Once again Tottenham Hotspur have reached a crossroads where chairman Daniel Levy must decide what the club is meant to be.
With Ange Postecoglou’s departure so the recent trend continued at the north London outfit of Levy replacing Spurs’ head coach every two years on the dot. You could have inked in a reminder on your calendar for the summer of 2025 to expect a major change in the dugout and a new direction, as it was two years before that, and two years before that, and yes, two years before that.
History does not bode well for Thomas Frank in that sense and the incoming Dane will be aiming to erase that scheduled appointment in Tottenham diaries for 2027. In all Levy has sacked 13 managers and with the arrival of Frank so the chairman will have had 19 different men leading the team from the dugout, including caretaker managers, during his 24 years at the club.
It’s a remarkable number and it’s not just different people appointed but very different styles, systems, characters and needs. The reset button has been pressed many, many times. Some other clubs have a set and defined style and way of approaching their football as well as their aims each season, all set within an overall stability, thus making managerial changes more seamless.
After a quarter of a century at the helm, it’s difficult to know exactly what Levy’s Tottenham is as it’s constantly changing. When you think it’s meant to be the swashbuckling style of Spurs of old, so Jose Mourinho, Antonio Conte and Nuno Espirito Santo have been appointed with a very different brand of football only to be sacked with a statement to be made that Tottenham want to get back to that exciting, attacking brand of football.
Levy himself has admitted that he made mistakes with the appointment of the two ‘trophy managers’, who then found they could not reproduce what they did elsewhere at Tottenham, although Mourinho will always point to the fact that he was sacked days before a cup final.
Thomas Frank’s Tottenham arrival, Postecoglou’s impact, Levy’s big roll of the dice – click here to listen to the latest episode of Gold & Guest Talk Tottenham!
“We did it twice and look you have to learn from your mistakes,” Levy said in 2023. “They’re great managers but maybe not for this club. For what we want, we want to play in a certain way and if that means it has to take a little bit longer to win maybe it’s the right thing for us. That’s why bringing Ange in was from my point of view the right decision.”
It didn’t actually take a ‘little bit longer’, only that familiar two-year timeframe, but with that trophy win the chairman seemingly craved now in the bag, it was decided it wasn’t the right decision.
The statement put out about Postecoglou’s departure informed that “the board has unanimously concluded that it is in the best interests of the club for a change to take place”.
The board in this instance is believed to have mainly comprised Levy alongside operations and finance director Matthew Collecott and lead independent director Jonathan Turner. Non-executive director Peter Charrington, director of ENIC, joined the board a couple of months ago, but sits on a number of different boards at various companies and is not believed to have got involved with football decisions at Tottenham as of yet.
The new CEO Vinai Venkatesham was only brought on to the board a couple of days before the decision, replacing executive director and long-time Levy advisor Donna-Maria Cullen. Cullen, who has been at Spurs for around three decades, is expected to remain connected to the club in a consultative capacity after she departs officially this summer. Chief football officer Scott Munn is expected to leave the club as well in the coming weeks officially, another Australian heading through the exit door.
The decision to remove Postecoglou, based on the poor Premier League position and points tally, was voted through and people within Tottenham were surprised when Levy did not put his name to it in the official statement as he had done for Conte, Mourinho and Mauricio Pochettino among others.
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The only recent occasion when the chairman did not have his quotes in a managerial sacking statement was when Espirito Santo departed in 2021. That was left to former – and potentially future – managing director of football Fabio Paratici. The Italian had convinced Levy to appoint the Portuguese by showing him footage of his more attacking Valencia side so perhaps it was only fair that Paratici should have his name attached to his exit after it failed within months.
However, after a week in which Cullen had received a lengthy goodbye from Levy in the statement of her departure and Ryan Mason also had words from the chairman as he left for his first managerial job at West Brom, it seemed odd to some within the club for there not to be a line from Levy owning the decision to sack the man who had won Tottenham their first trophy in 17 years.
The crux now for the chairman is to finally decide after almost a quarter of a century as the one constant at Spurs what the club is meant to be. He always said that he is the custodian of Tottenham Hotspur and he has without doubt improved the club greatly off the pitch, but on it we’re still none the wiser.
Are they a trophy-winning side, albeit the cup side they were before Levy’s arrival, because in their current guise they cannot become constant title challengers because not enough is invested into the club beyond what it makes? Mauricio Pochettino’s couple of seasons getting close to Leicester and Chelsea in a title race were the aberration rather than the norm.
Is the aim to simply exist by striving for the top four each season? Is it built around the prospect of bringing in Champions League football and the finance that comes with it to keep the club successful as a sustainable business first and foremost or is the most important thing to use that money to invest in higher aims as a football club?
The problem with the latter suggestion is that if it has been the plan for the past two and a half decades then it has only succeeded on six occasions.
Harry Redknapp’s fourth-place finish in 2012 did not bring Champions League football thanks to Chelsea’s exploits but perhaps that misfortune was balanced by Postecoglou leading Spurs into the elite club competition for a seventh time despite the struggles in the league. Yes, both managers were sacked weeks later.
Privately, Postecoglou is understood to have felt early on during his tenure at Tottenham that despite his best efforts to change things within the club, it wasn’t going to truly happen. The 59-year-old kept pushing and at least managed to mark his name in the north London outfit’s history before the two-year mark hit, unlike so many before him.
Tottenham need major investment and have officially been looking for that extra cash for more than 14 months now. All eyes will be on whether it finally arrives this summer through new means or through ENIC.
The imminent arrival of Thomas Frank feels like a huge roll of the dice by Levy in terms of how his legacy at the club will be remembered.
His chairmanship was always judged by the lack of trophies within those 24 years, other than 2008’s League Cup, but that narrative looked to be over with Postecoglou delivering the club’s first European title in 41 years for a grateful fanbase starved of success.
However, Spurs did not allow the euphoria around that night in Bilbao to last long. It could cost something approaching £20million to replace Postecoglou with Frank, including the bonus won by the Australian for bringing a trophy to the club and then there is the transfer cost in fitting a squad to yet another manager with different needs.
It’s a big financial outlay on a new head coach who is not a star name like Conte or Mourinho and one who will take some time to win over sections of the support.
For his part, Frank is a very good coach and a great communicator. He will say all of the right things to the fans and as importantly the players, who have shown their outpouring of thanks for what Postecoglou did for them in never-before-seen numbers after a managerial exit.
For Tottenham, Frank will be a safe pair of hands and he will need – and want – to be more than just that to make the change worthwhile.
The 51-year-old former teacher’s past in the Danish international youth set-up and what he did at Brentford shows that he will be able to develop the large group of talented youngsters Spurs have been amassing. Perhaps that is the hope for Levy that signing teenagers galore will see them all graduate with honours at the same time, but the Champions League will be an unforgiving classroom if they are not surrounded by top quality experience.
Frank has admitted in the past that he is very much a head coach, a man for the training pitches rather than a manager, and he will work with what he is given rather than demanding to have the final say on transfers as others have in the past. That will bring with it fewer awkward moments over ‘club signings’ as experienced under Tottenham’s bigger name managers but it also opens the door to a lack of synchronicity with the squad.
Key to preventing that initially will be the relationship with Johan Lange, who worked with Frank briefly at Lyngby, and the two men both believe in the data-driven world of football, something Spurs have attempted to switch to in recent years.
Paratici, who exists less within that world, will continue for now to remain around for advice in a consultancy capacity in the background, likely remaining there until there is further clarity on the ongoing trial in Italy involving him and fellow former Juventus officials.
This is a chance for Lange to forge his longer term future beyond this summer’s transfer window if he can provide Frank with the right tools. Much of that will in turn be dictated by what Tottenham can finance.
Tottenham are a club that have constantly changed beneath Levy even if the final product has rarely altered. The summer of 2025 has brought the biggest changes of the chairman’s tenure with both men’s and women’s head coaches sacked within days of each other despite that trophy and parade for the former, major changes at a boardroom level and talk of potential investment finally arriving in the near future.
Ultimately, this needs to be the summer when Levy decides exactly what Tottenham Hotspur is and gives it everything. Otherwise, you should probably mark your calendars for an upcoming event in June 2027.
