Now that Tottenham Hotspur have officially announced the appointment of Thomas Frank as their next manager, attention can now turn back to summer transfer rumors. And not a moment too soon! Spurs have already “wasted” one of the two (!) open windows, and there’s a ton of business that needs to get done before Spurs play PSG in the UEFA Super Cup.
Brentford attacker Bryan Mbeumo is coming off of the best season of his career, scoring 20 goals and tallying 9 assists for the Bees in the Premier League in 2024-25. All of the noise in the football media had Mbeumo leaving Brentford, but heading to quite possibly the one major club in the league that’s worse than Spurs — Manchester United.
But Frank’s appointment has maybe changed that calculus. There are reports from Sky Sports’ Lyall Thomas that suggest that Spurs are now moving for Mbeumo where he would rejoin the manager that developed him.
Sky doesn’t exactly have the most sterling of records when it comes to transfer rumors, even if Lyall Thomas is a perfectly cromulent reporter and editor. So a Sky rumor doesn’t exactly turn my head. What DOES turn my head is this brief tweet from Sam Tabuteu, a freelance sports journalist who writes for the Hounslow Herald, a London borough in between Heathrow Airport and the Gtech Community Stadium.
The Hounslow Herald is one of the small local papers in the areas around Brentford, and if you know me you know I tend to have a lot of time for the rumors that come out of the small regional newspapers in Britain. So if our new best friend Sam says Spurs are trying to move for Mbeumo, they probably are at minimum investigating what it would take, and likely on behalf of Thomas Frank.
If you played Fantasy Premier League, Bryan Mbeumo probably made it onto your team at some point over the course of the season, and for good reason — he had a monster season for the Bees, along with Yoane Wissa and Kevin Schade. This is probably a rumor that will excite a lot of Spurs fans and for good reason — he’s seemingly kicked his game to a new level and at age 25 is entering his peak.
But there’s maybe a reason to be a little skeptical about Mbeumo if you look a little deeper into his numbers. Yes, the 20g+9a statistic is fantastic. But his xG over the season was only 12.3, about a 65% overperformance of his underlying statistics. He also slightly overperformed his xA on the season. In short, Mbeumo ran extremely hot, some would say unsustainably so. Now take him out of his past environs and put him in a new team with new teammates and it’s a potential recipe for a regression to the mean.
The 20g Mbeumo is almost certainly worth the £60-65m expected transfer fee that it would take to get him out of Brentford. But is it worth spending that much for a 12g Mbeumo? What about something in the middle? Now, it’s possible that Mbeumo has made The Leap™ and this is the kind of player he is now. It’s also possible that joining Frank at Spurs would help him maintain the level he hit last season. But it’s just as possible that he regresses somewhat to something more akin to his overall expected metrics. It’s for that reason I’m a little skeptical about a big money move for Mbeumo, when Spurs really need to hit every summer signing out of the park.
Gazumping United would be fun, though.