Welcome to The Briefing, where every Monday during this season, The Athletic will discuss three of the biggest questions to arise from the weekend’s football.
This was the weekend when Liverpool finally won a league match, Arsenal continued in supreme form at the top, Wolves sacked Vitor Pereira and Chelsea earned their annual victory at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.
We’re asking what’s going on Spurs, why patience is a virtue when it comes to transfer fees and why the Premier League table makes little sense.
Should Frank bow to The Spurs Way?
The suffix ‘Football Club’ on the end of Manchester United has felt so appropriate in recent seasons, given that merely declaring the accepted shortened version of the club’s name hasn’t carried enough heft to portray the shambolic results and performances the team has produced.
It feels like we’re now going that way with Tottenham Hotspur. It can’t just be Tottenham, as they told us last season, and what’s happened there in the past few years feels like it goes way beyond the ‘Spursy’ tag. So, seriously, what on earth is going on at Tottenham Hotspur Football Club?
Even for them, the paradox of finishing 17th in the Premier League a few months ago while also enjoying their most memorable moment in decades after winning the Europa League, street parade and all, to now being fifth in the table while booing the team off, is just too, well, we said not Spursy, so let’s just call it absolutely nuts.
You don’t need xG to know which way the wind blows but the numbers do paint a grey, bleak picture of nothingness.
They mustered a pathetic total of three shots against Chelsea (one on target) yielding an xG of 0.05, their lowest since records began in 2012 (504 games since then).
It wasn’t a one-off, given their xG against Bournemouth a couple of months ago was 0.19, or 0.8 in their previous home match against Aston Villa.
The boos were booming and vicious. And, through the prism of that Chelsea performance and recent home form, fully merited. Yet on the road Spurs are the best team in the land, earning 13 points from 15, scoring 12 goals and conceding only three.
So how can the team currently on track to qualify for the Champions League again (if fifth place is good enough, like last season) be earning so much disapproval from their own supporters?
Well, Spurs are a special case. The Spurs Way™ is a thing; they don’t just want to win, they want to do so with style, panache and, above all, entertainment. You know, the kind Ange Postecoglou attempted to instil last season. The kind he completely abandoned when they came within sight of the winning post in the Europa League. And duly won it.
Thomas Frank has brought in the pragmatism Postecoglou pigheadedly failed to lean on during the majority of his Spurs tenure, but the Dane is probably using a bit too much of it.
The much-discussed double defensive midfield pivot of Joao Palhinha and Rodrigo Bentancur lends itself well to away matches; they can protect the defence while faster, more attacking players like Mohammed Kudus launch brisk counter attacks. Set pieces, trying to control matches without the ball, it’s nice enough away from home.
At home, though, with that same double pivot, and with only two attacking players in the XI against Chelsea (Kudus and the unfit Randal Kolo Muani), Frank didn’t just have the handbrake on, he had an anti-theft lock on the steering wheel and four heavy-duty wheel clamps on the tyres.
And yet, you wouldn’t exactly call Frank a defensive manager at Brentford. In fact, a year ago they were the league’s great entertainers, especially at home with scorelines like 5-3, 4-3, 4-2 and 3-2 between October and December.
Only Liverpool and Manchester City scored more than Brentford’s 40 home goals last season, and only Ipswich Town and Southampton conceded more than their 35 at the Gtech Community Stadium.
What’s the difference? Frank’s Brentford squad was perfected and honed over years of excellent recruitment. At Spurs, not only are his new signings like Kolo Muani and Xavi Simons still in the infancy of their Premier League careers (with Simons struggling to adapt), but injuries have deprived Frank of Dejan Kulusevski, James Maddison and Dominic Solanke, while Wilson Odobert and Mathys Tel are young and inconsistent.
Perhaps, even allowing for the alarming Steve McClaren-esque moment of being ignored by his players on the pitch at full time, we should wait for Frank to have more options at his disposal given that, rather than an overhaul of the playing style, is what Spurs need right now. Sorry, Tottenham Hotspur Football Club. Never a dull moment.
Do Caicedo and Rice show that judging transfer fees takes years?
Remember in 2023 when Moises Caicedo and Declan Rice both moved to new Premier League clubs for a combined total of more than £2oomillion and eyebrows were collectively raised above forehead height across the land?
Two-and-a-bit years on, those exorbitant fees are starting to look like reasonable value, at least in the nonsensical world of modern football finance.
As this list shows, spending huge money on a ridiculously talented footballer is absolutely no guarantee of success.
Every player on there (except Antony) did something decent, even Romelu Lukaku and Paul Pogba, but how many could say they, at any point, increased their monetary value?
Right now, if Caicedo or Rice were to be bought by, say, Real Madrid or a Saudi Arabian club, Chelsea and Arsenal could legitimately ask for more than the £100million plus (including add-ons) they each paid.
Caicedo, at 24, has blossomed into the best defensive midfielder not just in the Premier League, but perhaps in the world. Enzo Maresca said after the Ecuadorian’s latest man-of-the-match performance at Spurs that only Rodri could hold a candle to him, while goalkeeper Robert Sanchez went further and called Caicedo the “best player on the planet” in his position.
Rice was also man of the match on Saturday as Arsenal won again at Burnley, with more tackles and interceptions than anyone on the pitch, plus another goal. He’s been sublime for Arsenal for some time now.
They are different types of midfielders who you can imagine forming just about the most formidable midfield pairing in the world right now. They’re also, after winning player of the season at their clubs last season, in the very early running for the Premier League’s player of the season award this year. Probably only Erling Haaland and Antoine Semenyo can also lay claim to that billing, from the opening quarter of the campaign.
What their form over a long period shows is that transfer value is related to many years of performances. The sums paid for Florian Wirtz and Alexander Isak may look a little daft right now, with their one goal and four assists from a combined 22 appearances, but Caicedo, Rice and indeed Enzo Fernandez show that repaying those fees may take time and a little patience.
How true is the Premier League table?
There is an old adage that the league table isn’t worth looking at until teams have played 10 matches.
Well, the Premier League table is definitely worth looking at, if only to marvel at its ludicrousness. However, with nine points separating second and 17th, you can’t exactly call it settled yet.
What with little old Bournemouth in fourth, the aforementioned Spurs in fifth but not happy about how they got there and Forest in 18th but pretty happy and optimistic about their future under Sean Dyche, it’s all a bit lopsided.
Then you’ve got the three promoted teams going against the grain to earn 38 points between them so far (and Sunderland can go second tonight), while old powerhouses Aston Villa, Newcastle United and Everton are all in the bottom half.
To top off the league of unpredictability, Manchester United are in the top half and unbeaten in four.
It’s just a little shame that the top three and the bottom one are letting the side down by being exactly where we all thought they’d be. And Wolverhampton Wanderers’ solution to going winless in their opening 10 matches for the second successive season might be to hire the guy who achieved that for them last year.
Never change, Premier League.
Coming up
If you’d been told in August that when Sunderland met Everton in early November, one of them would go second in the table with a win, you would probably have had a little smirk and replied; “Yeah, second from bottom”. But hey, that’s the way of the world nowadays. Deal with it. The Black Cats v The Toffees kicks off at 8pm tonight.
The Champions League returns on Tuesday night with a couple of ties that are absolutely huge on paper but probably fairly inconsequential in real life in the world of the Swiss model; Liverpool versus Real Madrid and Paris Saint-Germain against Bayern Munich. Also on Tuesday, Spurs host a club you think Thomas Frank would probably have managed but actually hasn’t, in Copenhagen, while Arsenal will expect a comfortable victory away at Slavia Prague.
Newcastle United against Athletic Club is possibly the standout game on Wednesday night, although Manchester City hosting Borussia Dortmund has the potential for some fun. Chelsea are in Azerbaijan to play Qarabag.
If you didn’t quite get enough political posturing when it was announced there would be no Maccabi Tel Aviv fans at Villa Park, you’ll get a bit more this week when the game takes place on Thursday in the Europa League. Also that night; Sturm Graz host Dyche’s Forest, Rangers play Roma in a tasty tie in Scotland, while in the Conference League it’s Crystal Palace versus AZ.
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