Ange Postecoglou's triumphant sacking holds the key to modern football

The Guardian

a day ago

Enjoy your launch. And for Ange Postecoglou, who always bristled at the idea that his wealth of coaching experience had somehow been earned in inferior competitions, perhaps his departure from Tottenham really can be a kind of springboard: to one of these prestigious, equally demanding leagues he keeps talking about. Maybe the struggling Gamba Osaka. Perth Glory could well have a vacancy soon. Motherwell are still looking. A step down? That's just your old-world, Eurocentric, Prem-brained snobbery showing right through there, mate.
And so to Postecoglou's many rhetorical elisions can be added another: the triumphant sacking. Perhaps it was only in this universe – the post-truth universe – that such a feat was even conceivable. Along with the Europa League trophy he so stunningly spirited to north London, this may turn out to be the defining legacy of the Postecoglou interregnum. There have been better Premier League managers. There have been more charming and more entertaining Premier League managers. But there may never have been a manager better at defining his own terms of achievement; a managerial reign so evidently built upon a towering silo of nuclear-strength bullshit.
From the very start, Angeball constructed its own bespoke logic as it went along. The journey matters more than the destination. There is a process, and we stick to it. There are principles, and however tough things get, you never deviate from or compromise on them. 'Even if we go down to five men, we will have a go,' he said after his nine men were defeated by Chelsea in November 2023. The idea of Champions League qualification as a goal in its own right, unaccompanied by broader progress: 'meaningless', as he put it in March 2024.
In January 2024 he rejected the idea that a single trophy could ever constitute satisfaction or atone for mediocrity elsewhere ('You can't just sit back and say: 'I've just delivered a trophy, shouldn't I have some latitude to not be successful?''). In October 2024 he insisted that Tottenham's league performance should be regarded as the 'most meaningful' measure of his side's progress.
Ange Postecoglou 2023-24: meet Ange Postecoglou 2025. The coach who promised to attack in all circumstances, who disdained the transformative effect of a single trophy, has just won a trophy with the lowest possession recorded in a European final because sometimes – as he put it in Bilbao – 'you have to change your approach'. A coach who urged us to judge him on the league now no longer judges himself on the league.
A coach who blames Tottenham's abject league performance on a freak injury crisis also takes no responsibility for that injury crisis, for a style of play in which Tottenham comfortably spend more time in high-intensity sprints than any other Premier League team. A coach who claims he takes no notice of what is said and written about him has spent a suspiciously high proportion of this season reacting to things that have been said and written about him.
None of this is a character judgment or smoking gun in its own right. Changing your mind when the facts change: this is, in fact, entirely normal and rational behaviour. Hypocrisy is what makes us human. Go back through everything I've written about Postecoglou over the last two years and I'm sure you'll find it riddled with compromising contradictions. For what it's worth, I think the decision to sack Postecoglou now is a big error on Daniel Levy's part. At a time when Spurs are undergoing all shades of upheaval off the pitch, trying to bolster an underpowered squad, a managerial search and a vibe shift is the last thing they need.
Beyond this there is an enduring fascination to Postecoglou, the animal magnetism of the true ideologue. He came to the Premier League with no great reputation or playing record behind him. Tactically, he offered little groundbreaking or novel beyond a hard-running, hard-chasing dogma in which the only solution to every problem is to believe harder in the dogma. The dogma will win your duels. It will head away set pieces for you. And if it doesn't, it was ultimately your fault for not believing sufficiently in the dogma. In an important sense Postecoglou marked a continuation of the Mourinho-Conte axis: the latest in a series of coaches convinced that their own principles were stronger and worthier than those of the club, determined to prove to the world that Tottenham was terminally sick, yet they alone had the cure.
All of a sudden, one February morning, the league is gone; survival secure. The new dogma is defending like hell against continental Europeans on a Thursday. In fact, scratch that: this was always the dogma. There was no old dogma. This was what you were trying to build all along. Of course this has always been Postecoglou's real superpower: the cult of personality, the ability to render words convincingly true simply by emitting them from your mouth, to build castles and citadels of bullshit, an apparatus of demagoguery so potent and alluring that it supplants all previous logic.
Which – and no moral judgements here – is quite interesting, right? A 57-year-old Australian bullshits his way into a Premier League job, to spectacular away wins at Manchester City and Manchester United, to some of the most entertaining football ever seen from a Tottenham team in my lifetime. He convinces players to run themselves past the point of wellness. He convinces them to stick together amid a frightening assemblage of centrifugal forces. He convinces a significant part of the English footballing public that league tables are a form of fraud. And finally to a European title.
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Plot twist: the bullshit works. This isn't a cheap con job. This is talent, as surely as substitutions or being able to put on a small-sided coaching session is talent. And what it exposes – perhaps 'indicates' is a better word – is how much of modern football is essentially an act of persuasion. Agents bullshit. So do analysts and marketers and journalists. An entire industry built on pure narrative skill, the ability to make things up on the fly and bring people with you. What matters is not what you say, but the conviction with which you believe it to be true at the time.
And so the Postecoglou who declared at Celtic that he was 'exactly where I want to be' now seeks another fresh start. Perhaps a sideways move to another Premier League club, perhaps even a step up in class to the Greek Super League, the Korean K League, the League of Ireland. This part will not be a problem. Football has no shortage of soiled dreamers, clubs who missed the gold rush, fans whose only real desire is to feel something again. Marseille, Roma, Benfica, Schalke, West Ham. Leeds sacking Daniel Farke in November and going all in on Angeball feels like a perfect fit.
There is of course an irony here. In his meticulously cultivated personal branding, Postecoglou often likes to paint himself as a throwback, an outsider, a counter-culturalist, the grizzled underdog. But in his reliance on patter and persuasion, bluster and bluff, he is in fact a very modern footballing phenomenon. This is Ange's world now, and we're all bullshitting in it.