It is difficult, when you look at the Premier League table, to argue with Thomas Frank’s record at Tottenham Hotspur so far.
Nine games into the new season, they sit in third place. Only Arsenal, who are top, have won more games than Spurs. No team has scored more goals than Tottenham (they have 17, joint with Chelsea and Manchester City). Only Arsenal (three) have conceded fewer than Frank’s side (seven).
Even if you think it is too early to glean clear lessons from the table, the evidence of those nine games, the first almost-quarter of the league season, is promising. Even more so when you place it in the context of Frank’s time at Spurs so far.
Frank took over a team who had just had one of the most unusual seasons in modern club history, winning the Europa League while also losing 22 league games and finishing 17th. He has had to repair the ship while navigating through Premier League and Champions League fixtures. He has had to do this with a fairly patchy squad, with injuries in key positions. He has not been able to give a minute to Dejan Kulusevski or James Maddison — Spurs’ two leading creative midfielders — so far. Dominic Solanke, the first-choice centre-forward, has not started a game yet. There should still be a lot of growth to come.
And yet those three glass-half-full paragraphs do not in fact tell the whole story of Frank’s tenure so far. There have arguably been as many bad performances as good ones. In Europe, Spurs were fortunate to scrape draws at Bodo/Glimt and Monaco, and could easily have lost both games by a distance. Their home league games have been miserable since the Burnley win on opening day. Without Joao Palhinha’s late equaliser against Wolves, they would have lost their last three straight home league games.
Football is not just about numbers and outcomes. Fans want to enjoy the process too. This is true everywhere, but especially at Spurs. This is a club that invested tens of millions of pounds in big-name managers in recent years — first Jose Mourinho, then Antonio Conte — only to realise that the style of play did not fit. There are aesthetic expectations that have to be met.
Every fan is entitled to their own conception of ‘good’ football, but most of those conceptions will share some similar ideas. That their team should be proactive, dominate the ball, play in the opposition half, take risks, and eventually triumph through their own skill, bravery and co-ordination. These are eternal principles, but as English football has grown more technical and possession-oriented in the last 10 years, they have felt increasingly hegemonic.
This is why watching Frank’s Spurs at times has felt jarring. No football fan is fully free from cultural conditioning. Our eyes have adjusted to what we have watched for the last few years. And through those lenses, they do not look good.
Tottenham rarely move the ball through the middle of the pitch, preferring the stability of Rodrigo Bentancur and Palhinha sitting there together. They struggle to pick through a settled opposition defence. They do not overwhelm teams with relentless pressure. Only Aston Villa, Sunderland, West Ham United and Burnley, according to Opta, have had fewer shots than Spurs this season. They do not squeeze the opposition to death in their own half. Only Crystal Palace, Fulham and Burnley have made fewer high turnovers than Spurs. If you drew up a list of how you would expect a dominant team to play, Tottenham would not tick many of the boxes.
Sunday’s 3-0 win at Everton was a case in point. Everton had more possession and more shots. Tottenham spent long spells defending their own box, Kevin Danso endlessly heading the ball away. Guglielmo Vicario had to make two brilliant saves when the game was in the balance. But Spurs were clinical when it mattered. Micky van de Ven twice headed in from corners, and Pape Matar Sarr finished off a counter-attack in the final minutes.
If it was a one-off, some people might have called it lucky. But there is a pattern to these away wins now. Spurs did roughly the same thing to Manchester City in August, West Ham in September and to Leeds United earlier this month. It’s who they are now.
It is not hard to spot the change in style and emphasis at Tottenham this season. Away from proactive expansive possession, full-backs attacking through the middle, risk-taking on the ball. Towards stability in the middle of the pitch, Bentancur and Palhinha, maintaining shape in possession and maximising set pieces.
But what is true of Tottenham is true of the league at large. Look at Arsenal, who have gone from playing open possession football to being the best defensive team and best set-piece team in the world. Even City themselves have stepped back from the pure possession game, replacing Ederson with Gianluigi Donnarumma, effectively turning the clock back 10 years in the process. Their game is now about getting the ball to their physically dominant No 9 as quickly and as often as possible. Everywhere you look, teams are going direct, focusing on set pieces, teaching their players how to throw the ball long again. The game has changed faster than anyone could have imagined, and in the opposite direction.
And in this brave new world, this Dychenaissance, who better to manage Tottenham than Thomas Frank? His coaching has always been clear-eyed and strategic about pursuing every advantage for his team. At Brentford, some of his football looked like a throwback in an era of endless possession. But he followed his own path and pursued the intimations in a changing game. And right now, in the era when set pieces are becoming the game itself, his approach is at the cutting edge. And if this is what modern football is, Spurs might as well be good at it.
“Every manager and club wants to compete and it is about finding the small margins,” Frank said in his press conference on Monday, ahead of Wednesday’s League Cup tie at Newcastle. “I think the success that we had at Brentford was maybe not as fancy because we were a smaller club, but also Arsenal picked up (the importance of set pieces). Liverpool two years ago were extremely good at it too. So top clubs picked it up and then go, ‘Oh, you probably need to do this if you want to be able to compete or raise the bar to be even better.’
Tottenham have always needed a manager who is ahead of the tactical curve. They do not have enough money or enough originality to compete in any other way. They had that in Mauricio Pochettino, whose energetic pressing football gave Spurs an edge, before Jurgen Klopp or Guardiola even arrived in English football. But they appointed Mourinho and Conte too late, and could not even give them all the tools to compete anyway. Postecoglou’s expansive possession felt like it might have been the future, but football moved in a different direction — towards the minimalistic efficiency of the game Frank had been honing in Brentford.
Perhaps this is just what good football is now. And we all need to adjust our eyes.