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For your first trick, please show us Tottenham can trade blows with the best team Europe has produced this decade. If Thomas Frank wanted to make a statement two months after crossing London then defeating Paris Saint-Germain on Wednesday night would set this season’s bar for performance somewhere beyond the stratosphere. His new role, or at least the relentless public scrutiny of it, begins in earnest beneath the Friulian foothills and it is an opportunity to form the kind of first impression that leaves a lasting signature.
Hearts have never been won or lost through showings in the Uefa Super Cup, which has traditionally been as much a late-summer beauty parade as a high-octane heave between the previous campaign’s big winners. There is certainly no guarantee that a hot night in the beguiling surroundings of Udine, whose modest solar-powered stadium has been feted for its environmental credentials, provides hard evidence of sustainable progress on the pitch.
Nonetheless there is, as Frank was keen to point out, an opportunity to take.
It may be popularly held that Spurs stumbled upon the Europa League trophy in May; they certainly did not win many marks for artistic impression in doing so and the feat sat in direct contrast to a miserable league season. The latter, after all, is the reason for Frank’s presence.
But it has given an embattled group the vivid afterglow of something all too few sample in the course of a career: the kind of elite-level victory that, harnessed correctly, presents a launchpad to even greater heights.
“We have set the tone, and we want to repeat and do it again,” said goalkeeper Guglielmo Vicario, who expressed pride at the prospect of appearing in his home city.
“We have tasted the feeling before, and this feeling is amazing. We are there because we have earned the right to be there.”
If they prove that again in front of Uefa’s watching glitterati, the sense of a ship turning around will be sharpened. Frank’s squad has gaping holes, particularly in attack, but the condition in which they have arrived may be a short-term leveller. PSG’s latest final comes exactly a month after their sparkling young group, flat and knackered in their last game of a relentless 2024-25, were comfortably dismissed by Chelsea at the Club World Cup. Their senior players returned to training only last Wednesday; it begs the question of whether they are overcooked or underdone, but in either case this has been the pre-season that never was.
For their part Frank and company have been, to some extent or other, out on the grass since the second week of July. “We have had a more normal pre-season which is what I think every coach would prefer,” Frank said, before countering that by stating the blindly obvious. “Over a whole season, they are probably in a better place to perform better but for one game we will be ready.”
Frank will require evolution from last week’s bleak 4-0 defeat by Bayern Munich and is likely to pick the same starting XI. Cohesion is a must during injury-addled times in which the departure of Son Heung-min has been joined, at the worst possible moment, by hammer blows in the losses of James Maddison and Dejan Kulusevski. More of the grit shown in overcoming Arsenal amid the humidity of Singapore will be in order on this occasion. Tottenham’s new captain for the season, who Frank will name before kick-off, will be integral in instilling it.
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Results can oscillate wildly at this time of year; performances can be forgiven for that, too, when a new style is being bedded in. The Spurs players must learn on the job and it was instructive to hear Vicario speak openly about the more varied approach Frank, who was never averse to going from back to front at Brentford, will expect from his goalkeepers. “Something has changed,” Vicario said. “I need to read the situation in front of me: sometimes it’s to build from the back and play, sometimes it’s to go long.” Sitting next to him, Ben Davies hinted that the quixotic ways fostered by Ange Postecoglou may be diluted by a shot of pragmatism. “I think we’re definitely going to have a different gameplan depending on the opposition this season,” he said.
When PSG have been banished to memory, whether grisly or glittering, Frank will attend to a bulging in-tray. He must decide what to do with the errant Yves Bissouma but, more importantly for Tottenham’s future, will pray they can get ambitious moves for Eberechi Eze and Savinho over the line.
Those deals would assuage the frontline woes and suggest things are clicking into place more broadly. Earlier in the summer, Frank suggested it would take time to build the degree of understanding he had forged with Brentford’s recruitment staff. It is a process that needs to move swiftly.
Even if definitive judgments must wait, Spurs’ latest new era begins here. “The right time is now, so we need to be ready,” Frank said of their gala assignment. What a boost it would be if they meet the moment again.
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