The last time most Tottenham fans saw Ange Postecoglou was on the evening of May 25, after the 4-1 defeat to Brighton & Hove Albion which concluded Spurs’ season. Postecoglou and his family stayed on the pitch long after the final whistle, along with almost the whole squad and their families and friends, as everyone paraded the Europa League trophy and basked in the applause coming from the South Stand.
Postecoglou eventually walked down the tunnel to complete his post-match media duties. He wearily sat down to give his 60th post-match press conference of an exhausting campaign, having to field questions about whether, despite Bilbao, despite everything, he knew whether he would be back again next season.
But for one Tottenham supporter, it did not end there.
When lifelong fan Jeremy Conrad went on holiday to Greece the next day, he was surprised to see the Postecoglous staying at the same hotel, on the Athens Riviera, near the Temple of Poseidon. He eventually summoned up the courage to talk to Postecoglou and thanked him for everything that he had done for the club.
On the last night of his trip, Conrad had a bottle of wine sent to their villa, along with a letter he wrote on behalf of all of his Tottenham-supporting friends.
“Wednesday 21st May will forever be etched in our collective psyche,” it reads. “It’s made us smile wider, walk taller and laugh louder. You have orchestrated a generational shift in how we feel about our club and how others view us. Most importantly you have helped reinstate an immense feeling of pride and connection in the team that we love. You never stopped believing, you fought hard to defend and elevate the reputation of our club and we are eternally grateful.”
The next morning, Conrad was having breakfast when he felt a hand on his shoulder. It was Postecoglou, thanking him not just for the wine but for the letter, which meant so much to him. And he had a gift in return: a Tottenham home shirt. Postecoglou had signed it himself: ‘To Jez. Ange. COYS!”
Conrad had to try to contain his emotions.
A week after that exchange, and just 16 days after Bilbao, Postecoglou has been dismissed as Tottenham manager. He had one year left on the initial three-year contract (with a fourth as an option) that he signed in June 2023.
The club’s statement said: “We are extremely grateful to Ange for his commitment and contribution during his two years at the club. Ange will always be remembered as only the third manager in our history to deliver a European trophy, alongside legendary figures Bill Nicholson and Keith Burkinshaw.
“However, the board has unanimously concluded that it is in the best interests of the club for a change to take place.”
It marks the end of one of the most dramatic, divisive spells of recent years. An era in which Spurs lost league games at a rate unprecedented in the club’s history, and lifted their biggest trophy for more than 30 years. An era when the team became synonymous with a certain style of play, and then won a trophy by doing the exact opposite of that. An era in which Spurs lost to some of the weakest teams in the Premier League, while winning the biggest games of them all.
The rolling xG chart below shows the initial improvement under Postecoglou, but then a pretty sharp decline in both attacking output and defensive solidity about a third of the way through last season.
Following Tottenham has always meant accepting variance between highs and lows. But the season just ended has taken their fans through higher highs and lower lows than anyone could ever have expected. At times, it felt disorienting and confusing, as those supporters were forced to ask themselves: is the team in front of me good or bad? Is the manager? Which of these two versions of Spurs — ignominy most weekends, glory in midweek — is the real one?
For months, it had been widely accepted that Postecoglou would go at the end of his second season. That had been the plan inside the club, and Postecoglou’s expectation too. But many Tottenham fans who had turned against him in recent months, because of the league defeats, because of his spats with supporters, had been won back over by Bilbao. On that night when Spurs made history, it felt as if Postecoglou had proven that the optimistic story was true. And when hundreds of thousands lined the streets of north London for the trophy parade, and sang Postecoglou’s name, it looked impossible that this might be the end of his tenure.
So after the dizzying highs of late May, chairman Daniel Levy gave himself some more time to reconsider this huge decision. Rather than dismissing Postecoglou immediately after that season finale against Brighton, Levy gave himself an extra week to think about it, and went on a holiday of his own. He had to decide whether he wanted a third go on this particular rollercoaster.
He concluded, even after the greatest ride of his tenure, that he still wanted to get off.
If you want an answer as to why Levy has decided to dispense with the manager who brought that trophy and those crowds back to the club, you do not have to look too far.
A glance at the 2024-25 Premier League’s final table reveals it to have been a truly awful league campaign, one of the worst in Spurs’ history. Seventeenth is their worst league finish since 1977, when they were last relegated. A total of 22 league defeats is their joint-most ever, and their most ever in a 38-game league season. The loss rate of 57.9 per cent was their worst ever. We could go on.
One way of measuring Tottenham’s decline is by looking at their Elo rating — a measure of team strength that allocates points for every result, weighted by the quality of opposition faced. It shows their improvement under Mauricio Pochettino, the gradual decline under his successors (plus a little bump under Antonio Conte) and then a pretty sharp dip in Postecoglou’s two years.
It goes without saying that finishing so low in the Premier League — four points behind Wolverhampton Wanderers and Manchester United, five below West Ham United — is a dent in the club’s prestige and finances. Since the appointment of Martin Jol in 2004, the moment when the ENIC ownership era truly kicked off, Spurs had only finished outside the top 10 once, when they came 11th in 2007-08 — the season Jol was sacked in the October for Juande Ramos.
One of the selling points of Tottenham was that they seemed to have a much higher floor than most of their rivals. But last season they found a way to plummet through that. Given the financial value of a good league finish — each league position equates to roughly £3million ($4.1m) prize money — the cost of their failures is obvious. The Athletic has estimated that Spurs will receive £130.4m for finishing 17th. Fifth place, which they achieved a year ago in Postecoglou’s debut season, would be worth £166.6m.
That in itself could be taken as justification for making a change.
Just think back to the league situations when previous managers were dismissed. Tottenham were fourth when Antonio Conte was sacked in 2023, ninth when Nuno Espirito Santo left in 2021, seventh when they fired Jose Mourinho earlier that year, 14th when Pochettino was dismissed in 2019. The difference this time was that Postecoglou was never going to be dismissed during the season. Spurs had finished two of the previous four campaigns with interim managers in charge. It is not a good look. And the policy of sticking with Postecoglou through to the end of the season was emphatically vindicated by Bilbao.
So what caused such a disastrous league season?
Postecoglou has never hidden from the reality of the league table but has asked for it to be judged in context. The key plank of which is the devastating injury crisis Spurs suffered. They lost almost a whole team to various ailments over the middle part of the season. Most damagingly, they were without centre-backs Cristian Romero and Micky van de Ven, their two best and most important players, for the best part of four months. Romero with foot and then thigh injuries. Van de Ven with two separate hamstring issues. These are the two players who held the team together, and for whom there were no adequate replacements. Postecoglou also lost Guglielmo Vicario for three months with a fractured ankle, at a point when Spurs had no elite backup goalkeeper. He finished the season with both creative midfielders, Dejan Kulusevski and James Maddison, out with knee problems.
We could list every single injury Tottenham suffered here but it would take all day; instead, take a look at the graphic below that shows the squad’s share of minutes in the Premier League last season. Only Pedro Porro played more than 75 per cent of the available minutes.
You might argue that Postecoglou was incredibly unfortunate to have lost all these players on his watch. But muscle injuries are not entirely random. Postecoglou himself said in December that he “never thinks it’s just bad luck”. And over the course of the season, senior figures at the club started to wonder whether the management of the players was partly responsible for the spate of muscle injuries. In January, The Athletic reported in detail about the issues with the club’s medical department and the decisions to bring back both Romero and Van de Ven for the Chelsea game on December 8. Both players went down with new injuries during that match. Postecoglou, it should be remembered, never shied away from ultimate responsibility on this.
“Every decision that is made is on me,” he said on January 25. “If you’re looking for a head on a stick, take mine.”
Some will find the explanation of last season’s struggles in ‘Angeball’ itself, Postecoglou’s high-risk, high-reward football.
This explains why Spurs still scored 64 league goals — as many as fourth-placed Chelsea — finishing with a goal difference of only -1. They only won 11 league games (the last time they won fewer than that was 1934-35), though some of those were emphatic: 4-0 at Manchester City, 4-1 at home to both Aston Villa and West Ham. They even lost at home to relegation-bound duo Ipswich Town and Leicester City.
When Spurs were truly on it, playing at their intense physical peak, they were impossible to live with. They put up some huge running numbers — 119.8km in a 3-0 win away to Manchester United, 117.7km in that 4-0 at City — some of the highest figures all season. But at times it felt like a house of cards, where one part out of place could collapse the whole structure. Especially when key players were missing and their replacements were unable to replicate their work.
Rival managers sensed a vulnerability in Spurs. “You can see what their ideas are very clearly,” said a coach at a rival Premier League club, who wished to remain anonymous to protect relationships. “They play with a lot of players in their front line, they’re good at the high press, where they score a lot of goals. But when their full-backs are both up, leaving big spaces down the sides, you can kill them.”
There is no doubt that Tottenham looked utterly lost on the pitch at times. There was exasperation internally that they kept making the same mistakes, conceding the same goals. There were far too many times when they would lose possession and find themselves defending three-v-two or four-v-three on the counter-attack, even when they had been well set. Opponents would come away shocked by how Spurs had no solutions to their pressing and just tried the same thing all game. So was it the style, the poor quality backup players, or both?
But criticisms of Postecoglou’s style of play have to take into account that ‘Angeball’ has barely existed since halfway through the season. Spurs continued to try to play aggressive, proactive football even when the injuries started to bite, but after the 6-3 home defeat against Liverpool on December 22, it was never really seen again. Without the players required to play that way, they shifted towards a more generic approach: defending deeper, pressing less, more conventional full-backs.
Postecoglou would grow visibly frustrated whenever he was asked whether he had abandoned his principles, explaining the physical impossibility of playing dynamic football with exhausted players. And his pivot to pragmatism, initially forced by circumstance, became Spurs’ secret weapon on their way to Europa League glory.
All debates about Postecoglou and his work at Spurs come back to Bilbao. The debate among the fans — and ultimately for Levy — is to what extent winning the Europa League pays off the failures in the league. Are those 22 league defeats effectively wiped away by that trophy? Or does the Premier League form point to a truth about Postecoglou’s Tottenham that cannot be obscured by the shine of silverware?
Take, for example, the league form in the last few months of the season. In Spurs’ final 12 league games — after a 4-1 win at Ipswich that effectively sealed safety — they took just five points. Their only league win was against Southampton, who finished bottom with only 12 points.
But is that a true indication of Spurs’ level?
Postecoglou was very clear in Bilbao that he had prioritised the Europa League since the end of January. Key players — not least Romero and Van de Ven — were protected to keep them fresh for European matches. That was a strategic choice by Postecoglou, one that was eventually vindicated in Bilbao. But if he had allocated resources differently, there might not have been that trophy parade, but there might not have been those 22 league defeats either.
Or look at the relationship between Postecoglou and the crowd, particularly those fans who attend away games. There was an incident at Bournemouth on December 5, where Spurs lost 1-0 and the travelling supporters let him know exactly how they felt about the performance. The crowd steadily turned against Postecoglou over the course of the season, and the team were booed off more loudly with every home defeat.
Things came to a head at Stamford Bridge on April 3. Postecoglou’s decision to take Lucas Bergvall off for Pape Matar Sarr was booed by the away end, who sang, “You don’t know what you’re doing!”. When Sarr then thumped in an apparent equaliser, Postecoglou cupped his ear to the Spurs fans and waved at them. The goal was disallowed anyway. For many supporters, this was a breaking point. And it left senior figures at the club worrying whether the relationship between Postecoglou and the crowd was now broken beyond repair.
But then Bilbao happened and, for many fans, that relationship was not only fixed but stronger than it had ever been.
Postecoglou was roared on by the crowd as he gave his speech at the trophy parade, talking up a third season that will remain as a promise rather than a reality. He was originally appointed in part to be the public figurehead of the club, someone everyone could rally behind. To watch him at that parade was to realise he had achieved exactly that. Equally, there are still plenty of fans who will agree with Spurs’ decision and think that this is the right moment to make a change. But it is far from being the majority position that it was only a few months ago.
This is why Postecoglou’s is the strangest Tottenham dismissal of recent years. He did not leave when the fans had turned on him, but when many had turned back in his favour. And while most of his predecessors went when the players had grown thoroughly sick of them, and the mood turned fully toxic, he commanded a remarkable loyalty from the squad through the difficult spells and right to the end.
Postecoglou always had a distinctive approach to man-management. He kept his distance from people, happy to let his assistants take training, not engaging in small talk or chit-chat. Some sources marvelled at how removed he was, calling him a “lone wolf” or an “angry bear”, scowling around, face often obscured by a snood. Some players were left hoping for an arm around the shoulder, or simply left wondering where exactly they stood with him. Others liked how Postecoglou was the same with everyone, no favourites, and none of the emotional ups and downs that defined the Conte era.
There was logic to this distance. Firstly, to give Postecoglou the space to make rational decisions. Secondly, to allow him to pour everything into his scheduled pre-match meetings, bringing as much energy and emotion as possible, trying to leverage that sense of aura he built up through the week. Listening to players talk about Postecoglou in the last few weeks, how he motivated them for their Europa League campaign, it was clear how integral that approach was to their ultimate triumph.
Postecoglou would remind his team of the photos of victorious Spurs teams of the past at the training ground and tell them to “get on that wall”. He had the players’ families record messages for them before that final. When he brought Yves Bissouma back from the cold for the last three games of the campaign, he got a performance level nobody had ever seen from him. Only Postecoglou could have won the Europa League like this.
The real question since then has not been whether Postecoglou deserved to keep his job because of the trophy. But whether the whole evidence of his two years in it — one good league season, one awful one, one trophy — suggested that he was the right man for season three or not.
Many will argue that the tactical pragmatism and big-game motivation that led to Bilbao could be taken into next season. And that the 22 league defeats are entirely explicable by injuries and priorities. With a fully-fit team next year — and some additions in the transfer market — Tottenham would click back into being a good team again and stay there. You can call this the optimistic view of Postecoglou’s third-season prospects.
The other side of the argument is that he had two full league seasons in charge. Across those, Spurs only took 104 points. They lost more league games (34) than they won (31). Their form since the infamous 4-1 defeat to Chelsea in November 2023 has been awful. They only earned 78 points from their 66 matches. If you exclude the six relegated teams, it is the third-worst record in the top flight during that time after Everton and Wolverhampton Wanderers.
There is plenty of context for why: the changes to the style Postecoglou implemented, the departure of Harry Kane, the decline of Son Heung-min, the injuries, the thinness of the squad, the preference for youth over experienced recruitment in summer 2024 (No Conor Gallagher, no Jacob Ramsey, no Pedro Neto — all players the manager liked).
Ultimately, you have to balance that context against the evidence of the two years and ask yourself whether Postecoglou would lead Spurs to a stronger league season next time, when they will have to radically improve domestically while managing a Champions League campaign too.
Many of the fans would say Postecoglou is right, “season three is better than season two”. Some would say it is time to let someone else try. But the only one who had to decide whether or not to buy another ticket, to take the risk, was Levy.
And he eventually chose to get off.
Tottenham declined to comment on specific points raised in the piece when contacted by The Athletic.
(Additional contributors: Jay Harris, Thom Harris, Mark Carey)
(Illustration: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic; Crystal Pix/MB Media, Ryan Pierse/Getty Images)
