To Be Frank

Thomas Frank can carry Spurs forward, but not by cost overperformance.

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With the news that Spurs have signed Thomas Frank as the new manager, the impressive Danish coach (and former teacher) is getting plenty of plaudits for his accomplishments at Brentford.

Foremost among them is Frank’s demonstrated ability to ‘do more with less,’ the unstated imperative at Spurs that might as well replace audere et facere as the club’s official motto (don’t ask me about the Latin; it’s been too long).

Brentford’s cost-per-point under Frank—a measure of the extent to which the manager and team outperform their market cost in total fees paid for the squad—was 17th lowest in the Premier League last season, and has never been above 13th during Frank’s tenure. Brentford managed to score 2 more goals than Tottenham while winning 18 more league points, despite having a squad nearly half the value of Spurs.

An understandable conclusion to draw from this is:

If he can do that with Brentford (squad value of €414m), imagine what he can do with Spurs (squad value €766m)!

The Issue of Scale

I’m optimistic—I won’t say ‘excited,’ given the circumstances—about what Frank can accomplish with Spurs (more on that in a moment). But I think the idea that his overperformance at Brentford scales up to Spurs is misguided. And here’s why.

For one, there’s a matter of numeracy to contend with here.

By analogy, I might have developed an excellent training program that helps pretty good marathoners in the 3:30 range recover faster from training runs and consistently run their next marathon in under 3 hours. But just because that works for pretty good marathoners doesn’t mean I can start training elite marathoners and also knock 30 minutes off their marathon times. If you’re Kelvin Kiptum and you run a 2:00 marathon, there’s no room for you to improve by 30 minutes; it’s physically impossible. There’s also no guarantee that my recovery methods will work for your training regimen, since it’s so much different from how my 3-3:30 athletes train.

If you look at virtually any cost-per-point-won chart, you’ll see it’s mostly an inverted value chart. If you have the most expensive squad—the top 3 last season were Manchester City, Arsenal, and Chelsea—and you finish toward the top of the table, your cost-per-point will be higher than the vast majority of less expensive squads, just because there’s less room for efficiency when you’re spending (close to) the most money and also getting (close to) the most points. Likewise, if you’re mid-table in squad value—like Brentford—you have a lot more room to become efficient, even if you still finish mid-table.

Brentford, for example, were the 12th most expensive squad last season and finished 10th in the league. That amounted to just a 3-point overperformance of squad value. So, you could say Brentford were one of the best in the league in terms of cost-per-point ratio—the 17th lowest out of 20—or you could say Brentford overperformed their squad value by 3 points of table separation from 12th-place Palace. Both statements are true; the former sounds a lot better.

But there’s more to scaling overperformance than the simple fact of having more room for improvement in cost-per-point metrics when you don’t have one of the most expensive squads.

After all, one of the reasons the most expensive squads are more expensive than the rest is that they tend to qualify for European competition more frequently than the rest, creating a feedback loop for which they take in more prize revenue and have to spend more money on deeper, more experienced squads to cope with more games.

Spurs played 60 games last season. Brentford played 43. Spurs cost about 45% more than Brentford, but also played about 30% more games.

And it’s not just about volume, but quality of opposition. In addition to playing in Europe against the likes of Galatasaray, Roma, and Frankfurt, Spurs played Liverpool 4 times last season. They played Manchester United 4 times as well. Which is to say more games isn’t necessarily more games against lower league teams in cups; it’s more Premier League matchups, more matchups with Champions League quality opponents throughout the season.

What this means for scaling up overperformance is that overperformance in mid-table is qualitatively and quantitatively different from overperformance at the top of the table. And make no mistake, despite a dreadful 17th place finish last season, Spurs will compete in the Champions League next season. The expectations will be right back to where they’ve been for more than a decade now: to finish in the top 4-5 in the league and qualify for European competition.

Looking Forward to Frank at Spurs

I’m sure this is coming across rather negative, but that’s not where I intend to end up. What I’m saying here is that if you’re valuing Frank—or any Spurs manager for that matter—for their overperformance, you’re mis-valuing the manager and misunderstanding the situation.

Brentford-style overperformance is not going to move Spurs forward, just like Brighton-style recruitment is a model for Brighton but not for Spurs. It’s arrogant of me to say these things on the back of a 17th-place season, I know, but if you’re gonna talk overperformance—and chide Spurs for being so expensive yet so poor in the league—then you have to accept that this works both ways, i.e. by implication you’re also talking about underperformance.

It’s harder to get value out of a really expensive squad, just as it’s harder to call a £300 tasting menu at a Michelin-starred restaurant ‘good value’ even if it’s cheaper than some of the competition. But if you’re already spending £300 on dinner, it’s not value you’re after; you want the best.

And make no mistake, the best is what Spurs execs, managers, and players claim to want for themselves and for all of us, the fans. And they’re right to do so. We shouldn’t be afraid to aim high. There’s no reason in particular that Thomas Frank—by all accounts an intelligent, capable, dynamic manager—can’t take us to new heights. So this is not me saying Frank doesn’t belong at the Michelin-starred table; he absolutely does.

And that’s why, if you’re going to get excited about Frank, you shouldn’t make the basis of your excitement the kind of overperformance he pulled off at Brentford, because that’s neither realistic nor desirable at Spurs. We should expect that Frank gets backing in the transfer market the likes of which was never possible at Brentford. We should expect he’s allowed to use his trademark tactical dexterity as a strength at Spurs, rather than a requirement for survival, so he can build an idea of Spurs football that allows us to control games, an way of playing that’s distinctively his and ours. The prospect of that kind of evolution is what I can actually get excited about.