Tottenham and West Ham's relegation tie-breaker explained

 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.

Leeds United and Nottingham Forest will be hoping they have just about done enough to keep their collective heads above water, with the pair sitting on 40 and 39 points respectively with just four games to play.

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

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?

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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.

ay 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.