This should be a time of unconstrained hope, and undiluted promise, for Tottenham. Its coach, Mauricio Pochettino, has turned a club that was not so long ago synonymous with mediocrity and disappointment and failure into not only regular contenders at the top of the Premier League, but also Champions League finalists, a genuine continental force.

The overwhelming majority of the squad that lost to Liverpool in Madrid remains in place; only one regular, fullback Kieran Trippier, has departed. Pochettino’s resources, in fact, have been bolstered. After going an entire season without a single new player, he has been bequeathed Ryan Sessegnon, Giovani Lo Celso and, most important, the France midfielder Tanguy Ndombélé, signed for a club-record fee within days of Tottenham’s defeat in the Champions League final.

The Spurs chairman, Daniel Levy, meanwhile, has overseen a move from the club’s old home at White Hart Lane to a state-of-the-art stadium right next door, allowing Spurs to nourish its history while assuring its future. When the new arena opened in April, in that mind-spinning spring when Tottenham had the world at its feet, it was broadly agreed to be the best in the country, perhaps the best in Europe, and other clubs looked on enviously at what they, too, might one day hope to have.

There should be no clouds on Tottenham’s horizon. Considering all the club has been through — the wilderness years of mid-table finishes and misfit managers and St Totteringham’s Day and “Lads, it’s Tottenham” — these are days for basking. Three months on from Madrid, though, Tottenham feels like a club suddenly uneasy in its skin.

It is not just the fact that several first-team players either want to leave, or expected to have done so already: Christian Eriksen, Toby Alderweireld, Danny Rose, Serge Aurier. It is not just that Jan Vertonghen, a stalwart of Pochettino’s teams, has been dropped, for reasons that neither he nor his teammates fully grasp. (Eriksen, Alderweireld and Vertonghen are all out of contract next summer; the club, conceivably, could lose all three for nothing.)

It is not just that, for a squad that is widely regarded as being free of individualists and factions, an undercurrent of dissatisfaction with the manager’s tactics and selections — not least that of Harry Kane in the final in Madrid — and the intensity of his training has been bubbling away since last season. It is not just that the team’s form has tailed off alarmingly, picking up only 15 points from its last 15 Premier League games.