Thomas Frank has been appointed Tottenham boss without having managed in the Champions League before. We look at the unique challenge he will face in north London.
Thomas Frank, the new Tottenham Hotspur manager, faces the rather unusual challenge of going into a new club who have qualified for the Champions League.
It’s an unusual situation because whatever a team has done to get into Europe’s biggest competition tends to mean they had a successful season, and so there’s rarely any desire or need to change manager in the months afterwards.
But what has happened at Spurs recently is unique. They won the Europa League – guaranteeing a spot in next season’s Champions League – after their worst ever Premier League campaign. Tottenham finished 17th in the table having lost more games (22) than any other team to avoid relegation in the Premier League era, and so chose to sack their trophy-drought-ending manager Ange Postecoglou.
It means Frank faces a challenge that few others ever have ever had: Champions League football in his first season at a new club. He is only the 10th manager in the Premier League era to go into a new club during the off-season with a Champions League campaign coming up.
But the task for Frank is actually even greater. He goes into Spurs having never managed anyone in the Champions League before. In fact, a couple of Europa League qualifiers with Brøndby is all the experience in European competition he has as a manager.
There’s no doubting the quality of the work he did at Brentford, nor the fact that he is a hugely exciting appointment, but the question mark over how he will contend with the challenge of Champions League football at Tottenham is a legitimate one.
Also, none of the above takes into account that the Spurs team he has taken over have just become the lowest-ranked team (in terms of league position) to win either the UEFA Cup/Europa League or the European Cup/Champions League, and the lowest-ranked team to qualify for the Champions League.
Postecoglou did admit after the season ended that he had put all of his eggs in the Europa League basket and essentially gave up in the Premier League in the closing weeks, so that does provide some mitigation for his side’s terrible final position. Nevertheless, there are clearly lots of problems to be fixed for Spurs to become a team capable of competing in Europe’s biggest competition. In league position terms, they will become the worst team ever to play in the Champions League.
Frank may also be concerned about the fate of previous managers who debuted in the Champions League in their first season at a new club.
In the Premier League era, five other managers have gone to a new team during the summer before a season in the Champions League without ever having managed a game in the competition before. Three of them didn’t last even one full season, and neither of the other two lasted longer than 18 months. Clearly, this is a tough situation in which to join a club.
Each of those five managers started at their new club in different circumstances. The first was Ray Harford, who replaced Kenny Dalglish as Blackburn Rovers manager shortly after they won the league in 1994-95. He survived the full season, with Blackburn finishing seventh in the Premier League, but they crashed out of the Champions League in the group stage, and he lasted only a couple of months into the following campaign. His 16-month stint was longer than three of the other managers in this list but the shortest for a Blackburn manager in 17 years, showing how much winning the league had altered expectations at the club.
There was a 13-year wait for another club to change manager off the back of a Champions League-securing campaign, with Chelsea next to do so when they sacked Avram Grant after a 2007-08 season in which they came close to winning three major trophies but ended up empty-handed. They finished two points off top spot in the league, lost the League Cup final to Spurs in extra-time and missed out on Champions League glory by the width of the post as John Terry missed a penalty to win the final against Manchester United. ‘Close’ wasn’t enough for Roman Abramovich, though, and Grant was sacked, with Luiz Felipe Scolari coming in.
Scolari already had bags of experience; he was 26 years into his managerial career when he moved to London for his first club job in European football. He had even already won the World Cup with Brazil. But he had never managed in the Champions League, and was sacked in February with Chelsea fourth in the table and seven points off top spot.
Chelsea have since sacked two more managers who joined in the summer after Champions League football was secured: André Villas-Boas in the March of 2011-12, nine months after he joined following a season in which Chelsea had finished second, and Frank Lampard in January 2021 after he joined in 2019, when the Blues had just finished third and won the Europa League under Maurizio Sarri. With his 18-month spell, Lampard lasted longer than any other manager in this list.
The other manager to make his Champions League debut with a new club was David Moyes, who had the impossible job of replacing Sir Alex Ferguson at title-winning United in 2013. Moyes was sacked in April of that first season at Old Trafford.
Interestingly, though, some of those teams did very well indeed in the Champions League despite having a manager with no experience in that competition. Moyes’ United made the quarter-finals, Scolari’s Chelsea went on to reach the semis after he was sacked, and Villas-Boas’ side won the whole thing once Roberto Di Matteo (another Champions League debutant but a mid-season appointment) came in.
Frank will arguably have an easier job at Tottenham than any of those other five managers in that there is so much room for improvement at his new club. There’s also little expectation that he will win a trophy, which couldn’t be said of those fired Chelsea managers nor Moyes at United.
But he also has an awful lot of work to do to improve this team’s results sufficiently to satisfy a fanbase, many of whom will hope to see Spurs challenging for the Champions League qualification spots next season.
To do so in the 2024-25 season, Spurs would have needed an extra 29 points on the 38 they actually collected. An improvement that great from one season to the next has only been achieved by three teams in Premier League history, showing just how big a challenge Frank faces. Two of them won the title (Chelsea +43 points in 2016-17 and Leicester +40 points in 2015-16), but the other occurred this season, as Nottingham Forest won 29 more points than the previous year. Perhaps crucially, though, none of those teams were playing in Europe, as Spurs will be.
Life at Tottenham begins for Frank in mid-August as he becomes the first Premier League manager whose opening game in charge of a club will be the UEFA Super Cup, which pits Spurs against Paris Saint-Germain in Udine. Lampard came close to doing so with Chelsea in 2019, but their Super Cup defeat to Liverpool was actually his second game.
Across Europe since 2000, four managers have started at a new club with their very first game in the Super Cup and, ominously for Frank, none have lasted more than a single season in their job.
The 2004 Super Cup pitted two new managers against one another, as Porto’s Victor Fernández faced Valencia’s Claudio Ranieri. Both were sacked in February of their first season.
In 2016, Jorge Sampaoli kicked off life as Sevilla’s new head coach with a Super Cup defeat and spent only a season in charge, though that was because he was appointed Argentina boss as opposed to being sacked. Then, two years later, Julen Lopetegui went in at Real Madrid after they won the Champions League, so started off with a Super Cup game; he lasted just three months.
You would think Frank will have to do extremely badly not to be given at least one full season at Tottenham, but there will also be some pressure on him to start quickly and maintain the positive feeling that the Europa League trophy has brought to N17.
He faces a unique challenge in his new job, and will do very well to contend with the balancing act that European football requires. If he lasts longer than a season and a half, he’ll already have done better than any other manager debuting in the Champions League before him.
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