It is the statement that may come to define Ange Postecoglou’s time as Tottenham Hotspur head coach.
“Usually in my second season I win things,” the 59-year-old told UK broadcaster Sky Sports ahead of the first match of his second campaign in charge of the north London club. “That’s the whole idea. The first year is about establishing principles and creating a foundation. Hopefully, the second year is going on to win things.”
In light of the mixed start Spurs then experienced, he could have backed off from that statement and emphasised the process they were going through following a 1-0 home defeat in September by north London rivals Arsenal; they remain a young side in transition, and their form had been wildly inconsistent since the opening months of the previous season.
Instead, he doubled down. “I’ll correct myself — I don’t usually win things, I always win things in my second year, nothing’s changed,” he reiterated to the same broadcaster post-match. “I’ve said it now. I don’t say things unless I believe them.”
Postecoglou has flipped fortunes before, ending decade-long droughts or winning silverware in Australia and Japan.
If that’s not enough to make you buy into the Ange mythology, his declaration does ring true.
Since breaking into top-flight professional management in 2009, Postecoglou has consistently won a trophy in his second season, turning Brisbane Roar, Yokohama F. Marinos, Celtic and the Australia national team into winners after periods without silverware. Without that belief, Postecoglou — a relative unknown in the British Isles until moving to Scotland with Celtic in 2021 despite a managerial career spanning two decades — could never have got to lead a club like Tottenham.
This week, he has the opportunity to bring glory back to their part of the UK capital in Wednesday’s Europa League final against Manchester United, and continue a record he is clearly so proud of.
Postecoglou’s first taste of success as a manager came in his first job, taking South Melbourne, the club where he began as a youngster and had a nine-year career as a player, to the league title in his second season at the helm.
It was at South Melbourne where Ferenc Puskas shaped Postecoglou’s philosophy — which had already been influenced by his Greek father’s ‘Κάτω η μπάλα’/’Keep the ball down’ mantra — with the footballing icon stopping off in Australia in the latter years of a nomadic coaching run which spanned six of the seven continents.
As his interpreter and occasional personal driver during Puskas’ three-year spell in Melbourne, Postecoglou picked his brain about his legendary football career, with the three-time European Cup winner providing a comprehensive footballing education. Postecoglou first put those learnings into practice at his hometown club, implementing the 4-3-3 style with flying full-backs that he continues to lean on at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.
“I’d often pick him up from his house and drive him to the ground,” Postecoglou told UK newspaper The Guardian in 2014. “I spent a lot of time chatting about football with him — people talk a lot about me being an attacking coach, and that was where the seed was sown. I loved it. He was so much more open than the previous coaches who were so regimented and structured.”
After leaving South Melbourne, Postecoglou coached Australia’s Under-17 and Under-20 sides, where an infamous interview with TV host and former Crystal Palace and Australia international midfielder Craig Foster left him, in his own words, “unemployable”. Following short spells with third-tier Greek side Panachaiki and semi-professional Melbourne outfit Whittlesea Zebras, Postecoglou impressed enough as a TV pundit to get the Brisbane job. There, he rescued his reputation and got his career back on track.
Postecoglou took over a struggling Brisbane side partway through the 2009-10 league season, but could not rejuvenate their fortunes immediately. Brisbane finished second-bottom in that debut campaign, with the A-League’s closed-shop system (similar to MLS and Liga MX) protecting them from relegation. However, as has become typical during his managerial career, he used his first season to prepare his side for his high-octane style, and took advantage of the following off-season to sign players to bring an added technical or physical quality with the goal of competing for silverware in his second year.
“The one thing that stands out in my mind was the way that he wanted to create something that Australia hasn’t experienced before,” says Matt Smith, who was signed ahead of that 2010-11 season from local semi-professional side Brisbane Strikers. “I was part of a new group of players coming in to change the shape of Australian football. I was a ball-playing centre-back, and at that point, there were not too many of those in Australia.
“He has a very keen eye on players, Ange. He’s very planned. He’s one of the most intelligent people that I’ve met and so organised and clear on how he wants his team to play and where he wants to take them.”
After a busy summer where Postecoglou made five signings and conditioned his players to implement his style in pre-season, Brisbane stormed to a first-place finish, collecting 65 points from the 30 regular-season matches, eight more than Central Coast Mariners in second, while losing only once.
“It was just a matter of time,” says Smith. “As a playing group, we had so much belief in the system and how we wanted to play that it was ingrained into us. It became an obsession for us to focus on each of our roles independently and collectively work out our processes. We were fascinated with it as a playing group and were all steering in one direction.
“We saw the coaches and everyone pushing and pulling in one direction, and we knew we were always going to get that win and then continue improving. At that point, it wasn’t focusing on the wins: they’re important, but we were so focused and fascinated by improvement. Working hard all the time. We knew, with the style of football that we were playing, that we were going to get the results in the end.”
That focus on the process in light of poor results in the league has been integral to Postecoglou keeping the belief within the playing group at Tottenham. Ahead of the Europa League semi-final, Postecoglou spoke to his players about the Stonecutter’s Credo (also known as pounding the rock), an allegory for persistence even when progress may not be visible.
Having finished first, Brisbane then had a two-leg play-off against runners-up Central Coast to book their place in the Grand Final, where the league title would be decided. After beating them 4-2 on aggregate, the sides met again in the final a couple of weeks later (Central Coast had subsequently defeated the winners of play-offs involving the third- to sixth-placed teams in a match to decide their opponents) and won 4-2 on penalties after drawing 2-2 following extra time.
In his third season in charge, Postecoglou missed out on the regular-season title, but won the Grand Final, Brisbane becoming the first team in the league’s short history to win back-to-back A-League championships.
While Postecoglou has made slight reconstructions to Tottenham’s tactical plan en route to the Europa League final, implementing a 4-2-3-1 system against Eintracht Frankfurt and Bodo/Glimt in the quarter- and semi-final respectively, and pressing less aggressively, the main adjustments with Brisbane came in how he motivated the players for the special occasion.
“From my experience in winning finals, he is the best communicator that I’ve ever worked with,” says Smith. “How he can motivate a team is something I’ve never experienced in a sporting landscape. I’m pretty confident you’ll be able to speak to anyone involved in that Brisbane Roar team, and every single one of them was ready to run through a brick wall for him. He didn’t change anything during those final points of the season. Everything is built up over a longer period of time.
“That was something which was installed into everybody. I was there two years with him, so it was like, ‘What’s he going to say today that’s going to make us run through a brick wall?’, and every single time he hit the nail on the head.”
Postecoglou’s next challenge was to take a job he had interviewed for 13 years earlier — head coach of Australia. When he took the reins in 2013, the national team were on a steep decline, seen as too dependent on a fading generation of players that had just suffered successive 6-0 defeats to Brazil and France. Realising he could not implement his Brisbane philosophy with that side’s ageing core, Postecoglou reshaped the squad before the 2014 World Cup finals in Brazil.
“I think we were all quite fresh,” says former Australia defender Jason Davidson. “Because of everything that happened pre-World Cup, Ange came in and pretty much shook everything up and brought in a lot of youngsters that were breaking through. He wanted to go into the World Cup with a younger squad, probably an inexperienced squad. Looking back, I was fortunate enough to be one of those youngsters. On a personal level, I was very grateful because that shaped my career, going to a tournament like that.”
That World Cup proved a steep learning curve for a young side. Australia were drawn in the tournament’s group of death with a Chile side who would win the following year’s Copa America, defending champions Spain and a Netherlands team who would get to the semi-finals, and lost all three matches. However, it allowed Postecoglou to learn more about his players ahead of the 2015 Asian Cup, that confederation’s version of the European Championship. And while Tottenham’s current league season has spiralled in a way that many will argue cannot be justified even if it’s accompanied by Europa League final success, his approach ahead of Australia’s Asian Cup triumph bears some resemblance to the side he is building in north London.
Several Spurs long-timers have departed under his watch, including Eric Dier, Davinson Sanchez and Hugo Lloris, and the team has been refreshed with younger replacements who are more physically and technically capable of playing his style, such as Micky van de Ven, Mathys Tel and Wilson Odobert. And as a motivator, Postecoglou’s ability to unite his playing group despite outside pressure with stirring pre-match speeches and activities were key to their success just seven months after that World Cup disappointment.
“I really noticed his motivational side at the Asian Cup,” says Davidson. “We were the host country and had probably been together for around six to eight months by then. Leading up to the Asian Cup, I remember him getting us into a group with an Australia jersey, and he made every player throughout the camp step up and speak in front of the group. He asked everyone to explain what playing for our national team meant. He’d had the honour of doing that, so he did it too. It was very emotional for some players, talking about their past, their upbringing, how hard they had to work, what they had to sacrifice.
“I remember doing that exercise fondly, and it brought the group together. You could see the belief and unity as we got further into the tournament in the way he galvanised the squad to push through and try to create something special, and we were fortunate enough to do that.”
Australia met South Korea in the final, and in front of a home crowd in Sydney, they won 2-1 following extra time.
After their 2-0 away win at Bodo/Glimt in the semi-final’s second leg, Tottenham released a clip on their social channels of an inspiring Postecoglou post-match speech. Watching it made Davidson think about how he motivated the Australia players before that final.
“(The video) reminded me of him with the national team,” says Davidson. “It was how he created that environment where we were all family and everything else was outside noise. He wanted to make sure that everyone in the changing room had each other’s backs and would go out there and give it their all. We win together. We lose together. But above all, we make sure we do it together.”
The next stop on his globetrotting tour took Postecoglou to Japan and Yokohama F. Marinos in 2018.
The Marinos are one of the J-League’s original and most famous sides, but at the time had not won the league title in over a decade. They were wildly inconsistent in his first season, only escaping the relegation play-off on goal difference. One three-game stretch where they beat Vegalta Sendai 8-2 before losing 5-2 and 4-1 to FC Tokyo and Sanfrecce was a microcosm of their campaign. Marinos were the only side in the bottom half of the final league table without a negative goal difference, scoring 56 goals (only one fewer than the champions, Kawasaki Frontale) and conceding the same number, the third-most in the league.
Similar to that 2018 Marinos side, Spurs sit just above the relegation zone with a positive goal difference — the most similar case in the Premier League era being Manchester City in 2003-04, who finished 16th with a +1 goal difference. However, like he did in Brisbane, Postecoglou revitalised the team with a busy transfer window ahead of the 2019 season, identifying several areas which would take them to the next level.
“It was clear that this was a process, and everyone trusted in it,” says Dan Orlowitz, a football journalist based in Japan. “They made some smart off-season moves.
“All of them understood the kind of football that Ange wanted to play. All of them carried that out, and they were unstoppable. You saw what he was doing come to fruition in such an entertaining way — it was a blast to see that team play, whoever they were playing against.”
Title rivals FC Tokyo got out to a flying start with a front-loaded home schedule due to their stadium being used for the 2019 Rugby World Cup, but Postecoglou’s men closed the season with 10 wins in 11 matches to claim the title. Interestingly, Marinos were also bounced from their 69,000-seater Nissan Stadium by the rugby tournament, but they thrived in the tighter 14,000-capacity NHK Spring Mitsuzawa stadium, known for its intense atmosphere.
During their Europa League run, Tottenham performed best against Glimt and Frankfurt, where they encountered passionate supporters home and away. If they are to lift the trophy on Wednesday, their ability to thrive in the face of adversity will have been integral in doing so.
After Postecoglou left for Celtic in 2021, Marinos appointed three more Australians as manager in succession (Kevin Muscat, Harry Kewell and John Hutchinson), attempting to re-create the magic. Muscat did win the J1 League the following year, but the attachment from the fanbase is still strongest towards Postecoglou.
“I think they’ll build a statue of him outside the stadium one day,” says Orlowitz. “In his own way, he was one of the most charismatic coaches the league has seen in a long time. He believed in what he was doing and so did everyone else — it was contagious.”
At Celtic, Postecoglou won the Scottish title and the League Cup in his debut season and followed it up with the domestic treble in his second term. In year two, his team upped the intensity, slightly increasing their passes per defensive action (a statistic that effectively measures how intensely a team press their opposition) from 9.2 to 8.0, became more dominant in possession (72 per cent to 70) and averaged three goals per game (up from 2.6).
The consistent improvement in his second season in charge throughout his career is notable, but, according to Malaysia head coach Peter Cklamovski, Postecoglou’s assistant at Panachaiki, Brisbane, Australia and the Marinos, it’s due to the processes put in place on day one.
“The statement he made early on in the year about always winning in the second season… that’s factual,” says Cklamovski. “But it’s built on a daily approach, which begins from day one. The consistency of his messaging, football and building that narrative, mentality, and football that links to that, connects as the journey continues.
“It’s all built in a day’s work. That continues daily, and if the mentality to get better every day exists, you’re going to win something in the second year because of it.”
Nine months after Postecoglou foreshadowed silverware for Spurs in 2024-25, the Europa League final is his last opportunity to quieten those who doubted him.
While it won’t mask a historically poor season domestically, success in the Spanish city of Bilbao will live much longer in the memory for a club who have gone too long without a trophy.
(Top photos: Getty Images)
