Tottenham Hotspur’s head coach, Ange Postecoglou, on his relationship with Australia

Some things never change. If you had a time machine, you could drop in on any one of “Big Ange” Postecoglou’s training sessions, with any of his teams, anywhere in the world, at any point over the past 28 years, and he’d be doing the exact same thing: standing off to the side, arms folded or hands in his pockets, watching intently. As he is again today, the head coach of Tottenham Hotspur, a singular presence standing on the sidelines, letting his assistant coaches take the players through the warm-up and the drills; all the while analysing each of their moves and mistakes, dissecting them with that laser-like glare of his, which burns holes in the back of his players’ heads.

Tottenham’s squad contains the greatest collection of individual footballers an Australian has ever had the opportunity to coach, including the likes of South Korean superstar Son Heung-min (captain), England international James Maddison (vice-captain) and Argentinian World Cup winner Cristian Romero (co vice-captain) – who are all under his spell.

In fact, there can’t be many Australians more ­prominent in the world right now than Postecoglou. He’s the first Aussie to coach a Premier League club – nobody else has ever really come close – and he’s landed at one of the biggest of the lot. According to Deloitte, Spurs is the eighth-richest club in the world, putting the club ahead of London rivals Arsenal and Chelsea, and the Italian giant Juventus. In 2019, Spurs reached the UEFA Champions League final, which is watched annually by four times as many people as the Super Bowl in the US; when the NFL comes to London each year, the matches are played at their stadium.

Last October, only four months after Postecoglou was appointed head coach, that stadium burst into mass euphoria when Spurs scored a last-minute ­winner to beat Liverpool 2-1, their fifth victory in their first seven games and part of an unbeaten run of 10 games that sparked an early Ange love-in across North London. It even inspired a musical tribute: one fan ­repurposed the lyrics to Angels, the hit song by Robbie Williams, and turned it into an ode to the team’s new boss that went viral across social media. And so more than 60,000 grown men and women spontaneously sang along at the top of their lungs as the song resounded out of the stadium’s loudspeakers: So you can keep your Pochettino, Conte and Mourinho, and even Christian Gross… because everywhere we go, da da da da da, I’m ­loving Big Ange instead. And through it aaaallll …Postecoglou’s reaction? He walked out to the centre circle of the pitch with his hands above his head, ­clapping but mostly unsmiling, soaking up the adulation. At that rousing moment, anything seemed possible for a team that had been languishing for years, and for a manager who had emerged from total obscurity in this part of the world as the figurehead to lead them forward.

“Credit to the lad, the Tottenham supporter who came up with it. It seems to have caught on pretty quickly,” Postecoglou says of the unofficial Angels rewrite as we sit down for a post-training chat. I’ve been given an hour of his time, which is in hot demand these days. He’s still in his training gear, a Nike club tracksuit, and seemingly at ease; the only other person with us is the club’s media and communications boss.

“It’s stuff you don’t think about,” he reflects. “So much of my childhood was trying to overcome having Postecoglou as a surname, and now they’re making it into songs. You talk about an existential experience in life, where it’s something that you were trying to get away from that has become something like that … it’s crazy.”

Now for the reality check: not since 1960-61 have Spurs won England’s top division. This is sadly ­symbolised by an artwork hanging on the wall behind Postecoglou. It features five rows of five all-white footballs, mounted on a navy background, each with various years in black representing a significant moment in Tottenham Hotspur’s history. Only two balls are dated in the 21st century, and only one of them represents a trophy, which was in 2008, when they won the English League Cup, which is not exactly the sort of silverware young kids dream of hoisting one day. Spurs pride themselves on being a club committed to playing the “right way”, but they rarely win silverware. “There’s some work to be done there that fits my brief,” he tells me. “That’s what excites me.”

Postecoglou specialises in gargantuan challenges like this. That’s why he’s here. To sprinkle his magic dust and break the club’s culture of brittle under­achievement, which is so talked about it even has its own adjective: Spursy.

We’re sitting in an office in Hotspur Way, the club’s sprawling, palatial headquarters, located in London’s northernmost borough of Enfield, which is unlike any facility I’ve seen in Australia. Later, on this sunny ­autumn afternoon, I’ll be treated to a tour via golf buggy, which is the only way to get around this 31-­hectare site: the 15 immaculately maintained ­pitches, three high-tech television studios, a huge, fully equipped gym, state-of-the-art treatment centre with cryo­therapy and altitude chambers, separate academy and women’s areas, a luxurious barbecue area by the pond (that’s right, a pond), a market garden supplying the team with fresh fruit, vegetables and herbs, and, to top it off, a 46-room hotel, The Lodge, where players and staff can spend the night if they wish. Postecoglou looks completely at home in these surroundings.

There are times, his friends tell me, when he says he still has to pinch himself that he’s arrived at football’s pinnacle, the Premier League – and not just because he has come from a comparative backwater like Australia. Seventeen years ago, he was selling soccer jerseys, boots and trophies in a small shop in Melbourne’s south-east because he couldn’t get a job anywhere, so bruised was his reputation after a notorious interview with Craig Foster on SBS while he was in charge of Australia’s junior national teams. And only seven years ago, he was effectively hounded out of the country ­because people were worried his high-risk attacking tactics – the same ones that Aussies now claim to love him for – were going to put the Socceroos’ World Cup qualification hopes at risk and plunge the entire sport into crisis.

Postecoglou is, at once, the ultimate symbol of self-actualisation – the idea that one of us can make it to the very top of the global pile – and a reflection of how the code’s corrosive culture back home can leave its best minds dispirited and defeated. The mere mention of the words “back three” – a reference to the controversial three-man defensive line Postecoglou deployed in his final stretch as Socceroos coach – can send a ­shudder down the collective spine of the Australian soccer ­community. It was a system designed to prepare the national team for challenging – and beating – the best teams in the world at the 2018 World Cup in Russia. The nation had grown tired of getting to that stage every four years but hardly ever winning. When Postecoglou left the job after sealing World Cup qualification at the end of 2017, he was clearly disillusioned with the game’s relapse into a classic Aussie underdog mentality, which he’d been so determined to break.

But that was nearly seven years ago. Much has changed, and I wonder what he makes of it all. The A-League is still struggling to attract broader attention, but most other aspects of the sport seem to be in rude health. The Socceroos, in 2022, went on their best-ever run at the World Cup, reaching the round of 16 ­before being knocked out by eventual winners Argentina in agonising style. Having qualified for the past five World Cups in a row, Australia’s global reputation is growing. The Matildas, meanwhile, have become the country’s favourite sporting team, and the 2023 Women’s World Cup, which Australia co-hosted with New Zealand, was a genuine cultural moment. Sam Kerr has broken into the uppermost echelon of ­sporting celebrities. Our young players, male and ­female, are swarming around Europe’s top leagues in a volume not seen in many years.

When I put to Postecoglou that the Australian game is ­perhaps more respected outside the country than within it, he shakes his head. “We’re not respected ­outside because we don’t respect ourselves, mate,” he replies crisply. “That’s always been the case and always will be. We don’t respect ourselves.”

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Apparently not, then. “Don’t get me wrong, like, I ­appreciate it [the ­attention], but it’s because I’m in a respectable league. If I was Ange Postecoglou working anywhere else, there wouldn’t be the same sort of, for want of a better word, reverence around me. It’d still be, ‘There’s that soccer bloke, Con Postecoglou,’ as the great, uh … what’s his name?’

Not … Peter FitzSimons? “That’s the one,” he says. “A guy who has written books about the history of Australia that go into so much detail. I’ve read one of his books – unbelievable. So you know he’s a student. He’s not some dumb jock. He’s an intelligent guy. It’s either one of two ways. He’s doing it to be funny or totally dismissive. So how are people outside going to respect us when that’s how we treat the national team boss?”

This has unlocked a memory for me. I remember Postecoglou making a reference to being called “Con” in his press conference before Australia’s final World Cup play-off against Honduras in 2017. This was the first time he’d made himself available to media since the Herald-Sun reported that he would be quitting the job before the World Cup, even if they qualified – a public mystery that endured for two painful weeks until he put everyone out of their misery and confirmed it.

“I know what my legacy is,” he declared firmly in that press conference, as he was peppered with questions about his future. “It’s never going to be defined by one result. I hope my legacy will be that I’m someone who believed in something, and followed it through … I’ve been called Con Postecoglou, because Con and Ange are obviously easily misinterpreted, both ethnic names. I’ve had my surname twisted in headlines for something really clever and funny, which took me back [to] my primary school days. I’ve been called egocentric, selfish. There’s been calls for me to get sacked. But I’m still here.”

‘I wasn’t respected within my own country for what I was trying to do … I just felt like I’d made zero impact.’

Ange Postecoglou

I vaguely remember the offending tweet posted by FitzSimons at an earlier point in the qualification cycle, which I am able to quickly dig up: “On @SportsSunday in 4 mins with Neil Breen, Con Postecoglu, @TadhgKennelly and @emma_freedman Tune in!” There it is. Con. (Even “Postecoglou” is spelt wrong!) One of the most common Greek names in Australia, to the point it was once used by a comedian who portrayed a character known as “Con the Fruiterer”, a stereotypical take on Greek-Australian market vendors. David Mason, the Socceroos’ media manager at the time, tells me he also remembers FitzSimons calling Postecoglou “Con” in person, just before that episode of Nine’s Sports Sunday went to air, and Postecoglou not being impressed – not because he was personally hurt, but because of what it said about the prestige of the office he then held as Australian national team coach, and how flippant the mainstream was towards football.

“Very broadly, he’s right and I am wrong,” FitzSimons says now. “Obviously, the ‘Con’ thing was a brain-fart on my part. But I remain tragically proud of the fact whatever part I had in him leaving Australian soccer launched him on the international stage where he has continued to shine like a diamond since! As you will note in my columns, I have exulted in his success ever afterwards!”

All these years later, and Postecoglou is still thinking about it? One guy who got his name wrong?

“People think, ‘Oh, you’re sensitive to criticism.’ Mate, anyone who knows me will tell you I’ve got zero ego in terms of that stuff,” Postecoglou says. “I don’t care what people say about me. In fact, I love the discourse it ­provides. I love when people are arguing about football; nothing gives me greater joy. It was never about that. It was just that I wasn’t respected within my own game, I wasn’t respected within the country for what I was trying to do, and I just felt, well, it was the easiest decision for me to walk away, because I just felt like I’d made zero impact. I failed. I failed. At the end of 2017, I’d been coaching for what, close to 20 years? And after 20 years, I’m still getting ‘Con Postecoglou’. And I keep referring to that because that encapsulated everything for me.”

People will be heartbroken to hear he still feels that way, I tell Postecoglou. “But it’s the truth, mate,” he says. “I don’t say it with any bitterness or resentment. There’s no one happier than me with the Socceroos or the Matildas … I want [the game] to succeed. But that’s the reality of it … I’m back to being the wog in the schoolyard? Mate, no chance. I’m not putting up with this shit any more.”

It’s fair to say that respect – for his role and his name – is a big deal for Postecoglou. Growing up, his surname was mocked and mangled routinely, a familiar experience for many Australians of ethnic origin. It’s partly why the “Con” stuff-up cuts so deep, and also why, when Spurs supporters respect every syllable, it means so much. Before a match at the 2017 FIFA Confederations Cup, as he addressed Socceroos players at the team hotel – widely known as the “Enjoy Your Lunch” speech (just Google it) – he declared: “I’ve got sons now. You know what I want to pass to them? Just my name. When people hear my name, and they’re my sons, that’s enough. Because that name will mean something.”

The opportunity to write a book about Postecoglou came about not long after he was ­confirmed as Spurs manager in July last year. When I ran it past him for approval, he said he could not be directly involved due to time constraints, but that I should “just go for it”, which is typical “Big Ange”. He said he would not steer me towards or away from any interview subjects – aside from his family, which he wanted off-limits. He wanted me to rely on my own judgment. I soon learnt this was not dissimilar to how he deals with his backroom staff. “My only advice to you would be to write the book you want to write,” he told me. “Not necessarily the one I want told.”

I first crossed paths with Postecoglou back in 2010, when he was the coach of Brisbane Roar. I was at university when I began my first job in ­journalism as a freelance sports reporter for a now-defunct website. His “Roarcelona” team blew my mind. The A-League was relatively new back then and most of the teams played basic transitional football, but the possession-based style that Brisbane Roar played was other-worldly. They played like Barcelona, and that is no word of a lie – hence the nickname. At times, it was like they were playing a completely different sport to everyone else.

I’m too young to remember much from his first coaching job with his boyhood club South Melbourne in the defunct National Soccer League between 1996 and 2000, but by the time he arrived in Brisbane, he had perfected the ideas he was toying with back then. The Roar’s 36-match unbeaten streak, which broke the record for any Australian football code, was a genuine national ­phenomenon – former Socceroo Robbie Slater said at the time that it was such a big achievement that it should be ­spoken about in the same reverential tones as Don Bradman’s ­record in cricket.

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It was clear to me back then that Postecoglou was a special coach who could produce teams with a certain intangible quality that no one else seemed capable of replicating. If these players could be made to do that, I thought, then perhaps everything we were taught about Australian soccer, all the self-limiting rhetoric we internalised, and where we supposedly fitted into the world game’s pecking order, was wrong. And he proved all those things beyond any doubt when he rose to take charge of the Socceroos in 2013; two years later, they won the Asian Cup, playing a brand of football that people genuinely thought was beyond our capabilities.

This brand has become universally known as “Angeball”. It may have evolved over the years, but it has never strayed from its core principles: retaining possession at all times, relentless pressure on the ­opposition whenever the ball is lost, and a commitment to playing on the front foot and attacking. Some of this will sound obvious if you’re not into football, but what makes Angeball unique is that it doesn’t change, no matter what’s happening on the pitch. Where some coaches are happy to sit back and defend if they’re 1-0 or 2-0 up late in a game, Postecoglou keeps demanding more of his players, right up to the dying seconds.

Because it takes a little while to get used to – the transition period typically takes six to 12 months, by his estimation, until his ideas truly take root in a new environment – Angeball requires players and fans to find comfort in being uncomfortable. As Milos Degenek, the Socceroos defender who played under him at Japanese club Yokohama F. Marinos, puts it: “It takes one year to build a Rolls-Royce, but it takes 13 hours to build a Toyota. Everything that’s good takes time.” Consider Tottenham Hotspur, then, a work in progress.

Postecoglou isn’t an easy boss; while some coaches cultivate close relationships with their players, he ­purposely keeps his distance, to the point where even the biggest stars of his teams never feel too sure they’re going to be picked each week. While he has ­mellowed a bit over the years, Postecoglou can be ­incredibly grumpy, and struggles to suppress his rage when his players don’t obey his instructions. And yet somehow he has this ability to bring the absolute best out of everyone, an invisible force that makes his ­subordinates want to run through brick walls for him. Each team he has coached has come out the other end a lean, mean fighting machine.

Angeball has the origin story to match. Postecoglou, who turns 59 this week, was born in Athens and moved to Melbourne with his family when he was five years old. His late father, Jim, was typical of Greek migrants in Australia at the time, the many thousands who’d moved to the other side of the planet in search of a better life. A carpenter by trade, he worked absurd hours to put food on the table for his wife and two children – the other is Elizabeth, Ange’s older ­sister by five years – and it took a toll. Only football brought him out of his shell.

When Ange was a kid, his old man used to wake him up in the dead of night, sit him down on the couch and watch whatever football their grainy black-and-white television had to offer them. Jim would point out the teams and players that excited him, the ones that ­committed to attacking and entertaining instead of self-preservation, and so Ange grew to love them too. On Sundays, they’d go to Middle Park, the home of South Melbourne Hellas – the club Ange would one day play for – and as soon as Jim walked through those gates, he was a different person. Nowadays, whenever Ange is asked why his teams play the way they do, he says he’s just trying to produce a brand of football his dad would enjoy watching. “It is a simple equation,” Postecoglou once said. “I loved the game because it got me closer to him, and the rest just evolved from there.”

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Postecoglou played 192 games for South Melbourne, earning four caps for the Socceroos before becoming its coach in 1996 and winning two titles in the old National Soccer League. But he was probably always destined to coach Australia, having identified pretty early that he had grand ambitions in his head that his body wouldn’t be able to bring to life. He was first ­considered for the job in 1999, but missed out to Frank Farina. The consolation prize was a six-year stint in charge of Australia’s under-17s and under-20s, a period which Postecoglou describes as his PhD in coaching, but ended with an infamous car-crash ­interview on SBS, when Craig Foster called for him to resign on national television after failing to qualify one of his teams for a World Cup.

Postecoglou was subsequently tagged “old soccer” at a time when the sport was transitioning into “new ­football”, when billionaire football fanatic Frank Lowy was given full control of Soccer Australia and the ­decidedly un-ethnic A-League was launched. Postecoglou was deemed to be a barnacle on a ship that was changing direction.

Ironically, Postecoglou emerged from the wreckage more confident in his ability than ever before, having spent much of that time travelling across the world as Australia’s junior teams pursued qualification for various tournaments, picking up little nuggets of wisdom on the streets of places like Brazil, Germany, the Netherlands, Chile and Peru. The problem was that his name was mud in Australia and he had nowhere to channel his energy – until Brisbane Roar finally took a chance on him in 2009. They were richly rewarded, and his eventual rise to take charge of the Socceroos four years later felt inevitable.

Postecoglou willingly stretched his job description from mere coach of the national team to becoming the code’s public figurehead and philosopher. He had hoped that winning the 2015 Asian Cup, a tournament hosted by Australia, would present him with the ­metaphorical “golden key” to unlock the game’s potential and drag everyone along with him into a bold, new ­future. But he was wrong. The Asian Cup wasn’t a ­watershed moment for Australian sport. At best it was a passing fad, and Angeball was losing its purchase.

When Postecoglou realised what was happening, he upped sticks and left. Having coached the Socceroos at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, he resisted a second ­opportunity in Russia. “I had to qualify them again because I thought that was part of my brief, but I didn’t feel any responsibility to then take them to the World Cup,” he recalls. “It just felt like a natural end.”

Postecoglou’s first significant coaching gig abroad was as head coach of Yokohama F. Marinos, which he took up in late 2017. He set off for Japan with his young family – his second wife, Georgia, who he met while he was coaching South Melbourne (she was the club’s marketing manager), and their two young sons, Max and Alexi. They made their home in the city of Yokohama, just south of Tokyo. (Postecoglou married his first wife in 1988, while he was still playing – his eldest son, James, from that marriage, is now living in Greece.)

At the time, Yokohama F. Marinos was an ­underachieving giant in dire need of reinvention. Postecoglou’s appointment unfolded in a familiar way: there were early difficulties as players struggled to come to terms with his ­radical ideas and high standards, but then they became unstoppable. They won the J.League in 2019, making Postecoglou the first Australian to win a major men’s title overseas.

In 2021, he moved to Scottish Premiership club Celtic, which boasts one of the ­biggest fan bases in the world. Celtic is one of the two clubs based in Glasgow that have dominated Scottish football for more than a century. Celtic and Rangers, known as the Old Firm, share arguably the fiercest cross-town rivalry in world sport, straddling the religious, political and ethnic ­fissures across Glasgow.

Celtic was heavily criticised by fans for taking a punt on a coach they’d never heard of, from a country whose football they didn’t respect. But the club had also done its homework, knowing it would have to ride the inevitable early bumps during his tenure, to be rewarded in the end. Postecoglou won five of the six domestic trophies available to him in his two years at Celtic – his run of unbroken wins lasting even longer than at Brisbane Roar – and soon enough he was attracting attention from England. At this stage, the fans who had slammed the club for appointing him were desperately hoping the rumours about a swoop for him by Spurs weren’t true.

“As much as it has, in many ways, held me back, I love the fact I’ve had a different sort of journey,” Postecoglou reflects. “I just think that makes the story better. Wherever I’ve been – every club – I’ve always said [to the players], we’re there to tell a story. I wouldn’t prescribe my journey to people because it’s been pretty tough, but if it can have a decent ending, then … I think people can relate to it better. It’s not a normal trajectory for a manager [like me] to reach a big club in the Premier League, one of the biggest clubs in the world.”

The early promise of Tottenham’s sensational start in Postecoglou’s first season petered out due to a combination of injuries, suspensions and inter­national duty, which robbed them of their best players at crucial moments. They finished fifth on the ladder, missing out on qualification for the coveted UEFA Champions League; the final stretch of their campaign ended in bitter disappointment, losing five times (to Newcastle United, Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool and Manchester City) in their last seven games. Some fans lost their initial enthusiasm for Postecoglou along the way, but most remain fully on board with the Angeball revolution. A challenge for the title in the new season, which started last week, is by no means out of the realms of possibility.

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It feels like there’s been a historic spike in Spurs supporters across Australia, and there’s one man to thank for that. Postecoglou continues to inspire back home. But even this remains a source of internal conflict for him. When I ask Postecoglou what he hopes Australians take from his ride so far, he shakes his head.

“I don’t know. I really don’t know,” he replies. “It’s hard for me. I’ve had a weird relationship with Australia in terms of football because in many respects, I resented what it made me at the end, wanting to leave. But at the same time, I wouldn’t have gotten where I am today without it. Part of me just says, when I was there, I didn’t feel appreciated. It’s great that I am now. If ­people are getting up and watching Tottenham games because of me … I love that aspect of it.

“But does it have an everlasting effect on the game, on the country? I’m not sure. I’m not really sure how I feel about that whole thing.”

Angeball: The Definitive Biography of Ange Postecoglou by Vince Rugari (Hachette, $35) is out August 28.

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