There are so many problems and so many shortcomings with Thomas Frank’s Tottenham Hotspur that you could spend all day analysing the things that went wrong against Fulham on Saturday, and have been going wrong for much of this season.
But at the heart of it is one glaringly simple and obvious fact: their home form is unsustainably bad.
It is not sustainable to be averaging less than one point per game at home, a record better only in this season’s Premier League than Wolverhampton Wanderers. This is not a problem Frank created — Spurs were dismal at home in the second half of last season — but it is a problem that Frank has not been able to fix. It is barely even a truism to say that if you lose most of your home games, you are in deep trouble.
It is not sustainable to create so little in front of your own fans, to give them so little to cheer and believe in, that their confidence in the new era erodes from game to game. This was not as bad as the Bournemouth and Chelsea home defeats. Both of those two games were abysmal, and this was merely very bad. Perhaps this was closer to the Aston Villa defeat or the 1-1 draw with Wolves. But the fact that Spurs’ home record this season already contains so many flavours of misery tells a story of its own.
It is not sustainable for Spurs to be taking almost three-quarters of their points (13 out of 18) away from home, meaning that only their die-hard away support have got to experience this team’s better moments. If you have a season ticket here and do not travel away, you will have still only seen one league win under Frank, against Burnley on the opening weekend. That was more than three months ago.
And it is not sustainable for the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium to be as toxic as it was on Saturday evening, where the home fans were booing Guglielmo Vicario after a mistake that led to Fulham’s second goal. This was the first time the home crowd had turned on a Tottenham player since Davinson Sanchez almost three years ago, and Thomas Frank said afterwards that it was “unacceptable” to boo a player during the course of a game, and that they could not be “true Tottenham fans”.
The sight of Pedro Porro storming off at the end with a face like thunder was a reminder of how much the players must hurt, too, from defeats like this. But Frank is meant to be here in part to rebuild a sense of culture, of unity around shared goals. And nothing could be more corrosive to that than nights like this one, when the fans are openly mocking their goalkeeper during the course of the game after one bad error.
But as keen as Frank was to defend Vicario, the reality is that his booing by the crowd was not an incident that can be understood in isolation. It is better understood as an eruption of the frustration that has been simmering here for some time. Because this home record is not just a Thomas Frank problem. Go back over Spurs’ last 22 home league games — a run dating back to the first half of last season — and they have only taken 17 points from a possible 66. Since they beat Aston Villa last November, the only league wins here have been against Manchester United, Southampton and Burnley. Fans are fed up with paying so much money to see their team play so badly.
There has been plenty of debate about the atmosphere and how best to improve it on matchdays. But the answer is simpler than you might think. The best method to generate a good atmosphere at a football match is to play well. Nothing else can match that. The 4-0 win against Copenhagen on November 4 is a case in point.
So the solution to all this has to come from the team, and ultimately from Frank himself. Nothing that the manager or the players say between now and next Saturday, when Brentford come to Tottenham, will matter half as much as how they play. And even if they get a result in Newcastle on Tuesday night — and that does not feel likely right now — they will need to give their base something to cheer too.
The real problem for Frank is how many fans feel the team is getting worse rather than better. Everyone accepts he has taken a hard job at a difficult time, that the Spurs squad is patchy even when the best players are all fit, which they have not been this year. But people still want to see an upward trend, and even if they do not see that, they want a sense of what the destination is meant to look like. And this is not just a theoretical point; part of the reason why fans were so patient with Mauricio Pochettino when he started slowly at Spurs 11 years ago is because the ideal end point of his football was so clear from day one.
And yet the two very worst games of Frank’s tenure at Spurs — Chelsea and Arsenal — were not in August but in November. These are still the two lowest team xG totals, 0.1 and 0.07, respectively, in the league this season. Frank talks about “adding layers” but none of those layers feel solid. Yes, they were better in the first half at PSG in midweek, pressing high and creating chances, but this game was a leap in the wrong direction. And even the layers that ought to be permanent — not least defensive stability — look increasingly shaky now. Fulham could easily have won this game by more than they did.
None of which means that Frank is doomed or that he cannot turn this around. He is a popular figure at the club, and there is patience for his long-term project. But there are only so many times you can get booed off at home before you lose your standing with people. The credit with the fans that Frank started with has now reduced to zero. He will have to earn it back himself.