Defector

Where there's smoke, there tends to be a fired manager, and so it was no surprise that Nottingham Forest announced on Monday that it had parted ways with Nuno Espírito Santo. Following Forest's 3-0 drubbing at West Ham on Aug. 31, ahead of the first international break of the season, the club decided to sack the manager who led last season's stunning success. Of course, as avid readers of Defector might already know, the on-field results were secondary to Nuno's fate, and it was really his public feud with both owner Evangelos Marinakis and Global Head of Football Edu that sealed it.

I've covered the mess at the City Ground before, but a quick refresher: Nuno propelled Forest to seventh in the table last season, and perhaps expected commensurate support in the transfer market this summer. When he felt he did not get it, he opined quite publicly about his disappointment with the recruiting, and things spiraled from there. Edu recused himself from practices due to friction with the manager, Nuno's relationship with Marinakis fell apart, and from the reporting it sounded like the manager's firing/quitting was more of an eventuality than a possibility. The 3-0 loss to West Ham, as well as the international break, provided immediate cover for the decision, but no one is fooled here. Nuno was not on the hot seat until the drama began, and even an undefeated start to the season was not likely to save him once this all bubbled over.

And so out goes Nuno and in comes Ange Postecoglou.

The former Tottenham Hotspur manager had both succeeded wildly in North London—after an admirable fifth-place finish in his first year, he fulfilled his own prophecy in his second by bringing Spurs their first major trophy in 17 years, winning last season's Europa League final—and floundered horrifically, ending the league campaign just one spot above the relegation zone. The two sides of that history are what make the union here so hard to assess: Postecoglou is a proven winner, yes, but the faults that made Tottenham so dire domestically last season will clash with the foundation Nuno leaves behind, and I'm not sure what will win out.

Let me explain. Postecoglou's Spurs played some of the most attractive attacking soccer in England over his two-year tenure, a chaotic whirlwind meant to overwhelm opponents. Part of that strategy involved a suicidal high line in defense, the thinking being that the offensive blitz would help Tottenham outscore opponents even if the aggressive front-foot defending and offside trapping didn't keep many clean sheets. That formula worked well in the league in his first year and in Europe last season, but the monumental risks it posed were made clear in league play in his second go-round there.

Injuries to key players and the difficulty of playing such a perilous style eventually took its toll. Tottenham's 65 goals against over 38 EPL games were second-worst among non-relegated teams, and despite scoring the sixth-most goals in the league, Tottenham finished the season with a minus-1 goal difference. Even that feels like a miracle, given that Spurs finished the season with six losses in its final seven games, giving up five goals to Liverpool, and four to both Wolves and Brighton. By the end of the season, even with the long-awaited trophy in hand, it was hard to argue that Postecoglou's overall performance had earned him another chance to turn things around, and so he was sacked.

In terms of today, Postecoglou has a hilarious stylistic clash to resolve upon taking the Forest job. If Tottenham was the league's most ambitious and reckless side last season, then Nuno's Forest was its perfect inverse. The Trees played a low defensive line and preferred to control games by suffocation in its own third. The results were also as different from Tottenham's as could be: 46 goals conceded was good enough for fifth in the league. More than goals shipped, though, the stat that catches my eye most in comparing the two sides comes from the "tackles in the defensive third" category: Tottenham notched 285 of them, while Forest had a whopping 406.

Defensive third tackles isn't typically the first place you look to find a flattering stat, which makes sense: If you're doing so much deep defending, then you probably don't have a lot of control of the ball and are often trapped in your own penalty box under siege. But this was Forest's plan, born from Nuno's understanding of his squads' talents—Forest had great attackers last year who were killers in open space, but the defense wasn't all that formidable individually and therefore needed additional help. It might not have been the sexiest way to play, but it clearly worked.

Postecoglou will have two choices going forward. He can either adapt himself to the team's established, deep-defending style, or he can try to implement Angeball right away and hope for the best. In attack, while he may not have the name-brand firepower he did at Tottenham, Postecoglou does have some shiny toys to play with. Chris Wood is still scoring goals for fun—two already this season—and the trio of Callum Hudson-Odoi, Morgan Gibbs-White, and Dan Ndoye can all blast them in. You don't have to squint too hard to see Postecoglou turning this group into an attacking machine.

But the defense is another story. It's a hard enough adjustment for a team to completely swap styles from one year to the next, but doing it midseason, with no incoming transfers that better fit Postecoglou's tactics, feels like a maniacal decision. Of course, Postecoglou is not scared of maniacal decisions, so I wouldn't rule out him trying to turn the back four of Neco Williams, Ola Aina, Nikola Milenkovic, and Murillo into a high-line high-press defense. Will it work? Almost certainly not! But even when faced with injuries piling up left and right alongside losses last season, Postecoglou didn't ease up on the throttle at Tottenham, and that both won him a trophy and cost him his job.

There's also the question of whether the Greek-born Australian will get along with Marinakis and Edu, but that matter is even more difficult to speculate on. Given how well last season went for Nuno and Forest, I would not have predicted that the pairing would have such an explosive blow-up so soon, and so I could see Postecoglou similarly clashing with management about as clearly as I could see him getting along with his countryman owner. Since Nuno's problems with Edu arose in the transfer market, I could also see that relationship with Postecoglou subbed in staying cordial, at least until the January window.

There are just too many factors there, few of which have to do with results and tactics and all of the things a manager has to deal with on a daily basis, for predictions, but I will be paying attention, and so should you. Forest might not be good, and certainly not as good as last year, but the Premier League's must-see train wreck has already careened off the tracks, and there's no telling how much mayhem is still in store.

I don't know what I expected from a European final between the 16th- and 17th-placed teams in the Premier League, but it wasn't that. Maybe I was fooled by the stature of Tottenham Hotspur and Manchester United as two of the biggest clubs in England, or maybe I figured that a final would bring out the best of two sides just crawling through a doomed domestic season in hopes that summer cures all ills. Instead, the 2025 Europa League final was ass. Butt. Garbage. Nevertheless, at the end of 90 painful minutes, there was a light at the end of this sewage pipe of a match: For the first time since 2008, Tottenham won a trophy.

Tottenham manager Ange Postecoglou deserves a mountain of credit for something that reads as "cowardice" on paper, if you're cynical ("pragmatism," if you're feeling more generous). Spurs' biggest problem this season, aside from a crippling injury crisis, came in the form of its defense. Postecoglou's go-go-go attacking philosophy worked about as well as it should have, with Tottenham scoring 63 goals in the Premier League through 37 games, good for a tie in sixth place. But on the other end of the pitch, his side simply let goals in like that was the objective: 61 in those 37 games, good for fifth-worst.

For this one-off final, against a team with a futile attack—United has scored a measly 42 league goals, good for 16th ahead of just the three relegated teams and Everton—Postecoglou instead did his best José Mourinho impression and set up Tottenham to block all avenues to the goal, forcing United into hopeful crosses or speculative shots from distance. United obliged, and that's the main reason this game was so poor to watch, as the Red Devils could not get into any form of rhythm inside Tottenham's defensive third. Despite having 74 percent of the possession, and taking 16 shots, United never truly felt like it would score, save for a couple of plays that required on-point Tottenham saves. The xG stats tell the story rather well: Despite out-shooting Tottenham 16 to 3, United lost the xG battle, 0.99-0.98. That's not a big gap, of course, but given the shooting discrepancy and the fact that Tottenham tallied up a whopping 0.00 after halftime, it's bleak.

So what did go right to allow Tottenham to win this long-awaited trophy and, perhaps and maybe only if he wants it, save Postecoglou's job? Honestly, not much but a chaotic bit of action that just happened to go Spurs' way. In the 42nd minute, Pape Matar Sarr crossed the ball into Brennan Johnson near goal. The ball took an awkward bounce right before it got to the Welsh forward, and though he made contact with his right foot, the ball went backwards and hit Luke Shaw in the arm. The ricochet from that looked to be going out, but Johnson just barely got a touch as he was falling away from the ball, and that tiniest deflection—so small that I had to watch the goal about 10 times to make sure it wasn't an own goal—directed the ball past André Onana and into the corner of the goal. It wasn't pretty, but it was the kind of goal this ugly match deserved:

Other than that, Tottenham was able to enact its out-of-character strategy to perfection. Despite showing little counter-attacking threat to keep United honest—it was frankly a little sad watching Heung-min Son try to counter after his 67th minute introduction; coming off of a missed month due to a foot injury, he was clearly unfit and had none of his (former?) trademark burst—Tottenham still held off wave after wave of ineffectual passing from a team needing an equalizer to save not just this match and competition, but maybe its whole season.

Even when things went poorly for Tottenham's defense, someone stepped up to provide the difference. The most notable moment of the match, by far, came in the 68th minute, courtesy of Dutch defender Micky van de Ven. Off of a United set piece, Spurs goalie Guglielmo Vicario came out to collect the ball but ran into his own player, Dominic Solanke, which allowed Rasmus Hojlund to head the ball towards goal. Luckily for Vicario and Tottenham, Van de Ven had spotted the open goal when Vicario came out and he retreated to the goal line, where he was in perfect position to throw his body into the air and, somehow, keep the ball from going in.

For all of the passive play on Wednesday, and for how much this felt like a match between two teams in over their collective heads, Van de Ven's clearance is the type of trophy-winning play that Tottenham has failed to deliver for nearly two decades. It felt more likely that the ball would somehow hit off of Van de Ven's hand, like it did for poor Moussa Sissoko in the 2019 Champions League final, than it was for him to make that acrobatic clearance just inches from the line. Similarly, United came to some semblance of life in stoppage time, and forced a great save from Vicario off of a Luke Shaw header in the 97th minute, a save that could have just as easily been too slow.

(I had a vision, in that moment, of extra time between these two teams, and almost cried. Whether due to the pain of having to watch 30 more minutes of this, or the delirium of how stupid this match could get, I'm not sure, but the tears were ready to go.)

Instead, though, this was Tottenham's evening in Bilbao, a catapult into an unlikely, and mostly undeserved, spot in the Champions League next year, with the huge financial windfall that comes with it. The future is still murky. Postecoglou has been on the hottest seat in England for most of this horrid season. Does the club fire the manager who finally brought them to the promised land? Does Postecoglou himself opt to leave, mission accomplished banner fluttering in the wind? Or do they run this back for another season, in hopes that the injuries don't hammer Tottenham as hard next year, and that this embarrassing domestic campaign becomes just a blip in a long and storied tenure together?

United also has questions at the helm. Ruben Amorim hasn't had a preseason with the side, coming in as he did in November, replacing Erik ten Hag after United inexplicably kept him on through the summer. Amorim's three-defender system hasn't worked at all, but maybe with a full summer transfer window and preseason, it could. I have no idea, and neither does anyone at United, so this will have to be a leap of faith for England's (at least momentarily) fallen giant. For his part, Amorim told United legend Peter Schmeichel before the match that, no matter the result, he expected to be in charge next season. Whether he'll get the chance after this performance will be decided in the coming weeks.

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.

Here we are again. For most of Erik ten Hag's tenure at Manchester United, England's most storied club has been reeling. Though his first season, the 2022-23 edition, was a moderate success—third place in the Premier League and a League Cup trophy, after a 2021-22 season in which the club finished sixth with no trophies—it's been downhill since. Instead of building on that return to decency, last season United finished eighth in the league and last in its Champions League group, looking dire for most of the campaign.

The Dutch manager was almost immediately on the hot seat last season, losing four out of seven matches in the first six weeks, and it didn't get much better as the season went on. A 4-0 loss to Crystal Palace in early May seemed to signal the end of his time at Old Trafford, but a shock FA Cup final victory over Manchester City bought him enough of a reprieve to try again this season. A spendy summer followed that victory, and if not a return to title contention, the United faithful and brass probably expected a solid push for the top four. If the first six weeks of this season are to be believed, however, they're in for more of the same, which has to have put Ten Hag on the brink of the unemployment line.

At the time of writing, United sits mired in 13th place in the Premier League table, and even that undersells how poor the side has been. While it did pick up a 1-0 victory of Fulham on opening day, and a 3-0 stomp of relegation fodder Southampton, the rest of the domestic campaign has been embarrassing. A 2-1 loss to Brighton away might have been acceptable, but losing 3-0 at home to its most hated rivals of Liverpool had to hurt.

A listless 0-0 draw at Crystal Palace was disappointing as well, but perhaps the nadir of Ten Hag's entire term came this past Sunday. With the pressure building to unbearable levels, United laid a hell of a stinker at Old Trafford, losing 3-0 to a visiting Tottenham side that hasn't been all that convincing to start the campaign. While United might have felt hard done by due to a dubious red card to Bruno Fernandes in the 42nd minute (so dubious that the FA on Tuesday admitted the call was wrong and rescinded the concomitant three-game suspension), it's not like the card disrupted an otherwise sterling performance. From the first whistle, Spurs were all over United, scoring early (Brennan Johnson in the third minute) and then often after the red (Dejan Kulusevski in the 47th, and new signing Dominic Solanke in the 77th). Spurs controlled the possession (63 percent) and dominated in chance creation and shot taking, winning the latter statistic 24 to 11.

If there is ever a match that screamed "fire the manager," it was that, but Ten Hag might have been granted a stay of execution thanks to the calendar. An international break is coming up after this weekend's matches, so it did not make too much sense for United to fire its manager before that. Better to let Ten Hag ride out this week as a lame duck, with an away match in the Europa League against Porto on Thursday and a tough trip to Aston Villa on Sunday, before making any decision.

For my money, no amount of good results from those two matches should save Ten Hag's job, but it's possible that United shakes off its first Europa League match—a 1-1 draw at home to FC Twente, no one's idea of a powerhouse—to beat Porto, and then flips the switch against Villa. There's a statistical argument to be made that United isn't quite as futile in attack as it has looked so far, which could bode well for a quick turnaround: for the season, United has scored five goals on 10.81 xG, an underperformance that could even out sooner than later. However, the defense has been almost as lucky as the attack has been unlucky, giving up eight goals on 13.1 xGA. The upshot is that no matter where you look to assess United's season, the answer is bad.

The failure is comprehensive. No one on the roster is playing well, save maybe for Diogo Dalot, who has merely been okay at left back. New attacking signing Joshua Zirkzee might have won the opener at Fulham, but he's been worse than mediocre in his five appearances since. Last year's revelation, Kobbie Mainoo, has been sluggish, partly due to the lack of a solid midfield partner—Casemiro is washed, and has been one of the worst players in the league this season—and partly, perhaps, due to a busy summer schedule at the Euros for England. Marcus Rashford seems over it, and has only one goal in six matches. It's bleak top to bottom, in other words, despite the millions and millions of dollars pumped into the squad since Ten Hag took over.