Tottenham Hotspur are yet to bring a new face through the door in the transfer window and that has brought some frustration among the fanbase.
Spurs are not alone in failing to get going in the market yet with Manchester City, Chelsea and Liverpool the only real big movers so far, the first two due to their Club World Cup commitments. However, after that Europa League win and the prospect of Champions League football next season, this was meant to be a summer of building without dallying.
Add to that the change in head coach with Thomas Frank replacing Ange Postecoglou and then chairman Daniel Levy making it clear that the Europa League trophy was not enough and that he wants Tottenham to win the Premier League and Champions League and you've got the recipe for a summer in which there needs to be plenty of evidence for the supporters of trying to make those declarations more than just wishful thinking.
So far the arrivals have been for players already within the walls. Mathys Tel's loan from Bayern Munich became permanent, costing Spurs £29.8million (€35million), plus a potential further £4.2million (€5million) in add-ons. Kevin Danso's £21million loan from Lens also officially became permanent on Tuesday. Luka Vuskovic was signed from Hajduk Split back in 2023 but had to wait two years and turning 18 before he could officially make his £12million move following loans in Poland and Belgium.
The first new arrival is currently likely to be the £5million transfer of Kota Takai from Kawasaki Frontale, with the 20-year-old Japan international centre-back set to tie up the move next week following a goodbye to the J.League club's fans this Saturday.
But why the lack of big money transfer movement a Tottenham during a period when all the talk has been about pushing on and improving? Here we look at five potential reasons.
Waiting for investment
Transfers cost money obviously and if there's one thing that's been said a lot about Tottenham in recent years it's that despite being one of the most high-value sides in the world, they are an asset-rich club rather than a cash-rich one, particularly after the losses made in recent seasons. That is the reason Levy publicly admitted to a need for new investment a year ago in order for the club to properly compete against their rivals.
So far that new investment has not arrived but there is an expectation among many that it will this summer. With no apparent movement in terms of outside investment as of yet, it may well be that ENIC is required to pump funds into the club in exchange for a bigger stake in Tottenham.
They did that in 2022 with a £150million capital increase which the club appeared to end up only taking £100million of. Then in December last year, ENIC injected £35million of capital into the club, increasing their holding within Spurs slightly to an 86.91% share, up from 86.58%.
Of that majority ENIC share of the club, a trust of which Joe Lewis' family are beneficiaries owns 70.12% while Levy and his family are potential beneficiaries of discretionary trusts which own 29.88% of that share capital.
Spurs will make money from their Champions League qualification but that will be offset by the £32million or so they lost from the drop in Premier League prize money for finishing 17th rather than the previous season's fifth-place finish.
That's all of no consolation to supporters who were told that the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium would be a game changer for the club. It's certainly brought in record revenues but Spurs' need for new investment shows that they require far more than that.
That all could be one reason for not being able to invest in transfers yet, particularly ones where there is a significant portion of the fee required up front.
That wage structure
Much has been made of Spurs being bottom of the Premier League table when it comes to the revenue to wages ratio.
Tottenham's wage structure has always been explained away as being performance-driven in terms of being one of the league's most lucrative for players if they reach certain targets and hit various triggers. It will certainly be interesting to see what winning the Europa League meant in terms of bonus pay-outs to players as Postecoglou reportedly got with his contract. That might have been a very expensive night in Bilbao.
The obvious downside to having a lower wage ceiling than your rivals is that targets will often go for the guaranteed money rather than the potential money. Football is a team sport rather than an individual one, so meeting performance-related bonuses is reliant on others helping out.
Some of the wages at the Premier League's biggest clubs are two to three times what Tottenham are believed to offer in terms of a weekly salary and that's going to put them at a disadvantage if they can't sell the rest of the project as being brighter than their consistently challenging competitors.
Thomas Frank's squad analysis
There is also the fact that with any managerial change, the new man will want time to look at the squad that he has inherited and make a decision on what players he wants to keep and which areas need strengthening.
Frank will not start working with his players until a few return through the doors on Saturday and then the international stars start filing back into Hotspur Way next week.
So in the coming week or so the Dane will start to form a better image of the squad he has at his disposal from working with them face to face. There may be players who were key under Postecoglou that the new man believes need to be replaced while some who looked out of the picture could suddenly become vital under Frank.
That's not to say that some clear needs could not have been addressed yet in conversations between the Dane and his compatriot Spurs' technical director Johan Lange, but the bulk of the club's transfer window work will be decided by what comes in this next month of pre-season.
Uncertainty and that club-trained issue
Frank also needs to have some conversations with his key men, for the futures of both captain Son Heung-min and vice-captain Cristian Romero will need to be clarified with the Dane. The South Korean has reached the stage where after a decade of service the club will let him drive what comes next for him but obviously Frank's opinion on his amount of game time will help inform his decision in the season before the World Cup.
football.london reported almost a month ago that an MLS move was something of interest to Son and it may be that like Hugo Lloris, he ends up starting the campaign at Spurs before moving in January ahead of the new season in the USA. It could also be that the Tottenham skipper will want another crack at the Champions League after that heartbreak in 2019.
The conversation between Son and Frank in the coming week will go a long way to shaping what comes next for the captain, who turns 33 on Tuesday.
The new Spurs head coach wants to keep Romero in the fold and with two years left on the 27-year-old's contract compared to Son's 12 months, it's more about whether a club like Atletico Madrid will seriously offer the sort of major fee that might turn Tottenham's head for the World Cup winner, who was named player of the tournament in the Europa League.
The other issue at Spurs is the long-standing club-trained problem with a lack of senior players that have come through at the club. That leaves Frank having to fit 31 players into 22 spots in the Champions League squad if we are including the incoming Takai. The new manager needs to decide on a bucket load of departures before the squad can keep being added to otherwise it will just sit there bloated and financially draining.
Lack of decisiveness
There's also the possibility of course that Spurs just simply haven't been decisive enough in the transfer market so far in their pursuit of various players.
Tottenham have been long-term admirers of more players than you can shake a stick at but that doesn't mean a move materialises. There are various targets over the years where the club has played the long game and ended up without their target, none more so than the failure to sign Jack Grealish from Aston Villa under Mauricio Pochettino.
In an ideal world transfers would get done in time for pre-season. Despite the need for Frank to analyse his squad, that did not stop Postecoglou getting new signings through the door by this point in his first year with James Maddison and Guglielmo Vicario already at Hotspur Way by the end of June, so it can be done and for key players as well.
Mohammed Kudus is one of the versatile attacker names on Tottenham's list this summer and there is a feeling within the market that West Ham desperately need to sell the Ghana international to fund their own forays into the market to rebuild Graham Potter's squad. With a reported £85million release clause for the first 10 days of July it is unlikely the Hammers are going to get anything near that after a disappointing second season in England from Kudus.
Tottenham could be waiting to see exactly what their fellow London side will drop their expectations to, if there's not competition for the player. That of course is a dangerous game to play and the past has shown that more decisive clubs will jump in if Tottenham wait too long.
Some selling sides will have been waiting for the new financial year when it comes to the PSR rules and sales going towards whatever they do in terms of incomings in the 12 months ahead.
Tottenham need to get moving though because all of those grand words will come back to haunt them if they cannot provide Frank with the tools to make their dreams a reality and his appointment a success.