Tottenham’s underlying numbers are as bad as their Premier League position suggests. There is little reason to believe Thomas Frank can turn this around and save Spurs’ season.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but there are plenty of Tottenham Hotspur observers who would say none is needed to know that Thomas Frank isn’t the right manager for this team.
After a decent start to the season, Spurs have sunk down the Premier League table to 14th following a run of just two wins from 13 games. Things have got so toxic that their fans are clashing with players, booing the manager before matches have even kicked off, and many have entirely lost hope. There were more than 10,000 empty seats for Tuesday night’s Champions League win over Borussia Dortmund.
That victory provided a rare reason for hope, as a threadbare Spurs put in a genuinely good performance. They were a goal up and fully in control by the time Dortmund were reduced to 10 men, and fully deserved their 2-0 win.f
Even though the result can be caveated by the 26th-minute red card given to Daniel Svensson, there were still plenty of positives to take from the game. With only 11 available senior outfielders, Spurs played some of the best football we’ve seen under Frank to move up to fourth in the Champions League table overnight. They now have one foot in the round of 16 and have given themselves a good chance of avoiding the play-off round to get into the knockouts, currently fifth with one matchday to play.
But as was the case last season, when Tottenham won the Europa League but finished 17th in the Premier League, progress in Europe cannot mask their myriad of problems. For many, the final straw for Frank came a long time ago.
The Dortmund game gave the fans a precious chance to cheer. But for every mildly impressive result under Frank, there have been a run of dismal displays, much like the five-game winless streak since Spurs’ previous victory, a 1-0 win at Crystal Palace in late December.
In the time between Spurs winning at Selhurst Park and then beating Dortmund this week, they had an awful time of it. They failed to build on early leads against teams they would have been expected to beat (Sunderland and Bournemouth); lost to teams who had previously gone months without a win (Bournemouth and West Ham); crashed out of the FA Cup after a miserable first half left them too much to do to recover (vs Aston Villa); and they put in one of the least inspiring performances you’ll ever see, failing to do almost anything of note in one of the dullest matches in recent Premier League memory (vs Brentford).
For many, it was during that run that any lingering hope Frank might be able to turn the sinking ship around vanished entirely. Slowly but surely, the few fans who remained loyal – arguably naively so – to the idea that mere patience was all that was required have been proved wrong. The Dortmund win should not distract from how bad things have been domestically.
Much of the belief that Frank just needed time was based on the experience of Spurs’ now-thriving rivals across north London. Arsenal struggled in the league for the first 18 months of Mikel Arteta’s reign as manager, finishing eighth in both 2019-20 and 2020-21, the first time the club had finished that low in back-to-back seasons since 1975-76 (17th) and 1976-77 (8th).
Plenty of Arsenal fans lost faith in their manager. In December of 2020-21, with the club 15th in the table following a run of eight losses and just two wins in 12 matches, some were left fearing the worst. There was genuine talk of a relegation battle. Meanwhile, Arteta was ridiculed for saying that everyone should “trust the process” in the face of some of the worst results the club had known in its recent history.
And yet, look at how he has turned it around. Five seasons on, Arsenal are in their fourth straight title battle, and they are huge favourites to win it this season, having finished second for the last three seasons in a row. They are looking competitive on all four fronts this season.
There is very likely some trust – or more accurately blind hope – that Spurs can follow a similar path to recovery, not least from their chief executive Vinai Venkatesham, who, as it happens, was in an identical post at Arsenal from September 2020 to July 2024 – the precise period of the team’s remarkable rise.
There are undoubtedly similarities between the rivals’ situations in that Tottenham are, as Arsenal were, in dire straits, miles away from where they want to be, and with every reason to doubt their manager’s credentials.
But the difference is there were green shoots of hope at Arsenal, not least in the fact they had won the FA Cup in Arteta’s first season.
At Spurs, aside from a positive performance for 80 minutes against Paris Saint-Germain in the European Super Cup and a 2-0 win over Manchester City shortly afterwards – both way back in August – Frank’s six months at the club have provided very, very little reason for optimism.
That’s because performances have been almost exclusively terrible, in stark contrast to Frank’s bullish and, to some, infuriating assertions earlier in the season that his team had played well for significant periods in most games. Most who had watched those matches found it hard to agree.
When Spurs have lost – and there have been a lot of losses – they have deserved to. When they have drawn, they have usually come away the happier of the teams; they have snuck a late equaliser in five of their eight draws in all competitions, while in another of them – the goalless draw at Monaco in the Champions League – goalkeeper Guglielmo Vicario was almost entirely responsible for their clean sheet and point. He made eight saves that night in a man-of-the-match display.
But most notably, they have barely even played well in victory, making the win over Dortmund even more surprising. It was far from a perfect performance, but it was difficult not to ask why they have been unable to produce anything like that standard of football more often.
Frank’s Spurs have consistently struggled to keep hold of the ball or progress play through the thirds. More often than not, they have created far fewer and far worse chances than their opponents. And even when they do create chances, they have relied on set-pieces more than any other team, with a higher proportion of their expected goals (36.2%) coming at dead balls than any other side in the Premier League this season. They have managed only 14.0 xG from open play in their 22 games.
Spurs have won the ‘xG battle’ (generated more expected goals than their opponents) in just eight of their 22 Premier League games this season. Only Burnley, Fulham and West Ham have won on xG fewer times than them.
What’s more, of Tottenham’s eight xG victories, four have come at home when they have gone behind and been chasing the game, and their opponents have dropped back to defend their lead – against Liverpool, Fulham, Aston Villa and Manchester United. Spurs lost the first three matches in that list and drew with United.
These numbers do highlight one limitation of xG. Spurs might have won on xG against Liverpool and Fulham, for example, but on both occasions that was largely the result of them going 2-0 down and fighting their way back into the game late on against a team who were happy to sit on their lead. Expected goals doesn’t take into account game state.
Opta’s expected points model runs into similar problems, but it is useful nonetheless in trying to work out where teams ‘deserve’ to be in the league. The model simulates the number of goals scored by each side in a match based on the xG value of every shot taken, and then simulates every match 10,000 times and assigns points to either team from the proportion of those sims they won, drew and lost. The idea is that over a period of time, xG data can tell us how well or badly a team is creating chances, thus giving a better indication than the actual table of how everyone is really playing.
Throughout Frank’s reign, Spurs have persistently overachieved compared to their underlying numbers. After nine games of the season, for example, Spurs were third in the Premier League, but the xPts table had them down in 13th. In other words, their performances were worthy of enough points to be 13th in the league. No team had a bigger difference between their actual and ‘expected’ positions. This graphic shows that, rather than the 17 points they actually had, their underlying numbers suggested they deserved 11.2 xPts.
Knowing what we know now, these were warning signs from back in October that things were going to head south. And so it proved, as Spurs now find themselves 14th in the Premier League (while they are still 13th in the xPts table). They have sunk to a position their underlying numbers suggested was on the cards months ago. The table right now is a far better reflection of Spurs’ displays.
Back in 2018, at the start of his time at Brentford, Frank survived losing eight of his first 10 matches in the Championship because the club looked at the data behind his team’s performances and saw they had been unfortunate to lose so many times.
At Spurs, there are no positive underlying numbers to fall back on. In fact, the data has long hinted that results might take a turn for the worse. For a manager like Frank, who places great value in metrics like expected goals, those numbers should be alarming.
The parallel with Arsenal is worth quickly revisiting here, because in Arteta’s first half-season, they had the sixth-best record in the Premier League but were 13th in the xPts table in that time. Perhaps that is another similarity that the Tottenham hierarchy is clinging to, but the difference here is Spurs have dropped to their dismal xPts position, when Arsenal never did.
We are now three months on from Tottenham having been third in the table, and relegation appears a more likely possibility than a challenge for the top four. They have a trip to 19th-placed Burnley on Saturday that has become a must-win game because their next four league opponents are Manchester City, Manchester United, Newcastle and Arsenal. Recent displays give little hope that they will take many points – if any – from those matches.
As there have been throughout Frank’s reign, there are mitigating circumstances. Spurs finished 17th last season, and “fixing” them is a long-term project that was never going to be completed by January of this season. He has also had to deal with a horrendous list of injuries.
It’s also worth noting how well Frank has done in the Champions League. Even if Spurs have faced an easier set of opponents than most, finishing in the top eight of the league phase is no easy task, and Spurs might well achieve that.
There’s also the fact that xG data isn’t always right. Aston Villa and Sunderland deserve to be 12th and 19th, respectively, according to the xPts model, but are actually third and ninth. They might both fall down the table, but it is equally possible that they continue to defy the underlying numbers.
However, the eye test tells everyone watching that Spurs haven’t been very good under Frank, while both Villa and Sunderland are solid at the back and effective going forward, too. Spurs haven’t been either of those things with any consistency.
The club’s hierarchy may stick to their guns and plough on with Frank in the hope that their fortunes turn, possibly because there are so few viable alternatives available right now, and they may be proved right.
History may look back on them favourably for being so patient in the face of near-unanimous public opinion that Frank had to be sacked. The 2-0 win over Borussia Dortmund on Tuesday 20 January 2026 might prove to be the point at which everything turned for the better for Frank. In the midst of their fourth successive title challenge in 2030-31, we may all look back in awe of Venkatesham for repeating the trick he had pulled off first at Arsenal. Oh, how we’ll laugh.
But the numbers at Spurs are very worrying, and they have been for a while. It would be brave for the club to keep on backing Frank, and doing so will quite possibly be to their own detriment.
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