Overall, it has been a dismal 2025/26 Premier League season for Tottenham Hotspur, as the Thomas Frank era has gotten off to about the same start as the 2024/25 campaign did under Ange Postecoglou. Frank has had trouble figuring out his best personnel at Tottenham, and his tactics have been highly underwhelming and the antithesis of the sort of positive attacking football Spurs fans wanted the club to build on from the Big Ange era.
Although there are quite a few underpeforming veteran players and Spurs look more like a bottom half of the table team than a top four contender in the Premier League, there are plenty of positives to take away in terms of the young players rising up the ranks who will form the future of the club.
And there is no brighter spot than one of the players who is not even on the current Tottenham first team. Hamburg center back Luka Vuskovic is enjoying his first season as a senior player, and he is absolutely crushing it in the Bundesliga, playing arguably at a higher level than any other defender in German football.
Ranking alongside the world's finest youngsters
As Matt Hayes of Transfermarkt relays, Vuskovic has quietly more than doubled his transfer value. Initially placed as an 18 million euro player before the season started - which is actually pretty good for an unproven teenage center back - Vuskovic is now already worth 40 million euros.
His increase in value of 22 million pounds is bigger than his initial value of 18 million, and literally only three players - Arda Guler of Real Madrid, as well as Bundesliga stars Yan Diomande (a quiet Tottenham winger transfer target) and Lennard Karl had a bigger increase than Vuskovic's 22 million euros. Vuskovic, by the way, tied with another young Bundesliga standout linked to Tottenham Hotspur in Said El Mala of FC Koln.
There is no question that Vuskovic is a wonderful talent. He is dominating aerial battles, defending like a beast, passing as well as any young center back in world football, progressing play way better than his peers, and even scoring crazy goals, too.
Tottenham already have two of the world's finest center backs in Cristian Romero and Micky van de Ven, and both of them are, relatively speaking, young. Vuskovic is even younger at 18 and playing like one of the best center backs in Europe. That is massive for Spurs.