Thomas Frank is a fun guy to be around, a cool dad who drinks champagne in the hot tub at 5am, as he did this summer during a weekend-long party with his three children.
Here on a rooftop terrace in Seoul, neither of us are cool, a fact underlined by the industrial-sized fan that labours nearby, as well as the warm beer sweating on the table between us.
It all feels rather metaphoric – welcome to Tottenham, you can be super chill and super likeable with it, but this club will leave you feeling the heat before a competitive ball has been kicked. Brentford was not a frying pan – more a warm bath with scented candles – but Frank’s new club is most definitely the fire.
Downstairs, in the bar aptly renamed The Spurs Den, scores of Tottenham fans wait to see their manager. He later obliges, and they scream as if John, Paul, George and Ringo had walked in. Frank is a Beatle, in his own way. Outside, thousands of Koreans and foreign tourists party in what feels like this city’s equivalent of Times Square. There is a boxing match on the street, a circle of onlookers deputising for the ropes. An ambulance reverses with ironic abandon towards the crowds, but the bout continues to much merriment.
For Frank, though, the partying is over. It is time to glove up and face the fight in front of him. He knows this will not be easy – since our conversation he has lost James Maddison to a knee injury for the bulk of the season and seen his team beaten 4-0 at Bayern Munich. His easy-going demeanour is about to be given the ultimate stress test.
But first, before we talk Daniel Levy, Ange Postecoglou, set-piece and defensive frailties, there is a chance to explore the man behind the manager. He is a fascinating man, after all. He is drinking water, and so am I after burning my tongue on the ale, laid on by the organisers of this meet-and-greet fan event.
Thomas Frank is a fun guy to be around, a cool dad who drinks champagne in the hot tub at 5am, as he did this summer during a weekend-long party with his three children
For Frank, though, the partying is over. It is time to glove up and face the fight in front of him
His easy-going demeanour is about to be given the ultimate stress test as Tottenham enter the Champions League
To rewind, the 51-year-old was confirmed as head coach on June 12, one day before he and his wife, Nanna, had organised that weekend-long celebration for family and friends in Vejle, in their native Denmark. The new job was merely a coincidence, and a potentially inconvenient one.
‘My wife and I had talked about doing this for seven years,’ begins Frank. ‘To celebrate life, not 50th birthdays or anything. We planned to do it a year ago but it didn’t happen. So this year, “OK, no Euros, let’s do it!”. And then this f***ing show started!’
He is joking, the ‘show’ being a nod to the negotiations and wait to be installed as head coach. Thankfully, for Frank, his wife and 90 of their friends and family, the weekend went ahead.
‘I did the last bits of talking and getting it (Tottenham) sorted, put the phone down, quick shower, and then at 3 o’clock everyone arrived. After that, we basically just partied.’
I wish I’d been there – tell me more! ‘OK. So I’m very good at partying. That’s the one thing my three children got from me. The good looks, and everything else, they got from their mom!
‘The first night was supposed to be a little bit quiet. You know, a little bit of champagne and a few beers first, the dinner, just a couple of hours. Then, it just went from here to… whoa! It got a bit lively. Singing along like a band – 10 minutes went into four hours! We went to bed at 2.30am.
‘The next day, there was a dip at 8.30. Then there was the spa, volleyball, competitive football, of course! Spike ball, lunch. Then we had two gospel choirs and a famous Danish lady talking about life, in a very funny way. Then we dressed up for the dinner and we partied until 5 o’clock in the morning. It ended with all the guys in the spa with champagne!
‘It was just a fantastic vibe. Our children (aged 23, 21 and 18) and their friends generated that energy. Of course I’m still young, but when you are 50, you normally don’t go to a big party like that. Everyone was all in!’
Frank is a fascinating man and a fascinating manager, about to enter his biggest task of all
If that was a weekend during which Frank switched off, he was ‘all in’ on Tottenham, as he says, in the days before and weeks after. He had, in fact, driven to Denmark from London, taking his dog back to Copenhagen for the summer. Much of the 17-hour journey was spent on the phone, but not the communal car phone.
‘Nanna was with me, so I had to use the AirPods!’ he laughs. ‘She said, “I don’t want to hear anything, I want to do my own stuff!”. I was not that funny to drive with. We left at 6.30am and took the Eurotunnel. We then had nine hours to Puttgarden in Germany to take the ferry. I was head down, boomph, only stopping for a quick toilet, water, espresso, Red Bull, and then, go! We arrived at 11pm.’
Was there anything else during the journey other than calls about football? ‘Ah yes. We listened to one Danish podcast, speaking about tricky situations in life. Five famous people meet and talk about the people calling in… “OK, my wife wants to get divorced, what should I do?”’
It sounds like the journey might have tested the Frank marriage.
‘If Nanna could choose, she’d just say stay at Brentford, or a little bit more of a low-key job! She’s not into football, but she is also proud and happy for me. She knows it’s something I want, so she supports me. I could never have come so far or be in this job without her, impossible.’
Frank lost his father, Preben, a year ago. Because of that, he took his mother and sister for a break at his holiday home in Spain after the season had finished. ‘My dad, he would be very proud,’ says Frank. ‘He was not into football. It never came from him, my passion for it. But of course, like any parent, when your children are doing something, you support them. He watched all the games.’
Frank calls those few days in Spain ‘an escape’. ‘I love to go for a morning run and then a swim – I love the mornings,’ he says.
‘Then, we sit in the rooftop terrace with a coffee and talk about life. Then, when I have my time, I read, a lot of fiction. I’ve read a lot of leadership books and all that, but then my brain stopped working! So this summer it was the Swedish author Jan Guillou, and a series following a family through the century from 1900 to 2000. That is my downtime – I sit on my own, read half an hour, nap, read for half an hour, that’s it!’
Frank insists he is ‘all in’ on Tottenham after leaving Brentford to go from west to north London
The Dane started his managerial career in his national team’s age groups, before taking the top jobs at Brondby and Brentford
The downtime was reduced when Nanna arrived. ‘She took me to Marbella to some interior design shops, and I had to go through a few kitchen shops as well. So it was relaxing, but also a little bit of work, I would say!’
And so our chat turns to work. The rest of his summer was spent ‘on the phone, laptop, online meetings’. The timing of his appointment, he says, has given him the ‘opportunity to plan’, even if there is ‘a lot to get on top of’.
Tottenham are in the Champions League this season. Yet, their fans are not happy, which feels like a default setting in recent years. As ever, they want to see – with justification – more signings and a greater signalling of ambition from Levy and the club.
Did Frank know what he was walking into? ‘Of course I did what I could to do my due diligence about the club and the people involved in it,’ he begins. ‘But I also would say with the short knowledge I have of Daniel – I guess that’s the reason why you ask, because there’s some that don’t think he’s got the best reputation – but for me, he’s been very good.
‘He’s had a very good approach with everything, very, very transparent. Sometimes there can be a reputation that’s very difficult to get away from. So far, things have been very good.’
Spurs’ preparations for the new season took a huge blow last week when James Maddison suffered an ACL injury against Newcastle that will rule him out for the season
Captain Son Heung-min has left the club after a decade to join Los Angeles FC
What about the squad he inherited? Postecoglou was sacked because his team were inconsistent. ‘There were a lot of good things from Ange,’ starts Frank, who defends his predecessor but admits there are no plans to reach out to him. ‘There is a team that are very brave. They can play with high intensity. The training intensity is very high, and that’s a good foundation to go into.
‘Set-pieces is an area that I’m a big believer in – and that was not as highlighted before, looking from the outside. Then on the defensive side we need to be more balanced from the defensive parts – low, middle, and high. So those are the two big areas.’
Next, recruitment. Mohammed Kudus is the only permanent first-team signing so far, a point of angst among fans who expected a summer of investment. They have also seen Son Heung-min leave and believe the squad is weaker than last season, when they finished 17th.
‘I want, how can I say this, a big enough, small enough squad,’ says Frank. ‘It needs to be big enough and robust enough to compete in all four tournaments, because that’s important, but I can’t have too many players. It’s just so difficult to keep everyone happy, it’s almost impossible. Then, we also want to see if we can add enough quality.
Frank’s first impressions of Daniel Levy were good after he chose the Dane to replace Ange Postecoglou
Frank is adamant he is here for the long term and will not be just a short-term fix
‘But we don’t want to sign players we don’t think can really improve the squad. I would rather wait. I’m not here for the short-term fix. I want to build something to last, so we need to think longer term. Yes, we need to compete now, but that’s my thought process.’
To succeed in the long term, though, Frank needs to win games in the short term. Managers who don’t, don’t tend to hang around long at Spurs. But neither that reality, nor the sauna of South Korea, has done anything to suffocate his enthusiasm.
‘I’m excited. I’m ready for the challenge. I loved Brentford. It was a top job in every aspect. It was only an opportunity like this I wanted. Because this can be fantastic. It can maybe also be not so good, who knows… but the opportunity to make a difference here is massive. Who knows how it goes? I’ll be brave, I’ll be myself.’
Frank is a good man, but he’ll have to be an even better manager to survive and thrive in the Spurs mad house, a club that makes downtown Seoul feel sane.
