league goal of the season arrived in the 74th minute and Forest won it in the 88th.
The odd part is that this team can clearly score. Villa went to Club Brugge on 8 September and won 3-2 in the Champions League, with John McGinn, Emiliano Buendía and Nicolas Jackson all on the scoresheet, before hanging on through a second half in which the Belgians pulled one back from the penalty spot and came close to equalising. Three goals in Belgium, one in England. Emery will have a view on why.
Who is missing, and what a result would actually mean
Tottenham are without Wilson Odobert, Xavi Simons and Mykhaylo Mudryk. Pedro Porro is back in the squad after a muscle problem kept him out of the last two, and Sandro Tonali is back too after a knock picked up against Everton that had ruled him out at Anfield. Villa are missing Ian Maatsen and Pau Torres, with Matty Cash and João Gomes both carrying doubts of their own.
For Spurs, a goal would be worth almost as much as the three points. For Villa, three points would lift them out of the relegation places on the fifth weekend, which is not a sentence anybody expected to write about a side that was in the Champions League this month. The cautious view is that this ends 0-0 and both managers face the same questions again on Monday. The interesting view is that whoever scores first, whenever it lands, will set off a noise out of all proportion to a fifth-weekend fixture between the 17th and 19th teams in the table.