Thomas Frank has weighed in on whether Tottenham Hotspur are ready to make a £100m signing and what the club needs to do to reach the next level.
There have been plenty of reports suggesting that Thomas Frank will be backed with big funds in the upcoming transfer windows.
In fact, it has even been alleged that Tottenham want to make a statement signing in January to signal their ambition.
In the post Daniel Levy era, ENIC are allegedly ready to do away with Spurs’ self-imposed wage cap to compete for the best players in the world.
Thomas Frank calls for player development
Frank’s predecessor, Ange Postecoglou, suggested that Tottenham will never sign a £100m player like some of their rivals do.
However, the current Tottenham boss is less concerned about spending nine figures on a single player.
While he admitted that investment in the squad is necessary to push onto the next level, he suggested that developing players is just as crucial.
When asked if Spurs will ever spend £100m on a player, Frank told Football.London: “In the next 50 years? Then yes! It’s very evident that every successful club, not for one year, but over five, six, seven years, to build, you need a combination of time and doing the processes, depending on where the team come from, of course, but to stay up there is still very difficult.
“So time and process, and, then of course, investment. If you want success in football, you need to invest in players. Hopefully, do it cleverly and we want to do it smart, so we don’t invest too much on the wrong players. But you need to invest. £100m, I don’t know. Let’s see. I don’t think we are close to spending £100m, put it that way. But I don’t know, let’s see what happens in the future.”
“I’m a big believer that we need to develop the players we have, and if we do that, it’s about if you can develop players, not all of them should cost £60m, £70m, £80m, £90m, whatever the amount. I don’t think anybody has done that. Liverpool didn’t do that to get to the top. Even City hasn’t done that.
“So you need to be good at developing the players, which I believe we are and we will be very good at. But then you also need to invest in the right potential of a player. He could be 22, or 26. Declan Rice is a good example. How old was he when he joined Arsenal? 24 or 25? That’s important. Nobody achieves the top without investing.”
The quality of recruitment is more important than transfer spending
Tottenham’s net spend has been among the highest in the Premier League over the past few years, but that has not brought the team much closer to the best sides in the division.
One only has to look at how some of the club’s most expensive additions, such as Tanguy Ndombele and Richarlison, have performed to conclude that just spending big alone is not enough.
In fact, some of Spurs’ best signings over recent years, such as Micky van de Ven and Lucas Bergvall, were relatively inexpensive by modern-day standards.
The quality of recruitment is thus much important than just spending £70m-£100m on a single player for the Lilywhites to close the gap with the likes of Man City and Arsenal.