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Analysis
Thomas Frank’s dreadful Spurs spell is latest example that managers simply can’t change style
By
Michael Cox
Feb. 11, 2026 1:00 pm UTC
Tottenham Hotspur’s decision to sack their manager after a hugely disappointing 38-game tenure is obviously bad news for Thomas Frank. But, to use a literary device curiously common in football punditry, it’s even worse news for ‘Your Thomas Franks’.
After all, Frank will surely get another decent job on the back of his impressive performance with Brentford. You can imagine him popping up at a mid-sized Bundesliga club, for example.
But Frank was the latest test case for Premier League managers who have overachieved with underdogs through straightforward football, and put themselves in the frame for a ‘big job’.
The viability of a manager successfully making the step up has become a common theme in modern football, particularly now there’s a bigger gap (in budget and expectations) between the top and bottom in the English top flight. There’s also an overwhelming emphasis on a certain style of football that falls in the middle of a Venn diagram roughly incorporating ‘entertaining’, ‘attacking’, and ‘possession’.
You can’t entirely separate that from bad results. Frank hasn’t been sacked because his football was boring; he’s been sacked because he collected 29 points from 26 league matches, because Tottenham are bottom of the six-game form guide (two draws and four defeats), and because they are being dragged into a scrap to avoid relegation. There are some legitimate excuses for Frank, particularly injuries, but he simply appeared to be unsuited to the demands of managing a big club.
Under Frank, Tottenham constantly looked too passive, particularly in the home defeats against Chelsea and Bournemouth. They were bad at building up from the back, most obviously for an early concession away at Leeds. Often, they didn’t have anywhere near enough creativity in the side, most obviously in a terribly limp display at Woolwich. On Tuesday night,
Newcastle United overwhelmed Spurs, who struggled to get out of their own half for long periods.
Frank was, more or less, playing Brentford football with Tottenham.
Which brings us back to the question: can a manager change his identity? On recent evidence, no. The Frank era was a stark contrast from Mauricio Pochettino’s spell at Tottenham, even though Pochettino, like Frank, came from a Premier League newcomer (he took over midway through Southampton’s first season up after promotion). But Pochettino was always focused on playing ‘big club’ football. His Southampton became renowned as
the league’s most aggressive pressing side. Results were good. But the style, as much as the success, attracted Spurs.
This is vaguely quantifiable. Here’s a slightly unusual graph. It features managers who have taken on ‘big jobs’ (which we’ve defined as clubs who have been in the league for 15-plus seasons — Woolwich, Chelsea, Everton, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur) having made the step up from another Premier League side. Along the bottom is the average possession share they recorded in their final season at their old club, a rough measure of style. And up the y-axis is how many matches they lasted at their new club, a rough measure of success.
There is a rough pattern here. Pochettino was the manager most focused on possession at his previous club, and he enjoyed a hugely positive stint at Tottenham, turning them into Champions League finalists and Premier League title contenders. Things ended badly for Brendan Rodgers and Roberto Martinez at Liverpool and Everton, but their initial progress was good.
Rodgers’ Liverpool briefly seemed nailed-on to win the Premier League in 2013-14 when they had started as the fifth-favourites, and Martinez took Everton to their highest points tally in the Premier League era.
On the other hand, managers who were accustomed to low possession figures didn’t last long at all.
OK, there are a couple of outliers. Graham Potter was moving to Chelsea, a club traditionally less interested in ‘good football’ than other big clubs. He was therefore a bad fit for the opposite reasons to others.
The other outlier is Sean Dyche at Everton, the fourth-longest spell on this graph. But Everton, during that period, were little more than relegation scrappers, thanks to two significant points deductions in Dyche’s two seasons at the club. Early on,
Dyche stated his intention “to play beautiful football if I can, but I want to play winning football first”. Fair enough. He kept them up twice. But at no point did beautiful football enter the equation, and even David Moyes’ relatively basic approach has been a significant upgrade in that respect.
Almost everyone else, more or less, has failed to change their identity. Of course, Managers don’t go into these bigger jobs blind. They know there are higher expectations, that they must adapt their style of play. But they seem to struggle in a multitude of ways.
Roy Hodgson at Liverpool was a classic case. “It is insulting to suggest that because you move to a new club, your methods suddenly don’t work when they’ve held you in good stead for 35 years,” he said at one point. “It’s unbelievable. My methods have translated from Halmstad to Malmo to Orebro to Neuchatel Xamax to the Swiss national team.” And while “Neuchatel Xamax” is a great name to throw in to underline your globetrotting background, namedropping the three-time Swiss champions didn’t convince Liverpool supporters that he understood the task.
“The fact that it hasn’t gone as well as I’d have hoped results-wise is just the nature of football,” Hodgson said later on. “I haven’t worked any differently here than I did in the last six months at Fulham.” That, of course, was partly the problem.
Moyes faced a similar problem when tasked with replacing Sir Alex Ferguson at Manchester United. The story about him coaching Rio Ferdinand by showing him videos of Phil Jagielka’s defending is perhaps overplayed — Moyes was surely making a specific tactical point — but the former Everton manager seemed overwhelmed by the task. His Everton side went into games against big teams primarily to stop the opposition. That wasn’t enough at United.
Another interesting case doesn’t feature on the above graph, as he was taking an international job. But Sam Allardyce’s single game in charge of England was telling. This was a man who unashamedly played long ball football, but also once claimed, albeit light-heartedly, that “I’m not suited to Bolton or Blackburn, I would be more suited to Inter Milan or Real Madrid… it’s not where I’m suited to, it’s just where I’ve been for most of the time”.
England was his chance to prove that. But in England’s 1-0 win in Slovakia, his captain, Wayne Rooney, ignored Allardyce’s tactics and did his own thing. “Wayne played wherever he wanted,” Allardyce said in his post-match interview with ITV. “He was brilliant and controlled midfield. I can’t stop Wayne playing there.” This was an odd comment. So he was asked about it further in the press conference.
“He holds a lot more experience at international football than I do as an international manager,” Allardyce said. “So, when he is using his experience and playing as a team member, it’s not for me to say where he’s going to play. We’d like to get him into goalscoring positions more. I must admit, he did play a little deeper than I thought he’d play.”
And this was a perfect example of the other side of management at big clubs: dealing with star players. Even Allardyce, the boldest and brashest manager in the game, who had worked with top-class players before, felt unable to instruct Rooney. Equally, it sounded like Rooney simply didn’t feel a manager of Allardyce’s calibre had the authority to boss him around. Often, big players just ‘aren’t having’ these managers.
There are some unusual cases on the list. Roberto Di Matteo, who had a promising spell as manager at West Bromwich Albion but was actually handed the Chelsea job as an interim after being the club’s assistant, won the Champions League with an ultra-defensive style of football but was seemingly not the man to create a more long-term, attack-minded approach the following season, and was sacked at almost the first possible opportunity.
It’s almost impossible to find a recent example of a manager transforming his style, going from success with ‘underdog football’ to success with ‘big club football’. Vincent Kompany’s strange journey from relegating Burnley with a comical commitment to possession football to performing excellently with Bayern Munich supports the idea that stylistic concerns are vital when it comes to big clubs appointing a new manager.
Frank remains a respected manager who was hugely popular during his spell with Brentford. And for those of us without a vested interest in the particular club, it’s always interesting to see how these coaches — Allardyce, Dyche, Frank — will fare when stepping up to a bigger job. But, sadly, they constantly fail.
Big clubs perform best when they appoint a coach with a track record of playing ‘the right style’ of football within the Premier League, with a foreign club, or even — being charitable to Enzo Maresca’s performance with Chelsea, as he did win two trophies — in the Championship.
The most damning thing about Frank’s experience is that this is the season when
the Premier League has gone ‘old-school’, and his approach still seemed too basic for Tottenham.
The next case study could be Oliver Glasner. His performance at Crystal Palace has been exceptional, and in highlights form, Palace play very entertaining football. But last season and this season, his side has averaged the fourth-lowest possession share in the league, and have the lowest pass completion rate.
Can Glasner adjust his methods to the demands of a bigger club? The overwhelming evidence suggests not, and there are reasons to think that Glasner, while favouring a different style of football to Frank,
may face similar problems if appointed by a big club this summer.
