The Ange Postecoglou project at Tottenham Hotspur has become a sort of footballing Rorschach test.
You see what you’re inclined to see: a massive injury crisis that has gutted their defence and brutally exposed the limitations of the remaining players, who are out on their feet and only capable of providing the odd burst of inspiration, here and there … or an ongoing disaster engineered by a guy who doesn’t know what he’s doing, was lucky to get the job in the first place, and is too stubborn and/or prideful to change anything.
Whatever your perspective, there’s no denying the former Socceroos boss is having a very bad time of it right now. Though Spurs are still alive in the FA Cup, Carabao Cup and Europa League (so they yet might win that trophy Postecoglou always does in his second season), their Premier League form is atrocious, and unsustainable.
Ange Postecoglou is under siege at Tottenham Hotspur. Illustration: Stephen Kiprillis.Credit: Getty Images
Spurs sit 14th on the table, about halfway through the season, with their lowest points tally at this stage since 2009. Since beating Manchester City in late November, they have taken five of 27 possible points, and are closer to the relegation zone than the top four. Their 2-1 defeat to Arsenal on Thursday morning (AEDT) was their third loss in a row in the North London derby; that hasn’t happened since 1989, and Postecoglou still hasn’t got a win over his opposite number Mikel Arteta in four attempts.
Premier League managers have been sacked for less.
On Monday (1am AEDT), Tottenham travels to face struggling Everton. They should win, but Spurs fans have a saying for times like these, accustomed as are they to heartbreak whenever their brittle football team goes up against an opponent who is having an even tougher run: Dr. Tottenham will see you now. David Moyes, who is one game into his second stint as Everton boss, sits cheerfully in the waiting room.
It’s a grim situation, and Postecoglou not hiding from it.
“This can’t be accepted by anyone at the club. Us losing so many games in a league season is not right,” he said post-match at the Emirates Stadium.
“It’s not who we are. Allowing Arsenal to play to their tempo … it just wasn’t good enough.”
So, is this just another bump in the road on Postecoglou’s coaching journey, or something more significant? What’s gone so wrong? And how much of it really is his fault?
The football
Postecoglou’s style is well-established, and it will never change, no matter how often he is asked. ‘Angeball’ is probably the most daring interpretation of attacking football out there – but despite the prevailing narrative, it’s not so radically different to how the top teams in Europe play. They all push their defenders high, try to play out from the back and try to dominate their opponents.
Ange Postecoglou celebrates with his players after their Carabao Cup first-leg win over Liverpool.Credit: Getty Images
There’s already proof it can work. At their best, his Spurs have been irresistible. And while it’s always his tactics that get blamed when they lose, it’s not recognised enough that it’s his game model that has enabled them to record impressive wins over teams like Manchester City, Liverpool, Manchester United and Aston Villa. They have scored the second-highest number of goals in the Premier League. When everything clicks, you can see the team they could become. And if you look closely, you’ll notice that he does tweak and adjust things on a weekly basis – he doesn’t just set and forget his tactics as he’s lazily accused of doing.
The problem is that Spurs have been woefully inconsistent, and tend to lose the games they should (or fans think they should) be winning against teams like Ipswich Town, Crystal Palace, Brighton, Bournemouth and Nottingham Forest. Too often have they failed to take advantage of pportunities in front of goal, inviting opponents to punish them whenever they do – and they always do. They’ve also given up too many points from leading positions. These are not things that Postecoglou teams are supposed to do. Something is going wrong, somewhere.
The Premier League is a quasi-Global Super League these days. It is the biggest concentration of talent – both players and managers – in the history of the game. The competition’s global broadcast rights are worth so much that even mid-table clubs are routinely outspending established giants from continental Europe. What this means is that there are really no truly bad teams any more (except maybe Southampton), and the margins between success and failure are much finer than Postecoglou has encountered. Having inherited a big club in a poor state (more on that later), he is trying to enact vast cultural change in a nightmarishly difficult environment.
The good news is that the players seem all-in on his ideas. There is no hint of a dressing room mutiny. The bad news is that despite this being the case, they have too many aberrations where they don’t bring the full-bore mentality that they should know is required to underpin Angeball. That’s not really happened to him before; by now, the mentality piece is usually sorted. It might be because, physically, they are falling apart. Which brings us to…
The injuries
Last season, Postecoglou spoke several times about craving European football, and the rhythm of regular matches it would bring because that would faster develop his squad.
Now it’s here – and they can’t cope.
Every team gets injuries, of course. That’s part of the game. But what’s happened at Spurs this season has been ridiculous. Four of their first-choice back five are out: goalkeeper Gugliermo Vicario, centre-backs Cristian Romero and Micky van de Ven, and left-back Destiny Udogie. Romero and van de Ven have been out since the start of December. Any team would struggle with its backbone ripped out for so long, particularly one with such a holistic idea of how they want to play from defence to attack. Then there’s new recruits like Wilson Odobert, who did his hamstring approximately five minutes after signing for the club and hasn’t been sighted since October.
Micky van de Ven has been a terrific signing for Tottenham – but he’s barely played this season due to injury.Credit: Getty Images
At times there have been up to 12 first-team players unavailable. Thus begets a vicious cycle: Postecoglou has less capacity to rotate players, and as they tackle a schedule that has them playing two or three times per week, more and more is being asked of fewer players, but the emptier their tanks, the less they have to give. Performances suffer. Eventually, players break down.
Who is to blame? Well, it’s probably instructive that Tottenham has posted recruitment ads for a new medical chief, physiotherapist and rehab coach for the first team. (Applications close at the end of January, if you’re interested.)
Some fans have convinced themselves that Postecoglou himself is the cause of most of the injuries (hamstrings in particular) because of his intense training methods and tactics, which requires repeated high-effort sprints. The truth is that such a crippling injury toll is not a common feature of his coaching; the only time where anything comparative has happened was at Celtic, and the club’s hierarchy responded by building a big enough squad to enable a level of rotation that gave first-team players opportunities to rest. The problem, which was never that bad to begin with, went away.
Speaking of…
The recruitment
Anecdotally, many Tottenham fans appear to be pointing the finger of blame higher than Postecoglou, and this is the reason: the club’s approach to transfers, and the notoriously spendthrift ways of chairman Daniel Levy, has been a long-standing bugbear in the Spurs universe.
The club brought in four first-team players in the European summer, but only one was older than 20: striker Dominic Solanke, who has been impressive up front. Odobert has barely been sighted due to injury. The others – Archie Gray and Lucas Bergvall, both 18-year-old midfielders – have only recently been handed more substantial roles. It’s probably out of necessity; in an ideal world, Postecoglou wouldn’t have thrown them into the deep end like this, but amazingly, they’ve been two of their best players of late. Gray, in particular, has been super impressive at centre-back, a position he’d never played before.
But that’s where they left their business – despite clearly needing at least another left-sided defender, defensively minded midfielder and another versatile front-third player to take the strain off the others.
Asked last month whether they should have gone for older, more established players to fill those gaps, rather than prospects for the future, Postecoglou said: “We needed to do that because it was a team that was coming towards the end of its cycle, and we were rebuilding not just the squad but the playing style, and you couldn’t replace experience with experience because that is not a rebuild.”
Daniel Levy has endured a controversial two-decade reign as Spurs chairman.Credit: Getty
That might be true, but it’s also possible for Postecoglou to think that and also think they haven’t done enough to address there needs in the here and now; he just can’t say the latter publicly and criticise Levy.
That didn’t stop Romero from saying it, though, a couple of days later: “Manchester City competes every year, you see how Liverpool strengthens its squad, Chelsea strengthens their squad, doesn’t do well, strengthens again, and now they’re seeing results. Those are the things to imitate,” he said in a post-match interview with Spanish broadcaster Telemundo Deportes. “You have to realise that something is going wrong, hopefully, they realise it. The last few years, it’s always the same: first, the players, then the coaching staff changes, and it’s always the same people responsible. Hopefully, they realise who the true responsible ones are, and we move forward because it’s a beautiful club that, with the structure it has, could easily be competing for the title every year.”
It’s not like they can’t afford to spend more; Tottenham are, according to Deloitte, the ninth-richest club in world football. But in 2022-23, Deloitte found they had the smallest revenue-to-wages ratio in the Premier League. And with such a huge injury crisis on their hands, the only signing they’ve made since the January transfer window opened was for a goalkeeper, Antonin Kinsky. Another target, Paris Saint-Germain forward Randall Kolo Muani, has reportedly opted for Juventus instead.
The bigger picture
It’s worth remembering, as we speculate about his future, the reasons why Postecoglou was brought in to begin with.
Let’s go back to 2019, just before Tottenham made their first and only UEFA Champions League final, which they lost 2-0 to Liverpool. Then-manager Mauricio Pochettino spoke frankly about how he believed the squad needed a “rebuild”, and that it would be “painful”.
It didn’t happen. Pochettino was sacked a few months later and replaced by Jose Mourinho, renowned for his defence-first outlook, who it was hoped would instil the mentality that would turn Spurs into legitimate title challengers. He lasted a little over a year; then it was Nuno Espirito Santo, and then four months later, Antonio Conte. All of them pinpointed the clear need for further investment into the squad.
Postecoglou was seen as a return to Tottenham’s roots, his ethos and blueprint being an almost perfect match with the club’s motto, ‘To Dare is to Do’, and historic commitment towards attacking football. When he started, he told former Manchester United star Rio Ferdinand about how much “real solid foundational” work needed to be done and the level of “disengagement” there was between players, fans and club. They all fell in love with him pretty quickly.
In a rare public appearance at the height of the 10-match unbeaten run at the beginning of Postecoglou’s tenure, Levy explained the rationale behind his appointment. He admitted he had erred in hiring big-name “trophy managers” who didn’t fit the Tottenham way, that the frustration and pressure from players and fans about their lack of success had impacted him personally. Then he effectively declared that he had curbed his trigger-happy habits.
“You have to learn by the mistakes,” he said.
“[Mourinho and Conte are] great managers, but maybe not for this club. And for what we want, we want to play a certain way. And if that means it has to take a little bit longer to win, maybe it’s the right thing for us. That’s why bringing in Ange was, from my viewpoint, exactly the right decision.”
If this is the “painful rebuild” that Pochettino said was needed, then it would be completely stupid to bin Postecoglou now and start again with some other coach – and not only because Levy would be going back on his word. That Postecoglou is still there suggests Levy recognises this.
But it would be just as stupid not to back him properly, and give him exactly what he needs to take the club forward.
