Why Thomas Frank was glaring at Djed Spence and Brennan Johnson in the Tottenham dugout

If anyone at Tottenham Hotspur thought that the club was ready to enter a season that brings with it the UEFA Super Cup, Champions League and what might be the toughest Premier League campaign yet then one night in Munich would have obliterated that.

You're encouraged not to read too much into pre-season results, which in most cases is absolutely true, but Tottenham's game in Germany on Thursday evening was a study of two very different clubs run in very different ways with very different benchmarks for success.

On a huge honours board in one of the main corridors inside the Allianz Arena all of Bayern's many achievements are listed. It's just line after line of text and year after year with six Champions League/European Cup titles alone.

Only one section stands out because it has only one trophy noted in it. The Bavarian giants have only ever won one UEFA Cup, in 1996. That's not their fault though. They've barely ever needed to be in Europe's second tier competition. If they are in that then they failed previously.

Of course Bayern benefit from being the dominant team in a league that most seasons looks up to them, unless some plucky upstart upsets them in the Bundesliga, only to be raided by bigger sides, usually by Bayern themselves.

This was only the German side's second friendly since their holidays following the Club World Cup yet they looked ready to steamroll straight into another campaign. Spurs in contrast looked as beaten, battered and tired as they did last season. The quick turnaround after their 14-hour flight back from South Korea would not have helped.

The injuries are already mounting once more despite changes in management as well as medical and performance staff.

Thomas Frank currently finds himself without Dominic Solanke, Destiny Udogie, long-termers James Maddison, Dejan Kulusevski and Radu Dragusin, as well as Manor Solomon while summer signing Kota Takai is yet to play a single minute for the club.

In the transfer market, Spurs have struggled during a summer in which they desperately needed to push on. Now as the injuries already bite, the squad is looking wafer thin again in key areas.

What should truly worry Tottenham is that they needed major transfer surgery yet have mostly stood still while other clubs above them only required minor tweaks yet have added huge injections of quality into their squad with £200million-plus spent each at most of the big boys.

Technical director Johan Lange could be seen outside the dressing room in Munich on his phone. Spurs fans will be hoping he was pushing something towards its conclusion because for all of the Dane and Fabio Paratici's long, long combined list of contacts and connections in the transfer market, two new faces ready for the first team and one of them a loan signing appear a paltry haul in comparison to what others are doing.

It's not even like Spurs can claim they're doing the honourable thing and ensuring a clear path for their own homegrown players. They've sent most of them on loan in the past week with more to follow.

The failure to prise Morgan Gibbs-White away from the clutches of Nottingham Forest owner Evangelos Marinakis seems to have knocked Tottenham off their feet more than anyone could have envisaged.

With that move they would have appeared proactive and earned the plaudits for £115million worth of spending within 48 hours after Mohammed Kudus' arrival from West Ham.

Instead, weeks on, Frank still has no natural number 10 available to him, a situation that has had a huge spotlight shone on it since the moment Maddison ruptured the anterior cruciate ligaments in his right knee in the final moments of that game in South Korea.

Tottenham have the money, for it was there for the bids that went in for Gibbs-White of £60million and beyond, and the pot has been added to by the sale of Son Heung-min to LAFC for a MLS record fee of more than £20million. There is no fear within the club that they cannot finance their transfer plans, but what exactly are those plans?

Is the delay due to a lack of number 10 alternatives to Gibbs-White? Eberechi Eze remains in play for whoever can pay the money that will take him from Crystal Palace and then whoever can convince him to sign on the dotted line.

Tottenham have an interest in 20-year-old Como midfielder Nico Paz but those within the club deny any bid has been made at this point. A Real Madrid 50% sell-on clause for the Tenerife-born Argentina international reportedly makes any fee to begin negotiations likely to be a major one for a player who has played just 43 senior club games.

Harvey Elliott and Jack Grealish have been linked with the north London club, while some fans have even wondered if Frank and Spurs might be tempted into a short-term reunion with 33-year-old free agent Christian Eriksen. Could Frank try to go back to Brentford for Mikkel Damsgaard, who only signed a long-term deal in January? Surely the Bees can't let anyone else go?

"I think we are definitely in the market in general [for a number 10]. Of course, when players get a long-term injury we need to look into that, but generally we are in the market yes," said Frank after the rout in Germany.

When asked if anything was close, Frank added: "Nobody feels close or far away. I'm not saying anything before there's anything that is completely 100%."

It's not just a number 10 either, Frank wants another central defender due to concerns over the lack of availability of Cristian Romero and Micky van de Ven for long periods of the last campaign as well as the time it will take for Radu Dragusin to get back to full fitness and then sharpness following his own ACL injury.

Both Romero and Van de Ven were left chasing shadows against Bayern, the Argentine mostly trying to kick them.

Frank appears to have also decided that maybe he needs to replace Son after all. The Dane began the Asian tour bigging up the young options within his squad, but perhaps after seeing the lack of creativity in the matches against Newcastle and Bayern, seemed to suggest that it probably would be best if they could replace their experienced former Golden Boot winner with someone ready to rack up the goals and assists.

"Sonny was a key player for 10 seasons. He has left the club. We have both good young players in Mathys [Tel] and Wilson [Odobert] and they are really promising and can perform," said Frank on Thursday night.

"Brennan [Johnson] can also play that side. As I said, we are in the market. If we think we can find the right one, one who can improve the team, then he will be signed. If we can't, then not."

Potentially the player being sought could be someone like Eze who can fulfil both roles centrally and out wide in Frank's side.

The new head coach needs help. In losing Son permanently, Maddison for much of the season, Kulusevski for a chunk of it and Solanke for pre-season, Frank has had 91 direct goal involvements last season ripped out of his team.

It has been replaced at this point by a winger who scored just five goals last season, having been unable to build on his fine debut campaign in the Premier League the year before, and a defensive midfielder who is not one for finding the net or even getting near it, without a single goal or assist for Bayern last season.

It's not exactly rocket science required to figure out what could potentially happen to a team that finished 17th last season with all of those goals and assists in it.

For all of chairman Daniel Levy's proclamations of the Europa League not being enough and wanting to win the Premier League and Champions League, the expectations so far after the events of this sluggish transfer window could not be much lower.

Most bookmakers have Spurs placed with their odds as a bottom half team for the 2025/26 season at best.

Frank is trying to make them more defensively solid to ensure that doesn't happen but nights like the one in Munich show just how much is left to be done, particularly when he has similar attacking and creative absences to the ones Postecoglou did in the final weeks of the last campaign.

Postecoglou had no transfer window at that point to help him. Frank does and the snail's pace of movement - both in signing and selling players - at Tottenham is bewildering in a summer when they really needed to push on to try to close the gap on all of those sides above.

Most of all they needed to make a splash in the transfer market to ensure Frank hits the ground running in the new season to ensure nobody goes back to that decision to sack Postecoglou. If anything it will be the assertion that the squad the Europa League-winning Australian had was capable of better that will come under the microscope.

In a new manager's first summer there's going to be a certain amount of waiting for him to analyse what he has inherited and what he wants to keep or sell.

However, Frank identified immediately that he did not have a natural number six and would need one for his system. After missing out on Cristian Norgaard, Spurs would sign Joao Palhinha on loan almost two months after Frank was appointed.

The Dane will be finding out swiftly about all of the little idiosyncrasies at a club where managers come and go like London buses. Having new CEO Vinai Venkatesham trying to change practices from the top should help as time goes on with the former Arsenal supremo one for stability and attempting to create an internal management structure more befitting of a company that now has 800 or so employees.

Frank can only control what's happening in his department and he is learning more and more about the players in every game, their strengths, weaknesses and the way they react to situations.

Both Brennan Johnson and Djed Spence had difficult games against Bayern - they were not alone. The former struggled to make any real impact down the left in Son's absence and spent much of the game having to come back and try to help out Spence.

Spence got progressively worse as the encounter wore on. While he dealt well with Bukayo Saka in the friendly win against Arsenal in Hong Kong, the duel threat of Kingsley Coman and Michael Olise was just too much for him - as it would be for many a full-back - and that side of Tottenham's team was often all at sea.

Olise and Kane had both been named among the Ballon d'Or nominees on the day of the match and the former Palace man in particular put on a show.

Spence would often try to do too much with the ball and on one such occasion he got caught in possession and Bayern broke with Coman curling in a fine strike. The best players punish overindulgence.

When Johnson and Spence came off, Frank watched their reactions closely, almost looking like he was glaring at them. Johnson came off, slapped his outstretched hand and went along the line of people in the Spurs dugout doing the same.

Spence did so to the head coach but appeared to walk straight to an empty seat while expressing displeasure at either his or the team's performance. Frank watched him in his seat for some time before eventually turning back to the game.

That's not to say that either reaction was right or wrong, disappointment is no bad thing, but Frank will be learning more and more about what makes his players tick.

There were some things for Spurs to complain about in the game. Some of the officiating in the friendly was dubious at best, with Kane appearing to be a yard offside when he scored the only goal of the first half.

Palhinha, who looked every inch a player who has not played much football in months, was then hard done by when Bayern were awarded a penalty when he had not appeared to make any contact as Josip Stanisic fell to the floor in the Spurs box. Kane slipped as he took the spot kick, sending the ball into the stratosphere and bringing some form of justice to proceedings.

However, there could be no complaints about the rest of the game as Bayern were unfortunate to not hit the kind of landslide score they beat Spurs by back in 2019 at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.

Even when Vincent Kompany made 10 outfield changes in one go, the youngsters of Bayern had far too much for a Spurs side that were playing for longer in order to prepare themselves for the trip to Udine to play the European champions and Club World Cup finalists PSG.

Luis Enrique's side will have not played a single friendly in what will be exactly a month since that defeat to Chelsea in New York.

It doesn't matter. Yet again Tottenham will take on one of Europe's super clubs, an opponent far better prepared for the season ahead and stocked with talent. It is the level Spurs have been aiming for for far too long.

They need to create something better to meet the expectations laid out from the very top. Words are great, but actions are vital.