Frank backed, club liquidated, Alonso blackmailed: Ranking 10 possible next steps for Spurs | OneFootball

We’re not about to criticise the Tottenham Hotspur scriptwriters. Season after season they deliver the goods, hitting a full gamut of emotional plot-points from high farce, cringe-comedy that you fear to watch yet cannot look away, profound misery, abject despair, crushing disappointment and, cruellest of all, occasional moments of genuine hope and glory.

They’ve largely nailed it again this season with a storyline that leans heavily into farce but also has a lot to tell us about hubris and the dangers of stubborn refusal to accept objective reality.

But if we were going to give one small note, it would be to suggest that having Thomas Frank emerge on to the Hotspur Way training pitches for Monday morning’s leaden skies and declare “the sun is shining” was perhaps just a bit too on the nose.

Sure, there’s a clear desire to firmly establish the apocalyptic levels of delusion under which the Dane is currently operating with his continued ability to identify signs of progress and improvement in what is a freefalling worsening team, but having him say it’s sunny when it isn’t just felt a little bit too much like audience hand-holding. We can follow the trail without quite that much assistance. Have a little faith.

Having him follow that first obvious falsehood with another – “and we’re playing football” – was a lovely bit, though. Fair play.

What’s more important, though, is where the story goes next. What exactly is the plan? Have they wrung every last nonsense drop out of the Thomas Frank arc yet?

Here are 10 possible next steps, ranked from worst to least worst.

10) Back Thomas Frank all the way

Don’t back down, double down. Go all in on The Thomas Frank Project. Make it clear that this is how the new bosses, under the new and improved rule of the kindly and well-intentioned Lewis Family who are in fact not just the same as the old bosses but literally the old bosses – they’ve rebadged it, you fool – intend to separate yourself from the old days of the hire-and-fire Spurs manager conveyor belt.

Don’t even talk about some wishy-washy need for improved results or watchable football. After giving a wide assortment of capable yet flawed managers the boot for relatively minor misdemeanours for decades, this is the man you’re going to back no matter how egregious his crimes. He’s here for three years, and that is that.

And if that ends up with Spurs in League One with Frank going ‘Remember, guys, we finished 17th before I got here’ then so be it.

9) Go to the Winchester, have a nice cold pint, and wait for all of this to blow over

It does feel like, pre-West Ham, this was the option the Spurs board genuinely favoured. Just muddle through to the summer and then re-assess depending on where, precisely, Frank’s team had wound up in the big Premier League mid-table mess and proceed accordingly either with or without him.

The appeal of waiting until the summer is obvious enough. There’s potentially a bigger pool of managers available if you do still need to find a replacement – which you almost certainly do have to do – and the more obvious natural break that summer affords.

The downside that already existed was the awkward fact that an awful lot of other, bigger beasts might be fishing in that same pool. It’s not inconceivable that Liverpool and Manchester City need new managers this summer, and we must even brace ourselves for the possibility that Man United aren’t in fact hoodwinked by six good results and resist the temptation to turn Michael Carrick into Ole Gunnar Solskjaer Mk II.

Then you have to throw in the fact that absolutely nothing is ever certain at Chelsea, who have hired an inexperienced man-ager who gives off a distinct vibe that, sure, that’s an okay gig, but the real dream is to sell his own online course so that for the low, low price of several thousand pounds you too can chat astonishing bollocks.

It really might be the case that five of the old, disintegrating Big Six need new managers, with the potential knock-on effect that so too then do many mid-tier clubs who might be more appealing and definitely less batsh*t than Spurs.

The new added wrinkle after West Ham, of course, is that there are now no guarantees that Spurs’ present speed and course under Frank means reaching the summer as a Premier League club at all. That was objectively Spurs’ easiest remaining game of the season having already played Burnley and Wolves at home. If they can lose that game, they can lose to anyone anywhere (with the possible exception of Man City, obviously). And right now look like that is precisely what they might well do.

8) Simply liquidate the club

We suggested this after Bilbao and have come to realise we really might not have been joking quite as much as we initially thought. The chance to bring the curtain down on the world’s biggest banter club at the perfect and rare time of glory and contentment has gone, of course. The acrid p*ss of Thomas Frank’s reign now dribbles forlornly down the stained and fraying tracksuit bottoms that are Tottenham Hotspur Football Club.

But in a way that just makes it more fitting. The Spurs story is now complete. The crowning, yearned-for moment of success after years of being the butt of the joke has proved to solve nothing. Spurs fans spent 17 years being laughed at, and got two weeks being cock of the walk before it all went back to normal. Perhaps the real trophy was the jokes we heard along the way.

The actual trophy didn’t magically fix or change anything after all. Spurs are still Spurs. They will always be Spurs. Unless they simply put everyone out of their misery and just pack it all in.

We’re actually talking ourselves into putting this much higher in the list. It does seem like it really might be the least painful option in the long run. It’s okay, kids, Spurs have gone to live on a farm.

7) Non-club-DNA interim

There are other ways Spurs can go, though. It doesn’t have to just be Thomas Frank or packing the whole thing in altogether, even though it doesn’t really feel like the Spurs suits want to think about any other possibilities. There are in fact a whole raft of other options.

There are, for instance, at least three mild variations on the ‘wait for it all to blow over’ approach, which is to still try to muddle through to summer but with someone else instead of Frank overseeing the bold charge to maybe finishing as high as 12th with a bit of luck and a following wind.

We are, of course, in the realm here of the interim manager. There is a general preference for the interim to be someone who Knows The Club. A DNA-based appointment. That’s the route Man United have taken, and while the whole DNA thing is and remains palpable bollocks the specific appeal of a short-term manager who knows the environment does make some sense.

By definition, the interim manager arrives into a situation that a) is a mess and b) requires tidying up instantly. The less settling in and getting used to the vibe of the place required, the better the chance of success.

But it’s not mandatory. You can go for someone whose knowledge is not club-based but role-based. A seasoned interim. Your Guus Hiddinks. Your Rafa Benitezes.

Come to think of it, this might just be a Chelsea thing, and it might just be that the average shelf-life of a Chelsea manager amounts to just a long interim stint anyway.

But with Hiddink now 79 and Benitez three months into a 2.5-year contract at Panathinaikos, this might, alas, be a non-starter for Spurs. They can’t even go for Ralf Rangnick, who’s got the World Cup to look forward to with Austria.

6) Tiniest, scarcely detectable, homeopathic levels of club DNA interim

Is one week as assistant manager enough to accumulate any hint of club DNA? We might be about to find out.

We’re not sure exactly what Spurs’ thinking was when appointing John Heitinga as Frank’s new assistant boss, or which of the two possible lines of thinking is more damning.

Were they genuinely trying to help prop up their failing manager and didn’t think about how appointing someone who was recently head coach of actual Ajax to an assistant role would look?

Or did they appoint the recent head coach of actual Ajax to an assistant role with the interim possibility very much in mind and think that everyone would just think ‘It is nice of them to back a struggling manager with such a high-profile appointment’?

Anyway. He is in the building. He has experience of leading a big club that is a complete basket case, and the fact it all went disastrously wrong there shouldn’t necessarily put us or him off, should it? Okay, maybe it should.

Still, though. All seems perfectly feasible now. And a Heitinga interim sets Spurs up nicely for when Arne Slot takes over in the summer. Maybe.

5) Club DNA interim

Michael Carrick is now sadly off this particular table. If only United had opted for Solskjaer or Spurs had acted sooner. No use crying over ifs and buts now, though. And besides: Ryan Mason is available.

4) Marge, my friend, I haven’t learned a thing

Hey, Spurs, have you considered appointing an overachieving manager from a well-run Premier League team further down the food chain but higher up the league table? Could be an option.

Loads of possibilities here. Andoni Iraola, of course, although the fact the only Premier League team he is currently able to consistently beat is in fact Spurs is a concern. Fabian Hurzeler has been linked in recent days, which is absolutely perfect.

An approach for Keith Edwards would show a certain wit.

Marco Silva and Oliver Glasner are other contenders in this rough ballpark, but slightly different given Fulham and Palace aren’t quite as slick or ingenious Premier League upstart operations as the assorted B Teams.

But the general vibe of all these appointments are roughly the same: with the possible exception of Glasner, currently busy talking himself into an even swifter departure from Palace than already planned, all of these clubs would likely carry on regardless should the manager depart for Spurs, who would themselves achieve minimal if any obvious signs of improvement.

As for the managers themselves, their reputations would all take a hit as a result of a baffling failure to replicate success achieved away from the spotlight at a sensible, well-run club once they find themselves very much in the spotlight and driving a clown car.

3) Club DNA permanent

You do wonder if an awful lot could change awful fast at Spurs just by altering the currently poisonous mood within the ground. The quickest, laziest and easiest way to do this is to appoint a manager the fans already know and love.

The obvious route here is the Mauricio Pochettino one. It’s always felt like unfinished business exists on both sides here, and that neither club nor manager can ever truly move on until that itch is scratched.

Not even a year at Chelsea has fully dimmed that light, and the fact Spurs have signed Conor Gallagher – one of the few truly bright spots from Pochettino’s difficult year at Stamford Bridge – is a fun way to start convincing yourself there are dots to be connected here as long as you take the giant mental leap that anything Spurs ever do involves any meaningful thought or long-term planning.

The big problem with Pochettino, of course, is that there is simply no way of making it happen until after the World Cup. He’s not going to leave the USA job before a home World Cup is he.

And can you imagine what might happen if he did? Trump would take it as a personal affront and declare the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium a key strategic location that the US must acquire – by force if necessary. Although that would at least have the benefit of becoming a roundabout way to achieve option eight in our list. So not all doom and gloom.

Instead of prodding America’s mad king, though, how about turning instead to Hungary? Sure, it would be a wrench for Robbie Keane to leave his boyhood club Ferancvaros, where he has achieved some eye-catching results.

But it must also have been a wrench to leave his boyhood club Maccabi Tel Aviv, and he did that.

Could he really resist the lure of the chance to turn around the fortunes of his boyhood club Tottenham Hotspur?

Now it’s a huge leap into the unknown for both club and manager given Keane’s relative inexperience, but you do get an instant vibe change and that really might be enough.

Plus it’s clear that new CEO Vinai Venkatesham is desperate to mark his crossing of the North London divide by repeating the Mikel Arteta trick he fluked at Arsenal. He is still apparently trying to convince himself that Frank can be that second lightning strike, but Keane fits the bill far better. Couldn’t hurt could it? Unless it all went horribly wrong. Which it almost certainly would.

2) Gaslight Xavi into thinking Spurs are what he always meant by ‘interesting’

Everyone seems to have just assumed that ex-Barcelona boss Xavi Hernandez is waiting on a Premier League job. He’s been out of work since leaving Barca at the end of the 23/24 season and we’re going to go ahead and assume he’s knocked back a few offers in that time.

So why, one has to ask, would he be interested now in one from Spurs at their lowest and most depressed ebb? Especially when, as has already been noted, this summer offers a veritable bounty of possible big gigs for the out-of-work manager about town.

For that we can only go to Xavi’s own words. He has spoken of loving the ‘passion’ of the Premier League and how he’s more interested in taking up work there next than in Spain. We have to just quietly ignore the parts about wanting a ‘four-year project’ because that, frankly, is largely a pipe dream for any manager almost anywhere. Almost nobody gets to be Mikel Arteta, guys.

No, let us focus instead on the fact he wants an ‘interesting’ four-year project. Spurs can be accused of a great many things. Being uninteresting is not really one of them. Sure, they’re interesting in the ancient Chinese proverb sense of the word, but you can’t deny they as a football club are interesting even when the football itself definitely isn’t. Especially when the football isn’t.

So all Spurs need to do is confuse and deceive Xavi into believing that this absolute lunatic of a football club is just what he always meant by that remark, and that ‘interesting’ and ‘project’ were always far more important than ‘four-year’ when he dreamed of his next job.

Should also be noted that, more generally, appointing any manager whose only significant managerial success has come at a massive superclub also potentially falls under the ‘Marge, my friend, I haven’t learned a thing’ category so far as Spurs are concerned.

1) Obtain sufficient kompromat to blackmail Xabi Alonso and compel him to take the job

Whenever we think of the Spurs manager situation we cannot shake two compelling yet contradictory notions. One, that Xabi Alonso is literally the perfect manager for Spurs and that two, there is absolutely no chance he would take the job because he is not an idiot and will have by the summer at least, oh, let’s say, 12 better offers.

So Spurs will have to get creative. We don’t know what skeletons exist in Alonso’s no-doubt well-appointed closet and frankly, we don’t want to know. We just know there must be some. Nobody is perfect, not even handsome ball-playing midfielders turned handsome ball-playing managers.

Whatever those skeletons are, Spurs must discover them and then threaten to release that information unless he agrees to become the club’s manager for two years before being released back into the wild and a much better job at a much less silly club.

We’ve said it before and will say it again: succeeding wildly at a club like Bayer Leverkusen and then failing under the sheer ludicrous heft of Real Madrid evens out at a perfect Spurs manager. And it might even be true that a club like Spurs is exactly what Alonso actually needs rather than simply jumping straight back into superclub territory with your Liverpools or Bayerns.

Obviously the key word there is like. He would be absolutely crazy to accept that next job at a club that is Spurs. Crazy, or sufficiently compromised…