Thomas Frank needs to take drastic action to get Tottenham Hotspur’s season back on track.
The weekend’s painful 4-1 derby defeat against Arsenal has raised a lot of uncomfortable questions. Spurs have taken one point from their past three Premier League games against Chelsea, Manchester United and their north London rivals. The common thread which links all of those performances is how woeful they looked in attack.
Frank’s side were toothless for 83 minutes against United until Mathys Tel’s deflected strike sparked a wild ending to that 2-2 draw. They also recorded the two lowest expected goals (xG) totals of any team in the Premier League this season in getting beaten by Chelsea (0.10) and Arsenal (0.07).
New head coach Frank has been too cautious with his tactical approach over his first four months in charge. The 5-4-1 system he used at the Emirates Stadium on Sunday was designed to frustrate Arsenal. He was so worried about stopping the league leaders that he loaded up on centre-backs, who had nobody to mark because Mikel Merino operated as a false nine, and paid little attention to how Spurs could take advantage of the absences of Viktor Gyokeres, Martin Odegaard and Gabriel for the home side.
Tottenham have dropped to ninth in the table after just one victory (and those three losses) in five Premier League games. It is vital they beat Fulham and Brentford in their next two home top-flight fixtures to regain momentum. Frank’s relationship with the supporters is fraying, and he needs to win in front of them to earn back some faith.
One issue which could define the next couple of months revolves around who should start up front. Frank needs to decide whether to place all of his trust in Randal Kolo Muani, Tel or Richarlison until club-record signing Dominic Solanke recovers from the ankle injury that has kept the England international out since August.
Kolo Muani was signed on the summer transfer window’s deadline day, September 1, on loan from Wednesday’s Champions League opponents Paris Saint-Germain for the rest of the season. He has a point to prove, along with Spurs team-mates Xavi Simons and Wilson Odobert, who both spent time in PSG’s youth academy, against the club where he was marginalised in 2024-25, just a year after signing for €90million (£78.9m/$104.2m at the current rates).
Richarlison replaces Kolo Muani against Everton in October (Carl Recine/Getty Images)
You could make a strong case that Spurs should prioritise Richarlison and the development of 20-year-old Tel over playing Kolo Muani because they have long-term contracts with the club, but the situation is complex.
One of the reasons Tottenham hired Frank was his excellent record of improving talent at his former club Brentford, whose business model is about scouring the market for young, undervalued players and providing them with regular minutes before selling them on for a large profit. For example, they bought a teenage Bryan Mbeumo for around £5million in August 2019, when they were still in the second-tier Championship. The now Cameroon international scored 70 goals in 242 appearances for the west Londoners, then moved to Manchester United this summer in a deal worth up to £71m.
It is more difficult to develop youngsters in first-team football when you are also expected to compete for trophies, as Spurs are.
Frank needs to balance giving game time to the squad’s exciting prospects — including Tel, Lucas Bergvall and Archie Gray — with putting out the strongest possible starting XI to win games. The counter-argument is that Mauricio Pochettino inherited a young squad when he was appointed in 2013 but still guided Spurs to a fifth-placed finish and the League Cup final in his first full season.
Kolo Muani, who turns 27 next Friday, has played for four different clubs over the past three years.
He moved to Eintracht Frankfurt from France’s Nantes in the summer of 2022 but only spent one full season in Germany. He scored 16 goals in 34 Bundesliga appearances, which prompted PSG to make their move. However, the European champions’ head coach Luis Enrique now prefers Goncalo Ramos or Ousmane Dembele in a central striking role. After 18 months back in his hometown, Kolo Muani spent the second half of last season on loan to Juventus. He scored eight goals in 16 league games for the Italian side, but they turned down the opportunity to sign him permanently and completed deals for Lois Openda and Jonathan David instead.
Kolo Muani needs this loan to be a success. It might be too harsh to say his career has drifted over the past couple of years but he requires a permanent home to fulfil his potential.
France head coach Didier Deschamps has a host of quality attacking options to choose from, and Kolo Muani needs to be consistently performing at a high level to have any chance of playing in next year’s World Cup. It was unfortunate he had to withdraw from the final two World Cup qualifiers against Ukraine and Azerbaijan this month with the fractured jaw suffered in a collision with Harry Maguire during the Manchester United game after being left out of Deschamps’ squad in both the September and October windows.
Randal Kolo Muani wore a protective device against Arsenal because of his fractured jaw (Ben Stansall/Getty Images)
Richarlison is a strange footballer to describe. The Brazil international is not an elite goalscorer, but is capable of scoring great goals — his scissor-kick in August’s 3-0 defeat of Burnley and long-distance lob against Arsenal are the two most recent examples.
Frank has helped a lot of strikers to improve, but Richarlison does not match any of the profiles of the players he has previously worked with. The 28-year-old does not have the speed of Ollie Watkins, strength of Ivan Toney or ball-carrying ability of Yoane Wissa. When he is fully fit and confident, Richarlison is a good penalty-area threat but as it stands, this Spurs team do not create enough chances. His inventive header to put Tottenham 2-1 up against United and effort in September’s 2-2 draw with Brighton show what he can do when the ball is in the box, but he needs to improve his hold-up play.
Kolo Muani started the final three league games before the November international break, which suggests he is Frank’s preferred option. He scored goals when he played regularly at Nantes, Frankfurt and Juventus but has yet to open his account in nine appearances for Spurs (Richarlison, meanwhile, has five club goals in 19 this season across all competitions), albeit he has only recorded 215 minutes of game time in the Premier League. Gray (72) and Solanke (31) are the only members of the first-team squad to have featured less than him.
“Of course he wants to perform,” said Frank, when asked in his press conference ahead of the PSG game whether Kolo Muani’s start to life in north London had been frustrating. “Every player wants to perform and show their best, no doubt about that. He came very happy to join Tottenham and perform for us, and we were very happy to have him. Then he got a dead leg that took longer (to recover from) than we thought it would. Then he got the broken jaw. So it has definitely been stop-start. I’m convinced we will see more and more good stuff from him.
“I like his link-up play. I think he is very good at that. His ability to run in-behind and also his ability to go one-v-one. He is very good in those situations. That is probably a little difference (to Tottenham’s other forward options). And then he is very good in the box.”
Kolo Muani was excellent in the 4-0 Champions League win against FC Copenhagen three weeks ago. He offers a threat running beyond opposition defences and showed signs of a promising relationship with Odobert and Simons. He missed two great chances to score in the first half that night but then produced a fantastic assist for Odobert.
“We know that Kolo is a quality player,” said Odobert, also speaking ahead of the PSG game. “Having him with us can only be beneficial for us.”
Frank could start the two strikers together again this evening at the Parc des Princes, but that seems unlikely. This might seem a strange time to drop Richarlison, who has scored in consecutive games, for a player yet to find the net this season, but it feels like the smartest option to make Spurs slicker in attack.
Starting Kolo Muani is not going to entirely solve their chance-creation issues but he offers the team more variety and unpredictability than Richarlison does.
