Apathy is perhaps the most dangerous state to which any club can succumb, symbolising a disconnect too deep for any single result to affect. It happened to Arsenal in the last of Arsene Wenger’s 22 seasons in charge, with many inside the Emirates despairing of his grim resolve, only for the Frenchman to be dragged kicking and screaming out of the place he helped create.
The same forces are afoot at Tottenham in the age of Thomas Frank, despite the Dane having had just seven months to prove himself. But these fans’ loveless relationship with their manager is only one symptom of a more insidious malaise.
For all that they possess perhaps the finest stadium in Europe, the sheer opulence of Tottenham’s manor is a taunting reminder of the gulf between hope and reality. Ever since it opened in 2019, it has shimmered and seduced, only for the sumptuous aesthetics to sit uneasily with threadbare football.
It is obscene, frankly, that a setting so lavish can stage Premier League campaigns so profoundly witless – having finished 17th last season, they currently languish in 14th place this campaign. It is as though the Metropolitan Opera House has suddenly handed residency to Bozo the Clown.
Can this truly be a temple of the game? Or is it simply an ultra-sophisticated, multi-purpose palace with a football team attached? A message sent by the stadium’s X account (formerly Twitter) on New Year’s Eve gave a telling answer, with its mosaic of “2025: an unforgettable year” including images of Saracens and England rugby captain Maro Itoje, Chris Eubank’s fight with Conor Benn, a K-pop concert, a Cleveland Browns player in an NFL game, and precisely zero mention of the football club whose cachet makes it all possible.
Quite the snub, given Tottenham are still in the afterglow of a first European trophy since 1984. It gives an unfortunate impression of the building’s primary tenants being an afterthought.
Frank’s benighted tenure, with just two wins in 11 top-flight home games, has merely sharpened the sense of drift. A Champions League date with Dortmund should have been a focal point of the calendar, a precious bonus of Tottenham’s Europa League triumph and scarcely deserved for a side who had finished one place above relegation. After all, the single-tier South Stand here was specifically modelled on the vast Yellow Wall at Dortmund’s Signal-Iduna Park, designed to provide the team’s heartbeat when it mattered most.
On this discordant evening, the mood was distinguished only by a creeping ennui.
The attendance told its own story: 52,713, against a capacity of 62,850. Tottenham drew more than this for the same fixture in 2019, and they were not even playing in their own stadium then. While temporary exile at Wembley should long since have given way to fierce local pride on the footprint of the old White Hart Lane, nothing has quite transpired as anybody hoped.
The misfortune is that Tottenham have the trappings of a super club, but the record of also-rans. Even though every materialistic urge has been satisfied, the most restless yearning – for a team that consistently challenge for titles and produce exhilarating football en route – remains stubbornly unfulfilled.
It is Frank’s turn to face the opprobrium. He could hardly have scripted a better response against Dortmund, setting aside the scrutiny over his future to neuter opponents who had only lost once in the Bundesliga all season. But he could ultimately prove powerless to overcome a feeling in the stands that his face does not fit. The announcement of his name before kickoff elicited audible disdain, with the rancour over last weekend’s defeat by West Ham still raw. Public opinion can be capricious for a man in Frank’s position, and for the moment he continues to be perceived, however unfairly, as a dreary technocrat with an Arsenal mug.
The trouble for supporters who disparage him is that there is no self-evident replacement. Tottenham have experimented with almost every managerial philosophy possible in their glittering surrounds, from the defensive pragmatism of Antonio Conte to the vaulting idealism of Ange Postecoglou, a figure blind to his fundamental flaws. Frank was meant to offer the antidote to the Australian’s kamikaze excesses. But where once he was lauded for his common sense, he is now rebuked for his supposed lack of charisma. It all begs the question, who is the saviour-in-waiting? Mauricio Pochettino? And would this choice indicate anything but a cocktail of nostalgia and desperation?
Such is the perilous limbo afflicting Tottenham, a club forever striving to raise the ceiling of ambition but fated to keep crashing to earth. The swathes of vacant seats are an illustration that the longer this pattern repeats itself, the more corrosive the atmosphere will become.
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