Ange Postecoglou, Tottenham's Lovably Embattled Idealist, Stands On The Brink Of Redemption
Tottenham Hotspur has lost 21 times this season and sits 17th in the Premier League table—unimaginable for a club of its size and resources. While attempting to play the progressive attacking game mandated by their second-season manager Ange Postecoglou—an enigmatic style known as Angeball—Spurs’ players have often looked like they have forgotten, and possibly never knew, how to pass at all. Against Chelsea in April, Tottenham's own fans chanted "You don't know what you're doing" at the manager. For months, the pundits have screeched a common refrain: "Why hasn’t Ange been fired already?"
And on Wednesday, when Tottenham plays Manchester United in the Europa League final, Ange has a chance to salvage it all. A win would be the club’s first trophy in 17 years, its first European trophy since 1984, and would spell a return to the Champions League. It’s a ridiculous situation made even more so by the manager’s early-season reference to his track record: At every team he’s ever managed for multiple years—Australian clubs South Melbourne and Brisbane Roar, the Australian national team, Japan’s Yokohama F. Marinos, and Scotland’s Celtic—he’s won something in his second year. To the last few hardcore Angeball defenders still out there among Spurs fandom, myself among them, it would be sweet redemption.
Has Ange been doing a good job? Objectively, no! (While Tottenham has played better in Europe than in England this season, their success there can also be attributed to the fact that in the Europa League, they’re playing clubs with much smaller budgets.) So why do I believe? Because what Ange has brought from the beginning is an idea … a philosophy … a hope … OK, a fucking vibe.
He speaks eloquently about playing the kind of spirited, optimistic soccer his beloved father—a gruff, overworked carpenter who moved his family from Athens to Melbourne after the 1967 military coup in Greece—preferred. His father would wake a young Ange up in the middle of the night to watch English soccer, his favorites being “the entertainers,” above all Bob Paisley’s Liverpool.
Domestically, Ange and his father supported South Melbourne, a club created by and for the local Greek community. “That Sunday at the football became something special to me,” Ange has said. “My father, who I knew as a certain kind of individual during the week … just came to life. He would walk through those gates, socialise with everyone, get really animated … and I wouldn’t leave his side.”
Ange went on to play for South Melbourne, mainly as a left back. Ange again: “I really struggled in my playing career because I couldn't be the player who would excite my father. I was a defender and fairly limited in my technical ability.” His father died a few years ago, before he started at Tottenham, but Ange still imagines him in the stands, watching his son coach. “Would he be enjoying watching this team? That has always been the root of everything I have done. I can’t shift, because where it all started from is more powerful than any challenges I’ll get externally, from owners or media or supporters questioning my beliefs. They are so deep-rooted they can never change.”
OK, so: Ange makes his teams attack even when it’s clearly not working because it’s what his late father would want? I’m sorry to be a sentimental moron, but I love it.
Criticism of Ange often comes down to the idea that he’s been “found out”—that his gung-ho tactics worked well enough in the lesser footballing nations where he’s coached in the past, but that in England, in the best league in the world, opposing managers and players are too good and too well-researched to fall for it. That may all be true. I don’t actually have an opinion on the tactics themselves. What I’m here for is, again, the vibes behind them. Despite the losses—so many losses, so many of them so bad—I am still deriving joy in watching someone trying to chase some possibly impossible dream.
And short of generally pointing out that everyone seems to be high up the pitch all the time and then totally out of position defensively, I can’t really tell you what Angeball is. I’m not the only one. In his biography of Ange, the correctly titled Angeball, the Australian journalist Vince Rugari writes, “Angeball is not a formation or a structure or a system or a particular pattern of play. It can be all or some of these elements but is much bigger than any of them. It’s one of those things; you know it when you see it. In its most basic form, Angeball is a state of mind.” ITALICS MY OWN.
Rugari also writes that Ange's teams always go through a period of disarray and despair, which includes “disjointed pressing and bad passing. Bad, bad defending. Widespread questioning of Postecoglou, his appointment, those who appointed him, his methods, his sanity, and why anyone from Australia should be trusted on football.” But then—eventually, inevitably—“the smog begins to clear. The team starts to make a habit of scoring late equalizers or winners. Certain players who were thought to be rubbish begin to find previously unimaginable levels of performance. At this point the players are not executing tactics anymore; what they are doing has become a part of them. And from then on, it tends to take care of itself.” This isn’t logic; it’s faith.
Coincidentally, I recently finished another book relevant to the Angeball conversation: Yepoka Yeebo’s Anansi’s Gold, which tells the fascinating story of John Ackah Blay-Miezah, a conman who spent decades swindling investors out of collective millions by telling them a story about a non-existent entity, the Oman Ghana Trust Fund. The Fund was created by independent Ghana’s first head of state, Kwame Nkrumah, and was trapped in bureaucratic banking hell, Blay-Miezah told people. He needed money to unlock the Fund at which point he’d both reward his investors with incredible returns and enrich Ghana.
As the years rolled on with no payouts, the investors became their own self-supporting community, traveling together in packs to meet Blay-Miezah in outlandish hotels in luxurious locales only to once again be told that their payments would be delayed due to new, unforeseen procedural hiccups. Why did the investors keep believing in the Oman Ghana Trust Fund despite all obvious indications that it was an illusion? After a while, it seems clear, it simply would have been too terrible to believe otherwise. Similarly, have I gone too far to admit that Angeball may not work in England? Absolutely, happily, yes.
From the beginning, Ange was selling fans a story. That story was best encapsulated by another game against Chelsea, this one from November 2023. Reduced to nine men not even an hour into what was, at the time of the second red card, a 1-1 game, Tottenham nevertheless maintained an outrageously high defensive line and kept attacking. Spurs eventually collapsed in a 4-1 loss, but for 20 or so minutes, it actually looked like it might work. My son was three days old at the time, so maybe it was my addled state of mind, but I was riveted by that game. As Spurs’ Dejan Kulusevski melodramatically put it in the Players' Tribune, "Yes, we had lost a game. But we won in life." On the face of it, that is a ridiculous thing to say. But it is a sincerely ridiculous thing. As the losses in the league have racked up, Tottenham players have constantly said some version of "Yes, we know it’s wild, and we don’t quite understand it ourselves, but we actually do still have faith in Ange."
A few months after that Chelsea “we won in life” game, I got a beanie that reads "Angeball" stylized in the logo of '90s hardcore legends Madball. I’d ordered it from a weird part of the internet and it came way smaller than advertised and my son’s head is very large so, at some point in the winter, it became his hat. I would put it on his beautiful big noggin and we’d walk out into the East Coast tundra and I’d feel like we were fellow travelers in a sporting cult. Win or lose against Manchester United, whether Ange is fired or if he comes back (not even victory is sure to stay his execution), I’ll always be glad to have experienced Angeball firsthand. Because we should allow ourselves to believe in something irrational, something—dare I say—romantic. Otherwise, all we have are wins and losses.
