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Tottenham Hotspur are football’s best example of a living paradox. They are thrilling and frustrating, fantastic and feeble, tremendously troublesome and wickedly woeful. To best demonstrate this on a tangible level, they sit 10th in the standings, yet boast the Premier League’s best goals-scored tally and second-best goal difference, while they have one of the division’s better defensive records.
For Spurs fans, they have barely had time to bask in the warm, undersoil-heated glow their new billion-pound stadium was meant to provide since moving in over half a decade ago. The board were cut-throat with their decision to sack Mauricio Pochettino, but have failed to find a suitable long-term replacement for him since, cycling their way through permanent successors in Jose Mourinho, Nuno Espirito Santo, Antonio Conte and now Ange Postecoglou.
Success continues to steer clear of this part of north London, and like the many men who came before him, Postecoglou is now under the microscope for failing to deliver. Tottenham were booed off after allowing Ipswich Town their first top-flight win in 22 years on Sunday, halting momentum and sending them into a fifth-successive international break off the back of a disappointing defeat.
The mood around N17 is souring again. Postecoglou has little time to prove he is the right man to lead the club forward.
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Getty Images SportWalking into a mess
As has been well documented, Postecoglou was not the first choice for the Tottenham job when the vacancy arose in 2023. Talks were held with Julian Nagelsmann, not soon after his sacking by Bayern Munich, but hardly advanced. Luis Enrique was a top candidate when Fabio Paratici was managing director of football, though he couldn’t convince the board – from his position officially off the club’s staff owing to a global ban – to take the plunge. An enormous portion of the fanbase pined for an emotional reunion with Pochettino, though Daniel Levy and co were against the idea and he joined rivals Chelsea instead. Arne Slot became the top target, only to sign a new contract at Feyenoord and land a more glamorous role at Liverpool 12 months later.
There was even a fair dose of fan resistance when Postecoglou eventually emerged as Spurs’ number-one option, with the short-lived ‘#NoToPostecoglou’ trend dying almost as quickly as it had began in early June 2023. Supporters were divided and the club was fractured on so many different levels, but everyone was aligned in wanting a breath of fresh air to ease their troubles.
Postecoglou brought just that. In the absence of matches ahead of his first pre-season in charge, the Tottenham faithful consumed every piece of media and content regarding their new Australian manager as they could – books, podcast appearances, a famously infamous row on domestic TV during his days as a youth-team coach, you name it. The first step to a fresh start is an acceptance of wanting something different, and hearts were immediately opened to the affable Postecoglou, who took his charm and charisma up a notch when results and performances followed at the beginning of the 2023-24 campaign.
The mainstream media bought into him as well. He was a walking soundbite good for a quote on any occasion, an expressive extrovert who brought the tactical nuance loved by bloggers but no-nonsense mannerisms adored by the masses. Even away from the pitch and from interviews, Postecoglou was finding ways to become football’s most likeable character, notably with his charitable and kind actions at fan forums.
Spurs and Postecoglou’s honeymoon didn’t last forever, ultimately falling apart at the seams in a memorable nine-man collapse against Pochettino’s Chelsea, but there was enough evidence to suggest Postecoglou had Spurs – as a team and a club – trending in the right direction again.
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AFPClear identity
Very few teams are built on a history of playing negative football, but at least Tottenham – for better or worse, richer or poorer, sometimes in sickness and health – have always prided themselves on entertainment. A Spurs team should be fun to watch irrespective of what their goals are.
The worst part about the Mourinho, Nuno and Conte trifecta was that not only were Tottenham terrible, they were terrible to watch while doing so. There was a brief half-season period under the Italian where Spurs embraced the directness and resilience of his approach, but his defensive nature entered his players into a self-fulfilling prophecy of regression.
Postecoglou’s Tottenham are now one of the most distinctly recognisable teams across all of Europe. When they’re good, they’re very, very good, the best side to watch in the entire Premier League when all is flowing smoothly. During Erik ten Hag’s final season-and-a-quarter at Manchester United, his outfit were often contrasted to Spurs, criticising the lack of identity the Dutchman failed to instil despite the good grace of the two trophies he had brought to Old Trafford.
Thanks to Postecoglou, Tottenham still have the foundations for team who play with style and intensity. Now it’s about making everything else work.
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Getty Images SportResults business
There’s no running away from the cold, harsh truths of Postecoglou’s record, however. With only 16 points accrued from a rather favourable set of opening 11 fixtures, Tottenham are on track to end the season with a mere tally of 57, which would represent their worst Premier League return since 2008-09. You know, the season where they were bottom of the table in autumn and had to bring in Harry Redknapp to save them.
Spurs also collapsed towards the end of 2023-24 to kill their hopes of a top-four finish too – over their last 17 matches, they have taken 22 points. It’s all well and good having the right intentions when you cross that white line onto the pitch, but it won’t matter if you don’t step back off it on the winning side.
In the cups, Tottenham can look forward to a Carabao Cup quarter-final with United having already eliminated Manchester City and they remain among the favourites to win the Europa League. There’s solace in that.
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Getty Images SportAcceptance of blame
Unlike his predecessors – notably Conte, who simply couldn’t wait to combust after his final game in charge, a 3-3 draw at Southampton – Postecoglou doesn’t want to shirk responsibility and is totally accepting of both the mistakes he has made and the need for further change.
After Sunday’s loss to Ipswich, he said to BBC Sport: “Hugely disappointing. We started slow and passively. We gave ourselves a mountain to climb. Second half we had chances but didn’t do enough to win the game. It’s just down to me. I’m not getting consistent performances from the players. It’s something I need to address. I’m the person in charge so that’s usually the way it goes. I take responsibility. We can’t give ourselves those kind of mountains to climb.”
Postecoglou also wasn’t afraid to front up for the club’s in-house media show, so usually full of positivity but on this occasion sombre. He added: “I guess from my perspective, it’s unacceptable because we started the game nowhere near the levels we needed to be and gave ourselves a mountain to climb. Second half, we had the ascendancy and enough opportunities to get the job done but we didn’t do enough with it.
“It’s my responsibility, I’ve got to fix it. We’ve been inconsistent this year, fair to say, and we shouldn’t be that inconsistent. When you are that inconsistent, the responsibility lies with me to help the players overcome that.”
Now, obviously, the problem is having to give this same old spiel after each of your five defeats from 11 league games. Progress isn’t linear however, especially at Tottenham.
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GettyImpossible job?
Only three days before the start of Postecoglou’s first season in north London, he had the rug pulled out from under him when Tottenham agreed to sell Harry Kane, arguably their best-ever player, to Bayern Munich. In the Australian’s good grace, he stood back up, dusted his shoulders off and essentially said, ‘it is what it is, mate’. The managers who previously occupied the Spurs hot-seat definitely wouldn’t have been as forgiving.
Postecoglou’s finest job to this point has been to steer Tottenham so far away from the horrors of MouNunoConte (patent pending). He has helped blood younger players and actively encouraged returning to a sustainable model built around lower age profiles.
Considering it seemed like no one even wanted the Spurs job just over a year ago, Postecoglou has done well to make whatever the club’s next step is look more promising than the situation he inherited. If and when he someday departs, the club will have a much easier sell to whoever their top target is.
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AFPBigger problems upstairs
During the press rounds to promote his new autobiography, Hugo Lloris told the Guardian that Pochettino’s work at Tottenham was largely under-appreciated: “Daniel [Levy] always tried to make the right decision for the club and we were also a bit unlucky. At our best with Mauricio, we had to compete with the Chelsea of [Roman] Abramovich, the Man City of [Pep] Guardiola, the Liverpool of Jurgen Klopp. It was really tough because if the club was ready to invest £50m, the others will invest £100m.
“But I feel we didn’t give the high credit that Mauricio deserved because he brought a new generation of players – Christian Eriksen, Dele Alli, Harry Kane and many more – to a new level. He created something really special in the building. You could feel the unity and we really enjoyed competing for each other. We brought the club to the next step, but we had three finals and we could not score one goal in those games.”
A huge part of Pochettino’s project revolved around his almost unparalleled ability to improve young players, a trait which will serve Chelsea well even after only a year there thanks to his work with Cole Palmer. Tottenham, even to this day, are still relying on coaching miracles to bail out whatever else happens within the club. There feels like a lingering belief from upstairs that the playing squad doesn’t require the level of surgery – or as Pochettino often referred to it, a ‘painful rebuild’ – that is actually needed in order to compete. The latent loss of a genuine world-class player in Kane is now starting to hurt.
Postecoglou has talked about wanting to win the Premier League with Spurs, and those in senior roles, such as chairman Levy and sporting director Johan Lange, insist they want to compete in both the short term and long term. But they only signed one starter during the summer transfer window in Dominic Solanke, with the rest of their business geared towards the future, leaving Postecoglou with a squad that is simultaneously raw and stale. To be uber-critical of Tottenham, the project seems a bit half-arsed, neither one way or the other enough to yield results. That’s been the case even since the glory days of Pochettino’s miracles.
The saving grace for Spurs is despite all of this, they are only three points off the top four. If they had beaten Ipswich as expected, they’d be sitting in third place. The Premier League is as competitive as ever and there is little to separate title contenders such as Arsenal from those in crisis like United (just four points, to be exact). Tottenham are not alone in this kind of rut.
Postecoglou should have enough good will in the bank to survive the season, with much of fan frustration directed towards Levy and owners ENIC instead. Results can only get so bad though, and further bruisings through the winter will make it tough for even his most ardent supporters to stand by him.
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