By Charlie Eccleshare
In Besart Berisha’s first conversation with Ange Postecoglou, he got the feeling the Australian knew him, “even though we’d never met”.
Postecoglou, who at the time was Brisbane Roar coach, clearly and persuasively made his case that Berisha, a 26-year-old striker with German club Arminia Bielefeld, should move with his young family to the other side of the world.
“I had a big temper but he knew it, and he knew how to deal with this sort of thing,” Berisha said. “We talked about so many things, and the most important thing for him was family. He told me it wasn’t about signing a striker who would score 20 goals. ‘I want the right people in my team,’ he said. He convinced me straight away.”
Berisha was a huge success in Brisbane, rediscovering his love for the game and becoming a prolific striker. He scored 48 goals in 76 A-League games after signing in 2011, winning the Golden Boot in his first season as Brisbane defended their A-League title.
Berisha is one of many players who have been on the receiving end of “the call” from Postecoglou, from well before his current time in charge of Tottenham Hotspur in the English Premier League. At Celtic, it was so common to hear of new signings waxing lyrical about their conversations with Postecoglou that there was a running joke that the head coach could have an alternative career in recruitment if he ever had enough of football.
And over the past month or so, Postecoglou has helped persuade Timo Werner, Radu Dragusin and Lucas Bergvall to join him at Spurs, with Dragusin turning down Bayern Munich and Bergvall spurning Barcelona after their talks.
Besart Berisha and Ange Postecoglou during their time together at Brisbane Roar in 2011.Credit: Getty
What is it that makes Postecoglou so good at these pitches?
Both Dragusin and Werner cited conversations with Postecoglou as a big factor in signing.
“I chose Tottenham because I felt it was the right step and I had a really good conversation with the coach,” Dragusin said.
A week earlier, Werner said: “A lot of things attracted me here – first of all, the talk with the manager. It was a really good talk. He gave me straight away the feeling that I want when you talk to a manager and also the tactics and the style, how he wants to play, how he lets the team play. I thought straight away that it fits perfectly.”
Postecoglou, 58, says he doesn’t try to make a sale, and he has no interest in trying to convince someone who doesn’t want to join.
“With any player I’ve signed, it’s just a conversation about what I believe and my thoughts on them as players, where I see them fitting in,” he said. “And trying to create a picture in their heads about what they’ll encounter when they get here.”
That idea of a picture about what they’ll find at the club resonated with James Maddison during his initial conversations with Postecoglou. The Australian coach knew the midfielder might have preconceptions about Spurs after his time at Leicester City. Postecoglou explained that things would be very different under him.
“We spoke about how I would fit into the way he plays and my style of play and what position and all that detailed stuff,” Maddison said in November. “But he said at the end of it, ‘Well, really good to talk. But James, whether you decide to come or not, you’re going to see a completely different Tottenham team’.
“I just loved the confidence that he said that with – ‘You can come and be a part of it or you can go somewhere else and it’s still going to change at Tottenham anyway’. It left that bit in my mind where I thought, ‘Yeah, I want to go and work for this guy.’”
Ange Postecoglou embraces James Maddison earlier this season.Credit: Getty
With goalkeeper Guglielmo Vicario, Postecoglou pointed to the pair’s common ground – neither had enjoyed a conventional or gilded path to the top of the game. Postecoglou had arrived in London via Australia, Japan and Scotland; Vicario had worked his way up from the fourth tier of Italian football. Postecoglou also said the goalkeeper position was a priority, and that Vicario would be critical to how the team played.
With Micky van de Ven, who had interest from other big clubs, Postecoglou said the Dutchman’s pace and powers of recovery would make him the perfect defender for his defensive high line. Like Vicario and Maddison, van de Ven was convinced by Postecoglou’s clear vision of what he wanted from the team and how he would slot into it.
Key to the recruitment efforts is Postecoglou delivering on his promises. That still resonates with Thomas Broich, the attacking midfielder whom Postecoglou drove from the Netherlands to Germany to persuade him to sign for the Roar in 2010.
“He sat down with me for an hour and drove straight back to the Netherlands. We had a great talk and he convinced me to come to Brisbane,” Broich told The Athletic last year. “It was a good talk, but a lot of people in football talk the talk – I didn’t know he would be the guy who could pull it off.”
Broich was voted A-League player of the year in two of his first three seasons as he helped the Roar to consecutive titles. He and Postecoglou subsequently pointed to the head coach’s ability to walk the walk, as well as talk the talk, to prospective signings.
A similar thing has happened at Tottenham. During his conversations with the then-17-year-old Bergvall in January, Postecoglou could simply point him to the opportunities given to Pape Matar Sarr and Destiny Udogie, both 21, and, to a lesser degree, 20-year-old Alejo Veliz this season.
With Dragusin, 22, Postecoglou was upfront: you’ll get opportunities, you’re not coming in as a backup, but you’re joining a top club and becoming a regular starter isn’t going to happen immediately. Dragusin began his career trying to dislodge Giorgio Chiellini and Leonardo Bonucci from the Juventus team, and Postecoglou recognised he would not shy away from a challenge.
With Werner, older and out of favour at RB Leipzig, it was a different conversation: explaining that the German Werner’s pace and directness would work well in Postecoglou’s system and expressing his admiration for a player who it appeared had lost some self-belief.
In that respect, Werner was in a similar spot to Berisha, who at age 26, having failed to live up to the early hype that had taken him to Hamburg and Burnley, decided to join a head coach he had never heard of in a league he knew nothing about.
“He said he would take care of me, and that was really important,” said Berisha, now assistant manager of FC Prishtina in his native Kosovo, where he is trying to emulate Postecoglou’s management skills. “I had a little boy and a family. Managers need to understand that players are insecure in many ways. Some players are at big clubs and lose their way, and need a bit of guidance.
“Ange was the first manager who showed me that kind of care. He was so different, his view of me was so different. He said he needed this kind of player, and it made me think this is the kind of coach I need. And I told him on the phone: ‘Ange, I am in’.
