Thomas Frank was a symptom of Tottenham's progressing disease

Following yet another dismal performance on Tuesday night, Tottenham Hotspur have finally parted ways with manager Thomas Frank. Under his leadership, the club has won 2 of its last 17 Premier League matches, and is now just five points above the drop zone.

Nothing about Spurs’ performances suggest that they’ve been unlucky in any way, or that the manager deserved more time. Tottenham’s -0.27 xG difference per 90 is worse than every team ahead of them in the table except Sunderland. It’s basically level with Nottingham Forest’s -0.28. They’re still doing better than the teams in the drop zone, but Spurs are legitimately the 15th or 16th worst team in the Premier League, which is obviously inexcusable on their budget.

A team with that budget — Spurs have a wage bill more than double that of Leeds and Sunderland — does not become a relegation fodder side simply due to a bad coach hire. Thomas Frank was doing a bad job and very much deserved the sack, but there isn’t a lot of evidence that a good coach would have this team competing for a top 4 place. Spurs have a talent problem, exacerbated by a coaching problem, made impossible to fix by an executive problem. They are a club in need of a complete organizational rebuild.

But the mechanics of how and why Spurs sucked as a football team on the pitch are still interesting, so we can spend some time diving into Frank’s failures before getting into the bigger picture stuff.

First and foremost, Frank was brought into Tottenham with the idea that he’d fix a defense that was poor last season under Ange Postecoglou. While Spurs certainly got better at preventing high quality shots, that improvement was only to mid, not actually good. Clear shots and xG per shot conceded went down a lot, but Spurs still conceded a high enough number of total shots that their defense was never elite.

For that improved defensive structure, Spurs sacrificed all attacking ideas. Their 0.98 non-penalty xG and 0.65 open play xG per 90 are both worse than Nottingham Forest, as well as every team above them in the Premier League table.

If not for some excellent finishing — especially from center backs Micky van de Ven and Cristian Romero on set pieces — Spurs could be in an even more serious pickle. They’ve only generated 25.89 xG from their shots…

…but their post-shot xG is looking lovely, especially on headers. The big boys are placing them in the corners.

Frank arrived at Spurs from Brentford, a team that placed significant emphasis on set pieces before it was cool. And Frank has brought some improved set piece play to Spurs, in both boxes.

Unfortunately, you don’t get to make much use of improvement in those phases if you’re not winning attacking set pieces, and conceding a lot of defensive ones. Spurs’ set piece xG differential last season was -0.06 p90, and this season it’s -0.03.

That’s the Thomas Frank story. Good at setting up an organized defensive shape and set pieces on both ends. Bad enough at everything else that those things don’t matter at all, at least for a team of Tottenham’s ambition. But Tottenham were failing to reach those ambitions — Europa League trophy aside — for a while before he showed up. This is why Postecoglou was sacked despite winning a trophy.

Behold the rolling xG trendline, in which Frank’s Spurs look a lot like Ange’s Spurs. They might have looked much different aesthetically on the pitch, but the results were the same. Opponents get more and better shots than you, at about the same rate. There was a period of the fall where it looked like Spurs’ defense was getting good enough to justify Frank’s appointment and style of play, but they’ve fallen back down to earth in recent weeks.

Frank’s Spurs are getting the same results as Ange’s Spurs because the club has a talent problem. This is being made worse by a severe injury crisis: Spurs had 10 players listed as injured for their most recent match, plus Romero suspended. Wilson Odobert tore his ACL, while Conor Gallagher was subbed off with what is hopefully a minor knock. But that’s a staggering 13 senior pros that Spurs could be without in their next match.

Sporting director Johan Lange and other members of the Spurs front office might try to use this as an excuse for why the team is so poor, but I don’t think they should get off that easily. We don’t have time here to go over every aspect of Tottenham’s squad and transfer business, but we can look at a couple players, just to get an idea of the biggest problems.

We pointed out ball-progressing midfielder as Tottenham’s biggest need in May, and again in October when we had early signs that Frank’s tenure wasn’t going to work out. Moe wrote a more detailed piece on the issue later that month.

Spurs responded by signing Conor Gallagher in January. He is a central midfielder, but not exactly the dynamic ball progressing type. He’s more of an energetic box-to-box presser and ball-winner, a profile of player that Spurs had already made most of the squad out of. Gallagher’s been better than Pape Sarr and Rodrigo Bentancur, but not by much.

For comparison, here’s what an actual ball progressor on a relegation battling team looks like.

I also joked over the summer that I would rather get hit by a car than sign Mohammed Kudus, which is harsh. Given that I did not have health insurance when I made that statement, it was also absolutely false. But as of January 1, ya girl has coverage, so I’d absolutely take a shot from a compact sedan at low speed to get out of this deal.

The Spurs front office has absolutely no idea how to address the problems with its squad or coaching staff. In David Ornstein’s piece about Frank’s sacking, he noted that “Spurs are working through a few contingency plans” with regards to how to proceed. That those plans were not finalized months ago, when it was clear that Spurs were not improving under Frank and sliding into a relegation battle, is extremely alarming.

It is not, however, shocking. It’s behavior in line with a team that fired Daniel Levy without plans to appoint a director of football, and didn’t fire Lange and Fabio Paratici after a disastrous summer transfer window. CEO Vinai Venkatesham’s first order of business when he stepped into his job should have been interviewing director of football candidates. That person could assess the current scouting, data, and coaching setups and start to put a coherent structure in place. They could lead a coaching search knowing what type of personality and style of football the club was looking for.

Spurs have none of that. They are flying blind. Would Mauricio Pochettino, Oliver Glasner, or Michael Carrick be the best hire for Spurs? No one knows, and I don’t particularly care until the actual core problem is solved.

There is no magic manager out there. A great one might make this Spurs team mid-table, but the club is not going to get results in line with their budget until their front office is rebuilt. A real director of football should decide the next permanent manager of Tottenham Hotspur, not the three-headed monster of Venkatesham, Lange, and Joe Lewis’ kids. And that manager won’t be successful unless Spurs start shipping out the rubbish and signing better players.

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