Spurs will have to part with £10m to secure first-choice Ange Postecoglou replacement Thomas Frank and challenge Chelsea’s manager compensation monopoly.
While Spurs have ‘agreed a deal’ with Frank, the small matter remains of striking an arrangement with the Dane’s current employers Brentford to poach their head coach of almost seven years.
The Bees are expected to hold out for the full £10m payout in Frank’s contract, which runs until 2027.
While that figure would put the 51-year-old about 56th in a list of the club’s most expensive transfers ever – they once spent more on Clinton N’Jie – the usual reluctance from a club to countenance dropping such sums on a manager means talks may now slow down somewhat.
Even in an age when transfer fees continue to escalate, it is rare for Premier League clubs to put much money aside to acquire the manager they feel best equipped to pull it all together. These are the most expensive coaches in English top-flight history.
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Brendan Rodgers – £6m
Swansea felt £5m was “suitable compensation” for “such a talented, young British manager” and three members of his backroom staff when Liverpool came calling in 2012.
Seven years later, Chris Davies and Glen Driscoll again jumped ship with Rodgers for Leicester, but the addition of first-team coach Kolo Toure understandably brought the overall package closer to £10m for a frustrated Celtic.
The appointment of Rodgers alone cost the Foxes £6m as they quickly identified and secured their main target to replace the sacked Claude Puel in February 2019. It immediately felt like a potentially bounteous union and for a long while proved as such.
Rodgers extended his contract before the year was out, with his first two full seasons culminating in almighty bottlings of Champions League qualification after vague threats of title challenges.
There was silverware in the form of the FA Cup and consecutive European campaigns only look more impressive the further Leicester in their current guise spiral out of control.
But it ultimately ended in relegation heartbreak, with Rodgers sacked shortly before a drop into the Championship. The manager was due a pay-off of around £10m but is thought to have foregone some of that payment. Being replaced by Dean Smith does that to a man.
Ruben Amorim – £9.25m
There was a similar sense with Amorim that Manchester United might have found a perfect match; that feeling lasted about a fortnight.
Amorim had been on the Old Trafford radar for months, including through the hilariously bungled backing and sacking of Erik ten Hag, but it was decided that one final summer transfer window of recruiting at great expense more players specifically wanted by the Dutchman and entirely incompatible with his eventual successor was the best and indeed only possible course of action for a club which believes free lunches, charity work and employing non-footballers to be the problem.
Sporting paid about £8m to release Amorim from his Braga contract after just 13 games in charge in March 2020 and it was a masterstroke: he transformed the Lisbon club to the extent that they won two Primeira Liga crowns after an almost two-decade drought, while putting them on course for a third before his departure.
Manchester United wasted £21.4m on replacing Ten Hag with Amorim in November 2024 after threatening/promising the Portuguese that the opportunity to manage them would not come around again.
Having spent the first eight months of his reign explaining in unnecessarily public and painstaking detail precisely how incompetent he believes himself, his players and the club which has helped torch his burgeoning reputation to be, it is easy to imagine he might regret not calling their bluff.
All manner of low bars were dragged towards the centre of the Earth in an atrocious season which concluded with an embarrassing Europa League final no-show. The manager who so thoroughly out-coached his rival to procure the trophy and Champions League qualification with it was obviously ruthlessly dispensed with soon after; Sunk-Cost Fallacy FC doubled down on failure and rewarded Amorim with a £62.5m signing 11 days later.
Arne Slot – £9.4m
“Everybody understands Feyenoord will want to receive as much money as they can get, but I get the feeling that they will not begrudge me this move,” said Slot when it became clear that, through the noise surrounding Amorim and Xabi Alonso, he would be handed the Jurgen Klopp dynasty.
The Eredivisie runners-up were perfectly satisfied with a £7.7m fee and £1.7m in add-ons which might well have been triggered over the course of a Premier League-winning debut season. Liverpool, too, were content with a succession plan which convinced few outside the club.
Among those might well have been Spurs, on whom the joke is contractually bound to always be. They considered the credentials of Slot in The Great Managerial Search of summer 2023, although when it was reported that Feyenoord wanted £15m or so in restitution, it does not requite a vivid imagination to envision Daniel Levy’s non-response.
Slot parlayed that interest into a contract extension after playing Spurs like a fiddle. When it was an upwardly mobile Liverpool on the end of the phone less than a year later, negotiations inevitably went far smoother.
Enzo Maresca – £10m
Leicester were ‘disappointed’ when Maresca ‘decided at this stage that he no longer wants to be part of our vision,’ but they cannot possibly have been surprised.
The Italian recognised that his stock was high after winning the Championship title; he understandably chose to cash in when Chelsea made an approach for a coach they felt would be more malleable to their unique operations and machinations.
A £10m bill delivered not only Maresca but six members of his Leicester staff to Stamford Bridge, which seemed like remarkably shrewd recruitment when the Blues marched to second in the Premier League table around Christmas.
The wheels on the bandwagon felt loose for months after but Maresca and his team managed to stabilise themselves, qualify for the Champions League and win the Europa Conference.
Nothing can be ruled out with Clearlake but the Italian seems likely to be the first manager of their stewardship to finish one season and start the next, making Maresca one of the biggest success stories in sporting history.
Andre Villas-Boas – £13.3m
With Carlo Ancelotti handed one of the harsher sackings in Premier League history, Chelsea felt it necessary to conduct an absurdly expensive experiment to deduce whether lightning could indeed strike twice.
The hypothesis was fair. The club’s greatest era was triggered in no small part by the prodigious brilliance of a young Portuguese manager who had just won the Treble with Porto. Jose Mourinho himself once referred to Villas-Boas as “my eyes and ears” so when the 33-year-old won the Primeira Liga, Europa League and Portuguese Cup, the comparison became unavoidably intoxicating.
Roman Abramovich certainly agreed, sanctioning what was a world-record compensation package for a manager he would spend about as much to sack within eight months, at least partly because he tried to make John Terry sit in economy.
‘Andre was the outstanding candidate for the job,’ the Blues said when appointing him. By the time he was dispensed with there was ‘disappointment that the relationship has ended so early’ – and presumably so expensively.
Graham Potter – £21.5m
It was presumed that Chelsea’s financially incontinent revolving door managerial policy would end with Abramovich’s ownership, but Clearlake ensured to honour that proud history with their first appointment.
Thomas Tuchel was soon shown the door Potter would be invited through thanks to his work at Brighton. As ever, the Seagulls were fully prepared for such an eventuality and guaranteed they would be reimbursed for their troubles.
Roberto De Zerbi was already in place as Potter’s replacement when it was revealed that Chelsea’s latest direct debit payment to Brighton amounted to just over £21m for the manager and five of his backroom team.