Thomas Frank plans to mark his leap up the Premier League pecking order by making Bryan Mbeumo his first signing, copying an expensive move Man Utd ‘never wanted’.
Frank is expected to be appointed Spurs manager shortly after the north London club struck up an agreement with Brentford to make the Dane one of the most expensive coaches in Premier League history.
But the plundering of Brentford might not stop there as Frank has ‘demanded’ that Bryan Mbeumo accompany him on the trip to Spurs, who will have to hijack Man Utd’s move for the forward.
It would not be the first time a manager has joined a bigger club and made sure one of his players joins him – although Spurs will hope it goes better than most of these examples.
Marouane Fellaini
David Moyes “never wanted Marouane Fellaini to be my first Man Utd signing”, but the subtext is hilarious and crucial.
While he always intended to pack the Belgian among his belongings for the trip from Everton to Old Trafford, the manager was painfully aware of The Optics in using the rare transfer pull of one of the biggest clubs in world football to immediately bring in a relatively uncultured player from his old club.
But Ed Woodward somehow contrived to deliver an even more embarrassing scenario in his first and worst transfer window at Man Utd. Fellaini was the only signing handed down to Moyes after futile pursuits of Cristiano Ronaldo, Gareth Bale, Thiago Alcantara, Cesc Fabregas, Ander Herrera and Fabio Coentrao, among a great many others.
“I knew, coming from my old club, the look of him was never going to be [right for United],” Moyes added. It undeniably contributed to the sheer incompetence of Man Utd signing Fellaini for £27.5m on September 3, despite there being a release clause in his contract making him £4m cheaper up to July 31.
Not that Moyes’ concern over perception prevented the club from making a joint bid for Fellaini and Leighton Baines earlier that summer.
The tales of Rio Ferdinand and Nemanja Vidic being shown tapes of Phil Jagielka are regrettably apocryphal but it is without doubt that a manager out of his depth clutched a comfort blanket that carried the scent of Goodison Park as his big career break ended in inevitable failure.
Then again, as Sunderland manager a few years later Moyes openly said of Fellaini and Adnan Januzaj that he would “drive down to Manchester and pick them up” if a deal was possible, so the bloke obviously just values familiarity.
READ MORE: David Moyes managed Man Utd once and it is time we all just moved on
Arouna Kone
It is remarkable that Moyes jumping up to Man Utd was not the most absurd case of overpromotion those circumstances produced. Rarely ever has a manager failed upwards quite so impressively as Roberto Martinez with Everton.
The Spaniard arrived at Goodison Park as the Moyes replacement armed with an FA Cup winner’s medal, but the addition of a Premier League relegation on his CV suggested the arrangement might not end so well.
A brilliant first season was the precursor to two years of expensive backwards steps, by which point Martinez was sacked and again ludicrously fell higher up the managerial ladder by being entrusted with the Golden Generations of both Belgium and Portugal.
Martinez surely spent his first days in both posts investigating the genealogy of his old Wigan squad. His first signing at Everton was that of Kone, who described it as “an honour to be back working with the manager once again”.
James McCarthy made the same jump soon afterwards, passing Fellaini in the Finch Farm reception on deadline day as Man Utd, Everton and Wigan crystallised their respective places in the football food chain to an unnecessary extent.
Richarlison
Frank will inherit a fractured Spurs dressing room in any case but the undying support of one player would have been guaranteed with a different intra-Premier League appointment.
Richarlison specifically cited how he felt it was “important for me here to be with Marco Silva again” when Everton “spoiled” the entire transfer window by signing him in summer 2018.
The pair had first crossed paths at Watford when Silva personally intervened to hijack the Brazilian’s planned move to Ajax. The Hornets sacked Silva five months later in a rare show of impatience with a manager, who landed at Everton by the summer.
His first port of call was to link back up with Richarlison who, for his many faults, helped keep the Toffees up and never lacked for effort before leaving at a profit when Spurs came calling in summer 2022.
Joe Allen
“We have got some protection on Brendan coming back for our players in the initial period, which I think is the right thing,” Swansea chairman Huw Jenkins said of a gentleman’s agreement – or what he termed “a 12-month respite” – designed to prevent Liverpool from raiding the Welsh club for anything more than their manager.
It lasted all of 70 days. While Rodgers reunited with former Swansea loanee Fabio Borini in his first signing as head coach at Anfield, the Northern Irishman immediately went back on that handshake deal with his former employers to return for Allen.
A furious Swansea lambasted Liverpool for reneging on “a written agreement” not to sign any of their players within a year of Rodgers’ appointment, but a clause which permitted Allen to join the Reds, Arsenal, Chelsea, Manchester City or Man Utd for £15m overrode any informal accord.
Swansea, realising Rodgers was likely willing to drag them through every court around the globe and fight to the death to sign a player so courageous, relented and decided to just win the League Cup with Ki Sung-yueng instead.
Jermain Defoe
It is one of the great bits of Barclays folklore that the 18 most expensive signings in Harry Redknapp’s 34-year, almost 1,400-game managerial career only actually involve 15 players.
Sandro ranks 18th and 12th. Peter Crouch is 8th and 5th. And Defoe comes 14th and 2nd. It is an unfathomably effective way of saying someone managed Spurs, Portsmouth and QPR without explicitly stating it.
And the only thing preventing Niko Kranjcar from making that list is that he did not cost all that much on any of the three separate occasions Redknapp signed him.
“This is the third club I have signed him for. I know what a top-class player he is,” Redknapp said after making Defoe his first signing as Spurs manager in January 2009, spending £15m on a player he bought for £9m as Portsmouth boss 12 months before, and West Ham poached for £1m or so before the turn of the millennium.
That shared history spawned one of the great Redknapp stories – how he downplayed the need for Defoe to undergo a medical before completing the deadline day rule-breaking Portsmouth move “because he knew me from a kid and that” – but it was in north London where he laid the foundations for success on those diminutive but broad shoulders as his first purchase.
