So farewell, then, Thomas Frank. It never was a transitional season. If Tottenham Hotspur is a tanker to be slowly turned around, you were sinking it.
Regular readers of Mediawatch on these pages will know that one of the things that bugs Football365ers is that words used to mean something and increasingly often that is no longer the case. ‘Transitional season’ is one that grinds our gears more than most.
Sure, you could argue that Frank was sacked because of the terrible results and performances (and a whole heap of other things) that were, somehow, even worse. But his real crime in our eyes was more of a moral failure. An unwillingness or inability to accept the reality, and an insistence on seeing progress where none existed. There was never one single shred of evidence to support his delusions.
Now a transitional season is absolutely a real thing that exists. They can be hard, they can be difficult, they can be painful. They can, ultimately, be entirely unsuccessful. It’s perfectly possible to have a transitional season that never leads to the promised future. It might even be more common than the successful transitional season.
What a transitional season isn’t, though, is just a convenient euphemism and mask for ‘sh*t season’. Or at least, it shouldn’t be.
Manchester City in 2016/17, that was a transitional season. Pep Guardiola’s first in English football was at times a struggle for him. There was a lot of dismissive chatter about his fancy-pants passing game and him saying stuff about not really being interested in tackles and such.
These things are all relative, of course. City weren’t as good as they had been and nowhere near as good as they would become, but their bed was still at least partially un-shat. They still won 23 league games and lost only six. They reached the semi-finals of the FA Cup and the knockout stages of the Champions League. They scored 80 Premier League goals that season which is still, you know, loads.
But they trundled in a distant third in the league. Eight points behind second-placed Spurs(!) and 15 behind champions Chelsea.
It wasn’t always pretty, it wasn’t always clear that what Guardiola was trying would go on to work in the kind of spectacular six-league-titles-in-the-next-seven-years way in which it did. But it was clear a transition was taking place and that if it did work it would be quite something.
City were playing differently, and – this is the important bit – doing so in a way that if it could be harnessed and finessed and moulded to the unique demands of Our League had the highest imaginable ceiling. It was, in short, worth finding out.
That’s a transitional season. City and Guardiola are even back in transitional season territory now, albeit less convincingly, as he builds a new team with another slightly different approach that actually moves back towards something more traditionally ‘English football’ in style. Might work, might not, but you can see the moving parts.
Mikel Arteta did about three transitional seasons at Arsenal before getting them to where he wanted to be. There were multiple points along that journey where faith could justifiably have been lost, but even if you didn’t think it was going to work you could see a plan.
Arteta’s pleas to ‘trust the process’ had an obvious self-serving side to them but they weren’t empty bluster either.
Fans will, to a greater or lesser extent, accept that these things happen and are even a necessary part of the game as long as they can see some evidence that it a transition to something better is at least possibly happening. If they can see, even if only sporadically and not necessarily in regular results, a team changing before their eyes from one thing to another, better one.
But it isn’t just a get out of jail free card. You can’t just say ‘transitional season’ because you’re sh*t.
And yes, we’re talking about Thomas Frank. Again.
“I knew it would be a big challenge, that it would be a transitional season and that we are building something that I am convinced will be very good in the future. I know there are a few things to improve, but I am very aware of what they are.”
But the key difference is that there is simply no evidence for this very good future during a worsening present. No straw to clutch that the ‘few things’ were improving. If anything, Frank’s season became less transitional. Very early in the season, in the Super Cup against PSG for instance, or Man City away, it was possible to imagine this could actually be a transitional season in which Spurs became a more solid, less ridiculous football team.
But they now concede two stupid goals every single game and are getting worse and worse at the time when, in a traditional transitional season, there should be signs of things coming together rather than falling apart.
Frank has deployed the ‘transitional season’ trope as disingenuous cover, aided and abetted by a pliant press pack who much prefer the quiet, polite bullsh*t of the Dane to the spiky, confrontational bullsh*t of Ange Postecoglou. After the fatal defeat to Newcastle left Spurs five points clear of the relegation zone he took it to extremes that amount to gaslighting.
“I understand the fans’ frustration. We are in a position we don’t want to be in. It’s also a situation the club has been in for almost two years, at the end of last season as well.”
Let’s call that what it is: a lie.
Spurs were never in this situation last season. Not to this existential threat level. They were very, very bad in the league, sure, but the closest their flirtation with the bottom three came was a gap of eight points, at which point – this exact point of the season in fact – they won their next three games in a row. Frank should remember, really, because one of those three wins was a 2-0 victory over his Brentford.
When Spurs abandoned their hugely disappointing Premier League campaign at this time last season they had 33 points from 26 games (Frank’s Spurs have 29) but more importantly a 16-point chasm between them and the bottom three. They were completely safe when they entirely logically chose to prioritise the Europa League.
He was brought in to ensure even that brief flirtation with relegation and humorous but largely irrelevant finishing position was a horror that would never be repeated. Instead he transitioned Spurs into a team fighting – and right now losing, very badly – a genuine relegation battle.
You can’t call it a transitional season when you’re making bad things even worse.