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“It’s easy when things aren’t going well to come up with excuses,” Brennan Johnson says and, with things not going well for him at Tottenham, there was plenty of stuff that he could have hidden behind.
The weight of the £47.5m fee which took him from Nottingham Forest in September 2023; Spurs have paid more for only three players in their history. The sky-high expectations of being at one of London’s glamour clubs. Apart from a loan to League One Lincoln in 2020-21, Johnson had known life only in Nottingham and at Forest, whose academy he joined at the age of eight. And then there was the social media abuse; kryptonite for confidence.
If there was a low point for Johnson, it surely came after the derby defeat at home to Arsenal last September when he looked at his Instagram account and was assailed by the hurtfulness of the messages. The winger made the decision to step away from his socials but more than that, to reach even deeper into the depths of his resolve; to blot out the noise and the naysayers, to focus on what he could control.
Johnson does not lack mental toughness. There was always pressure on him as he grew up in West Bridgford to the south of Nottingham and made his way at Forest because his father, David, had been a favourite at the club, scoring 50 goals for them across six seasons after the turn of the millennium. Johnson withstood that.
It has always been about the hard yards for him; he knows he has the ability on the ball but it is nothing without the physical application. And so the 23-year-old focused on making the right runs, better runs, getting into the areas where the Spurs manager, Ange Postecoglou, wanted him.
The results have been spectacular. As Johnson prepares for the Europa League final against Manchester United in Bilbao on Wednesday, he does so as Spurs’s top scorer with 17 in all competitions – plus seven assists. The turning point came straight after the Arsenal game when he got his first goal of the season – the stoppage-time winner at Coventry in the Carabao Cup. He would score in each of Spurs’s next five matches, including against United at Old Trafford in the 3-0 Premier League win.
“It was just about trying to nail down the stuff I could do,” Johnson says. “So, a lot of work and a bit of luck when you get into those positions but just trying to train as hard as I can and be in the position.”
Johnson contributed five goals and 11 assists in his debut Spurs campaign and his greater productivity this time out is best talked up by the line that says no player not called Kane or Son has scored more for the club in a single season since Dele Alli got 22 in 2016-17.
It is still possible to feel that Johnson is not fully appreciated; he has somehow drifted under the radar. The idea is linked to the notion that Spurs fans want David Ginola on the wing. They prefer aesthetes to athletes. But Postecoglou is not the only modern manager who will tell you that they need runners, first and foremost. Johnson’s in-game physical data has been consistently excellent and Postecoglou has praised him for his work ethic, his receptiveness to feedback. Which brings us back to those runs.
Postecoglou has joked that he would love to be a winger in his team and there is certainly a trademark Johnson goal – a burst from beyond the far post, sometimes in front of a defender, to meet a low cross from the left with a first-time close-range finish. Ten of his 22 for Spurs have followed the blueprint, one being the goal at Old Trafford after a storming Micky van de Ven run and cross.
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“It’s a demand that the manager puts on us to be in the back post,” Johnson says. “Last season, there were a few instances where I wasn’t in the right position and he gets frustrated because people think it’s a tap-in but if you’re not there then it goes out for a throw-in.
“It’s knowing who I am playing with, knowing the type of crosses I am going to get, almost studying other players in the team. This season I made it clear that I had to be in the right positions to try and score.”
Johnson has played in previous showpieces, including the 2022 Championship playoff final in which Forest beat Huddersfield. He was on the losing Lincoln team in the 2021 League One playoff final against Blackpool. He downplays the emotional detail before this game about how his father started his career as a trainee at United; he did not make a first-team appearance for them. But there is surely something to be taken from Spurs having beaten United in all three domestic meetings this season, including the Carabao Cup quarter-final.
“We can’t rely on that,” Johnson says. “It’s about coming up with a plan because each time we’ve beaten them has been down to different reasons. I feel like we’ve done good work preparing for Man United and this is a new opportunity. We want to be as confident as we can.”
