All happy football clubs are alike; every unhappy football club are unhappy in their own way. Spurs have always been prone to existentialism, but in recent years it appears to have taken hold ever more, the club trapped in a constant cycle of decline and reinvention to the extent that both are simultaneously happening all the time.
To be a Tottenham fan in 2025 is to ask time and again: “Who are we? Where are we going? What’s the point?” and never get any closer to an answer. This was their 11th home league loss of 2025, a new club record. Season-ticket holders have enjoyed four league wins since watching their team beat Aston Villa 4-1 on 3 November 2024. On reflection, the stadium announcer playing Fisher’s house anthem “Losing it” as the squad first emerged was a Freudian slip at best.
This game provided a neat opportunity for some anniversary self-reflection – Liverpool also visited for the 17th Premier League match of last season, 363 days earlier. Spurs lost 6-3 then in an adrenaline overdose of a defeat. In hindsight it was the defining game in breaking Angeball, the day the music died, the worst of everything his detractors said that his team were – brittle and hedonistic and out of control. They lost five of the ensuing six league games and scored more than twice in a league game just twice throughout the next five months.
This, at the very least, was not quite so cataclysmic. It was scrappy and shapeless and ultimately ruined by a ridiculous red card to Xavi Simons for accidentally making contact with the back of Virgil van Dijk’s calf, the consequence of the video assistant referee’s fervid love for being pointlessly punitive. As has been the case with much of this season, really bar defeats by Nottingham Forest and Fulham, this was a match Tottenham could excuse losing. But it was also a match that they never looked like winning, one of the defining threads of Frank’s lowest moments so far.
Having the four managers they’ve had in the past five years would cause any club to lose their bearings
“We play the game our way,” growled a pre-match video over the compulsory lights show for any sporting event which now happens after 4pm, a proclamation which begged the question – what is that way? What is everyone trying to do here? Tottenham’s last four managers to last more than five months are José Mourinho, Antonio Conte, Postecoglou and Frank.
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Experiencing life under all four of those in a five-year period would cause any club to lose their bearings, their sense of self. At some point everyone involved needs to give themselves a break and thank their respective gods they still have something resembling sanity.
This is still a squad almost entirely built for Angeball, and with all due respect to Ben Mee and Ethan Pinnock, Frank has never worked with two centre-backs of the quality or pace of Micky van de Ven and Cristian Romero. Not having any of his three best attacking players available – Dominic Solanke, James Maddison and Dejan Kulusevski – cannot be overstated for a team struggling to score goals.
After Kulusevski went off injured early against Manchester City in February, Spurs beat only Southampton of their next 11 league games, three of which the Swede started but in which he never looked fully match fit.
Meanwhile, Frank’s striker for the day, Randal Kolo Muani, jogged around like a particularly abstract exhibition of modern art, seemingly massively valuable for reasons unbeknown to everyone except a few impossibly wealthy men.
The best of Tottenham’s attacking play came from simple driving runs through the middle, Djed Spence and Lucas Bergvall looking repeatedly baffled at the space that they were provided to waltz into.
But it is now 13 months since Spurs “proudly unveiled” a new “brand identity”, embracing, as these things so often do, their “rich history and unmistakable heritage”, which are apparently different things. It included a new badge, which looked remarkably like the old one.
The two club employees quoted in that proclamation of a brave new world, which featured such insight as “we want to be a certain type of football club”, were Postecoglou and director Donna-Maria Cullen, both of whom left in the summer.
This constant churn is the real obstacle to being an existential club, an identity club, in 2025. The teams that have something resembling a distinctive playing style and internal idealism are largely dependent on the world-bending egos of a few men - Mikel Arteta’s Arsenal, Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City, Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali’s Chelsea, Evangelos Marinakis’s Nottingham Forest.
Spurs fans would not want to admit that for the past decade they have been Daniel Levy’s Tottenham, entirely built in his image, to his specifications, victim to his foibles and preferences. Now they don’t even have that, leaving an unspoken power vacuum that Frank is the obvious public face to fill, but has not been able to do so.
Of course, Tottenham had the identity guy, the “everyone line up behind me and we’ll all leap lemming-like off this cliff together” guy. It was fire and brimstone until the house burned down. But despite this, you sense that this fanbase require a narrative to be woven, a dream to be sold regardless of its feasibility, even if all roads actually lead to fifth. Everything has to be part of something bigger. They have to be part of something bigger.
Frank is an unconvincing big-picture guy, not a natural prophet. “I’m very comfortable and confident that I will, how can I say, fix it, but just to make sure it’s not me,” he said pre-match, a very Danish attempt at bluster and bravado. “When this club comes out on top, there will be a lot of good people working together, aligned at the same time through the years.”
Of course, this season is thoroughly redeemable, even now. Spurs did little hugely wrong here, especially given that their main creative sprite was sent off. Nicolas Jackson did not score a hat-trick like the bizarre 4-1 defeat two years ago that first punctured Postecoglou’s winning start. Even in 13th, they are only a few wins from the top six and have some softer upcoming fixtures. This is not the end of the world. So why does it feel like it?
Photograph by Julian Finney/Getty Images