With Thomas Frank taking charge of the proceedings at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, he will likely push along his mid-block system approach at N17, and this is where a lot of the current squad need to be worried, given that his arrival will likely change a lot of how the team operates, and it will likely phase out players that have been more of a weak link in the current roster.
Now it is quite easy to take this out of context, so let me clarify that I don’t mean that they plainly don’t have the quality to feature under the Danish head coach. But I do mean that they will have to work hard and get back into their potential if they were to not get phased out of the roster at N17.
Three players who are likely to lose their first-team roles at Tottenham under Thomas Frank
Guglielmo Vicario
To start with is the goalkeeper Vicario, who has had a lot of problems in the past season. He has had inconsistent claims time and again, complemented by questionable composure under pressure aerially, which have caused a lot of problems for the North Londoners from set-piece situations and crosses.
He has also struggled to maintain himself in aggressive high lines, given how he was not quite assertive over whether he needed to rush or stay a lot of times.
Now if we think about the system that Thomas Frank has been expected to implement at Hotspur Way, the starting goalkeeper will need to have elite composure on the ball whilst boasting a sharing presence on the ball and the capacity to vertically lay off the sequences in the first phase.
While the 27-year-old is a sharp shot-stopper, the thing is that, as I said before, he doesn’t have that aerial dominance and, moreover, doesn’t provide the calmness from the back that the Lilywhites are going to need when building from the back.
Whilst Thomas Frank has been working with the likes of David Raya and Mark Flekken at Brentford, and if you consider both of them, they have that box control and tactical poise which Vicario has failed to show on a consistent basis at Tottenham.
Heung Min-Son
The South Korean has a visible sense of decline in terms of his physical explosiveness, and while he still remains an icon at N17, he will have to grind out his presence under Thomas Frank. The Dane head coach highly values putting in consistent presses (even if it is generally on triggers). He also likes to front in a systemic and disciplined system, and this is where Son could end up quite easily falling behind against more athletic attackers, given how the North Londoners Spurs target players like Bryan Mbeumo, Wissa, and Xavi Simons, who end up being more ideal for the way Thomas Frank wants to play, given how they are capable of inverting as well as rotating between lanes.
The South Korean, given that he is no longer the vertical aggressor that he once used to be, has shown that, given how he has struggled in terms of tight spaces and the Lilywhites likely playing with two strikers, Son may be decided into a rotational role.
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Rodrigo Bentancur
Now I know that Bentancur is possibly technically the most polished midfielder that Tottenham have at the moment, but then he lacks that physical dominance and coverage that Thomas Frank demands in his midfield. The system at Brentford under Frank was a lot about winning the possession back and having press-resistant transitions complemented by aggressive vertical layoffs, and Bentancur does all of it but rather a bit inconsistently since his return from injury.