Thomas Frank was fired by Tottenham on Wednesday after only eight months in charge and with his team just five points above the relegation zone in the Premier League.
Despite leading Spurs to the round of 16 in the Champions League, Frank has overseen a desperate domestic campaign. A 2-1 loss to Newcastle on Tuesday was greeted by boos from the home fans and left Spurs still without a league win in 2026.
“The Club has taken the decision to make a change in the Men’s Head Coach position and Thomas Frank will leave today,” Tottenham said in a statement. “Thomas was appointed in June 2025, and we have been determined to give him the time and support needed to build for the future together.
“However, results and performances have led the Board to conclude that a change at this point in the season is necessary.”
Frank’s exit means Spurs are on the lookout for a sixth head coach in less than seven years since Mauricio Pochettino departed in 2019.
The Dane was appointed at the end of last season when Ange Postecoglou was fired despite leading Tottenham to its first trophy in 17 years by winning the Europa League and securing Champions League qualification.
Frank had built up an impressive reputation for his work during a nine-year spell at Brentford when he established the modest London club as a Premier League force. But he was unable to repeat that success at Tottenham, where he won just seven of 26 games in the league.
Spurs’ last league win was Dec. 28 and defeat at home to Newcastle extended a ruinous run to one win in 11 in England’s top flight.
Spurs dropped to 16th in the standings on Tuesday and two places above the relegation zone.
Frank was not helped by an extensive injury list that included star players James Maddison, Dejan Kulusevski, Rodrigo Bentancur, Mohammed Kudus and Lucas Bergvall.
Captain Cristian Romero was also absent against Newcastle after being sent off in the previous game against Manchester United.
Frank said after defeat to Newcastle that he was “convinced” he would still be in charge for the next match against Arsenal later this month.
“If you do something right, you build something that can last,” he said. “Of course, we are not in a top position now. Everyone knows — directors, ownership, myself — what position we are in, what we need to improve and what we need to do better. That is what we are working very hard on.”
Frank is not alone in failing to revive Tottenham. He followed in the footsteps of some of soccer's top coaches, including Antonio Conte and José Mourinho, who could not bring success to the North London club.
And even when Postecoglou managed to deliver major silverware and a place in the money-spinning Champions League, it wasn't enough to save his job.
Postecoglou paid the price for a woeful domestic campaign that saw Spurs finish in 17th-place — their lowest since the Premier League was founded in 1992.
League form has also proved costly for Frank, whose team was on fewer points than Postecoglou's at this stage last year.
James Robson is at https://x.com/jamesalanrobson
AP soccer: https://apnews.com/hub/soccer
Tottenham's head coach Thomas Frank gestures during the English Premier League soccer match between Tottenham and Newcastle in London, Tuesday, Feb. 10, 2026. (AP Photo/Ian Walton)
Tottenham's head coach Thomas Frank gestures during the English Premier League soccer match between Tottenham and Newcastle in London, Tuesday, Feb. 10, 2026. (AP Photo/Ian Walton)
PARIS (AP) — Gisèle Pelicot's brain froze as the French police officer revealed the unthinkable.
“Fifty-three men had come to our house to rape me,” she recalls him telling her.
Sharing details of the horror that until now had largely been reserved for French courts, Pelicot is publicly telling her story of survival and courage in her own words, in a book and her first series of interviews since a landmark trial in 2024 turned her into a global icon against sexual violence and imprisoned her husband who knocked her out with drugs so other men could assault her inert body.
Extracts of “A Hymn to Life, Shame Has to Change Sides," published Tuesday by French newspaper Le Monde, rewound to Nov. 2, 2020 — the day when her world fell apart.
Her then-husband, Dominique Pelicot, had been summoned by police for questioning after a supermarket security guard caught him secretly taking video up women’s skirts.
Gisèle accompanied him and was completely unprepared for the bombshell delivered by the officer, Laurent Perret. Gradually, and with care, he explained how the man she regarded as a loving husband and whom she described as “a super guy" had, in fact, made her the unwitting victim of his perversions.
“I am going to show you photos and videos that are not going to please you,” the officer said, words she recounts in the book.
The first showed a man raping a woman who had been laid out on her side and dressed up in a suspender belt.
“That's you in this photo,” the officer said.
He then showed her another photo, and another after that — drawn from a collection of images that Dominique Pelicot took of his wife over the years when he regularly knocked her unconscious by lacing her food and drink with drugs, so strangers he invited to their home could assault her while he filmed.
Gisèle Pelicot couldn't believe that the inert woman in the photos was her.
“I didn’t recognize the individuals. Nor this woman. Her cheek was so flabby. Her mouth so limp. She was a rag doll,” she writes in her book.
“My brain stopped working in the office of Deputy Police Sergeant Perret."
The shocking case and her courage in demanding that it be tried in open court spurred a national reckoning about the blight of rape culture. The harrowing trial ended in December 2024 with guilty verdicts for all 51 defendants.
Dominique Pelicot and 49 other men were convicted of rapes and sexual assaults over a period of nearly a decade. Another man was convicted of drugging and raping his own wife with Dominique Pelicot’s help.
Dominique Pelicot, found guilty on all charges, was given the maximum possible sentence of 20 years in prison. The sentences ranged from three to 15 years imprisonment for the other convicted men. Only one of them subsequently appealed and saw his sentence for rape increased from nine to 10 years imprisonment.
In the book extracts published by Le Monde, Pelicot says that accepting the possibility of a closed-door trial would have protected her abusers and left her alone with them in court, “hostage to their looks, their lies, their cowardice and their scorn.”
“No one would know what they had done to me. Not a single journalist would be there to write their names next to their crimes,” she explains. “Above all, not a single woman could walk in and sit in the courtroom to feel less alone.”
The 73-year-old adds that had she been twenty years younger, "I might not have dared to refuse a closed-door hearing.”
“I would have feared the stares,” she writes. “Those damned stares a woman of my generation has always had to contend with, those damned stares that make you hesitate in the morning between trousers and a dress, that follow you or ignore you, flatter you and embarrass you. Those damned stares that are supposed to tell you who you are, what you’re worth, and then abandon you as you grow older.”
FILE - Gisele Pelicot leaves the courthouse for a break during the appeals trial in the case of a man challenging his conviction, less than a year after the landmark verdict in a drugging and rape trial that shook France, on Oct. 9, 2025 in Nimes, southern France. (AP Photo/Lewis Joly)
