The Tottenham Hotspur boss has been speaking about the owners’ ambitions to push the north London club forward in the coming years
Charles and Vivienne Lewis are looking to push Tottenham Hotspur on as a force in football
Thomas Frank is confident that Tottenham’s owners, the Lewis family, are set to back him and the hierarchy with investment to build a successful club, although he still believes a £100million transfer remains beyond Spurs in the near future.
The Lewis family, namely siblings Vivienne and Charles Lewis and the former’s son-in-law Nick Beucher, have stepped to the forefront this year to back the Premier League club and CEO Vinai Venkatesham going forward, following the exit of chairman Daniel Levy after 24 years at the helm.
The Lewis family have since injected £100million into the club and are expected to provide further financial support to help Spurs close the gap to the big-spending clubs above them.
On Sunday, Tottenham travel to their local rivals Arsenal, who currently sit on top of the table, four points clear of Manchester City and eight clear of Frank’s fifth-placed side. The Gunners will feature some expensively assembled individuals bought over recent years, not least the £100million man Declan Rice. While Frank does not believe Spurs are close to splashing £100million on one player themselves, he does expect the Lewis family to push the club on.
“They definitely said they are all in for the club, that they want to be here for the long term and they want to have success,” said the 52-year-old. “We’ll see what happens in the future, but I’m confident they will back us to do everything we can to build a successful club.
“I’m very good at talking up here, but it’s about showing it out there on the pitch consistently after setbacks. The same with them. In the best positive way, that’s what we need to do together.”
Frank’s predecessor Ange Postecoglou once said that Tottenham would never sign a £100million player but the current head coach believes they will one day, if not in the near future.
“In the next 50 years? Then yes! It’s very evident that every successful club, not for one year, but over five, six, seven years, to build, you need a combination of time and doing the processes, depending on where the team come from, of course, but to stay up there is still very difficult,” said Frank.
“So time and process, and, then of course, investment. If you want success in football, you need to invest in players. Hopefully, do it cleverly and we want to do it smart, so we don’t invest too much on the wrong players. But you need to invest. £100m, I don’t know. Let’s see. I don’t think we are close to spending £100m, put it that way. But I don’t know, let’s see what happens in the future.”
He added: “I’m a big believer that we need to develop the players we have, and if we do that, it’s about if you can develop players, not all of them should cost £60m, £70m, £80m, £90m, whatever the amount. I don’t think anybody has done that. Liverpool didn’t do that to get to the top. Even City hasn’t done that.
“So you need to be good at developing the players, which I believe we are and we will be very good at. But then you also need to invest in the right potential of a player. He could be 22, or 26. Declan Rice is a good example. How old was he when he joined Arsenal? 24 or 25? That’s important. Nobody achieves the top without investing.”
Ahead of Sunday’s game, Frank joked that Arsenal stars David Raya and Christian Norgaard are now “traitors”. The game will bring a reunion with two of his long-serving ex-Brentford stars. Raya was the Dane’s goalkeeper for five years and Norgaard worked with Frank from his early years in the Danish international youth set-up and would go on to become his trusted captain at the Bees.
Frank’s first Premier League game as a manager came with a 2-0 home win against Arsenal in 2021 with Raya and Norgaard both involved, but the duo will now line up against him on Sunday.
“Two of them are now traitors and moved to the wrong club!” said the Dane with a grin.
Although Arteta remains in charge at Arsenal, plenty has changed in the intervening years on both sides of the north London divide and Frank believes the same can be said about both managers coming into the game.
“Arteta is a good manager. He’s one of the managers who respect all the phases of the game,” said the Tottenham head coach. “That was a special game [in 2021]. It was our first game in the Premier League. It was a day I’ll never forget.
“I definitely learned a lot in the last four years about the different teams, about myself. [It’s about] adding layers with the team, with myself, to communication, leadership, small tactical tweaks. I have clear principles but am constantly developing and tweaking them.”
Frank will go into Sunday’s match with the huge boost of having eight of Spurs’ 12 unavailable players back in contention, including Mohammed Kudus, Lucas Bergvall and Randal Kolo Muani, who will play in a face mask after suffering a fractured jaw in the draw against Manchester United before the international break.
The Lilywhites boss also said that he is “pretty sure” Dominic Solanke will not require further surgery on his ankle and is comfortable that the striker will be back soon after four months out with a problem that has dogged him since the summer.
“We are very aware of how we do things, when do we really push and when do we not push. Now we are in a place where we think he will go forward and we’ll take it from there,” said the Spurs boss.
Sunday’s match will showcase a battle of two teams who are strong at set pieces, Arsenal at scoring from them and Spurs in keeping them out. This season has brought a heavy focus across the league on set pieces and long throws with some suggesting that Frank’s move to north London has been a factor in that.
“Oh, I don’t know. I’ve seen Arteta has been quoted saying he’s always been interested in it for a long time,” he said. “So that I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure the bits I’ve done at Brentford have inspired a lot of clubs to focus more on set-pieces.
“And it is quite interesting that this year I go from Brentford to Tottenham, the spike in focus on set-pieces for all the teams, especially the long throws, is crazy.
“It seems like everyone is very, very focused on them, which we should be. They’re a third of our goals. So why not be very good in that phase, and very good in high pressure. We need to be good in many phases.”
The battle of the set pieces will see two of Frank’s former Brentford staff going head to head in Spurs’ Andreas Georgson and Arsenal’s Nicolas Jover as the restart experts at both north London clubs.
“Both of them are very curious, both want to learn and develop constantly by studying the game of set-pieces so in that way they have quite the same mindset in many ways, trying to find the way how you can develop set-pieces to hurt the opponent from corners and wide free-kicks,” said the Spurs boss.
“So in that they are quite similar; one is Swedish the other French so a little bit different temper. Mikel and I with our coaching staffs will have a battle – how can we get the upper hand and it will be the same with Nicolas and Andreas.”