The Tottenham & Postecoglou Conundrum

When the careers of Antonio Conte and Jose Mourinho are critically looked upon in the future, there’s every chance people will inadvertently remember their time at Tottenham and wonder how that ever happened. Not because Conte and Mourinho were terrible coaches at Spurs—far from it, in fact—but because it was the most unlikeliest cultural and stylistic club-manager marriages the Premier League has seen in recent years.

Mourinho and Conte were CV-rich coaches of esteemed pedigree, but their stints at Spurs were not exactly known for culture, connection, family, or the buzzwords you would describe a club that means more, beyond the formality of win, lose, or draw. Those Mourinho, Conte years were the antithesis of the fist-bumping Klopp and his gloriously rambunctious Kop, or the passionately unhinged Arteta and the ever-growing harmonious feverishness of the Emirates fateful, or even the Pochettino-Tottenham romance for that matter. And I haven’t even mentioned the stark difference in the actual football itself.

Nonetheless, the goal of Tottenham in hiring two of football’s favorite coaching nomads was to “win now,” understandable for a club that went over a decade, not just to form some fruitlessly fictitious long-term bond between club and manager that will end up in a CL final loss and an embarrassing league title loss to Leicester City.

Yet, the other truth of that ‘fruitlessly fictitious’ Pochettino era was that the Champions League final against Liverpool in 2019 was the club’s first ever in their entire history. And while losing the Premier League title with Pochettino against 1000/1 Leicester had rival fans calling them “bottlers,” it was one of two genuine back-to-back Premier League title challenges—none the club has ever seen in the Premier League era.

Consequently, for Mourinho and Conte to be deemed anything close to a genuine success at Tottenham, they simply had to win. It was the only worthwhile tradeoff for what everyone knew was going to be largely depressing football in spite of the club’s long history of expansive attacking football.

Winning something was also how Spurs fans could convince themselves that having two managers constantly casting slyly disrespectful remarks at the establishment as though they were doing the fans a favor for being managers of their club was somehow acceptable. Well, unfortunately for Spurs and Daniel Levy, the Klopp-Pep PL era meant they never really stood a chance of winning to begin with, even with Conte and Mourinho, and let’s not even talk about the Tottenham of Nuno Espírito Santo, because frankly, no one even remembers that.

Postecoglou’s Tottenham

But alas, after a long and slightly embarrassing search, Tottenham seem to have found themselves again. You only have to see the fans singing away through thick and thin on home and away days to notice this refreshingly positive energy around the club. Ange Postecoglou may not have the storied trophy-laden career of Conte and Mourinho (despite being older than them), but in a not-so-long space of time, he has injected the club with a newly found fervor, a unison from top to bottom, and a healthy platform on which to dream again, all while playing arguably some of the most exciting football in the Premier League.

Beyond the exciting football, however, you want to think Spurs ultimately want to be what City are, even if it’s reasonably hard to imagine. Then, at the very least, Spurs would like to be competing for premier leagues like their archrivals Arsenal have done in the past two seasons (even though they’d never readily admit to this), something not since the days of Pochettino.

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In any case, it is within reason to find this vision slightly unimaginable, not because it is impossible, but because Tottenham have not won a trophy since 2008, and also because City are quite simply one of the greatest premier league teams of all time—a bar that will certainly be too high for many a club, as it is looking like for Arsenal.

But perhaps the trophy drought for one is why certain Tottenham fans, however few, often slip into cynicism when their team naively give up a lead naively away at a midtable club. These cynics would question Postecoglou after Tottenham raced to the top of the Premier League table after the first few months, even after the Spurs manager became the first ever manager to win two consecutive manager of the month awards in the Premier League.

For these cynics, it is still about winning now—getting that hoodoo of a drought out of the way, having something to brag about after so long a year. At their loudest, they often bring up the manager’s very pedigree, remarking over how a 59-year-old manager with no experience in coaching a European top-five league club can deliver a trophy. And unfortunately for Postecoglou and his present majority group of loyalist Spurs fans, how Tottenham ended the 23/24 season gave even more substance to the voice of the cynics.

It is fair to say that neither Postecoglou nor Levy nor Tottenham would want slowly increasing cynicism to turn into consistent evidence-based opinion. And yet, you can argue that even after three games, Postecoglou’s Spurs have not quite shaken away the signs that saw a section of their own fans call them naive. Well, maybe losing away at St. James Park despite having almost 70 percent of the ball is anything but naive, but maybe being pegged back in the second half against newly promoted Leicester after being on top is definitely somewhat naive. 

The Football and It’s Conundrum

Postecoglou favors fast and direct attacking football, a brand of which hasn’t been seen in its purest form since the pre-Virgil Van Dijk era of Klopp. The football is exhilarating as it is brave and chaotic, arguably even more so than that seen in the days of Pochettino.

It is also a complete opposite to the pragmatic, structured, and largely uninventive style of Mourinho and Conte, which, for what it’s worth, is a kind of football you look forward to seeing if you are a Spurs fan—a kind of football that surely must mean something—especially given the recent debates on football losing its freedom of expression in general. Tottenham didn’t have this football, nor did they have the trophies in their recent past, but at least they now have Postecoglou ball.

However, the tradeoff for Postecoglou ball is how open and mindlessly vulnerable the team often is in defense. Tottenham posted an expected goals against/xGA of 68.07 in the 23/24 season, per understat, making them the 14th best defense per xG. They conceded 61 goals, meaning their overburdened defense combined to prevent 7 more goals; still, six teams conceded fewer goals than them. In comparison, Man City and Arsenal conceded 34 (37.37xGA) and 29 goals (31.78xGA), respectively, representing roughly half of what Tottenham conceded last season.

The underlying fact here is that these stats don’t point to an anomaly; of course they don’t, especially when you watch Spurs attack with high-flying wingbacks cum-number tens and viciously vertical midfielders week in and week out. But even so, you can argue that conceding chances in droves would be somewhat worth it if Tottenham managed to score enough to make their ridiculously attack-minded game count, but this is not the case either. Tottenham managed 74 goals (7th) from an xG of 73.35 (6th) last season, while Man City (94.79 xG) and Arsenal (89.55 xG) scored 96 and 91 goals, respectively. Curious, isn’t it? especially when you consider Man City and Arsenal are fairly front-foot attack-minded sides as well.

The conclusion then is that Postecoglou’s game is quite simply a frantic procession of chaos, one that often tingles the spine of any neutral, but is so far justifiably raising doubts about its viability to be effective on both sides of the pitch.

One game from the 23/24 season perfectly epitomized the Postecoglou game. And it came at home to London rivals Chelsea in what was former Tottenham boss Mauricio Pochettino’s return to his former home. Tottenham took a 1-0 lead in the 6th minute after a characteristically fast start. But then, after a Romero red card just over the half hour mark, everyone would have thought Postecoglou would have switched to a more reserved and pragmatic game plan to keep his side in it.

However, Tottenham stunningly continued to keep a ridiculously high line throughout the entire match while Chelsea kept going in behind them effortlessly. Chelsea ended up winning the game 4-1, but it’s worrying to think it could have been more, especially when you consider Tottenham went down a further man 10 minutes into the second half.

When Postecoglou was asked after the game about his tactical inflexibility, the Tottenham boss replied, “If we go down to five men, mate, we’ll have a crack.” Well, in fairness, after 12 games in and on top of the table, it was perhaps an admirable decision to keep going against those odds; the Spurs fans definitely looked like they loved it. But then you look at how Tottenham ended up finishing 5th by losing 3 of their last 5 games last season, and you begin to ask whether going full throttle in attack for 90 minutes is brave or, in fact, plainly reckless.

The answer to that is pretty straightforward; it is an answer the growing number of cynics within the Tottenham fan base now loudly echo; it is a fact of the Premier League’s competitiveness. You simply need a healthy balance between attack and defense to win enough games, if you aim to challenge for trophies or finish high enough on the table, that is. Scarily enough, even the likes of Klopp and Arteta have both found that in this current version of the Premier League, the bar for perfection in terms of tactical balance has never been higher—a consequence of the mere existence of Pep Guardiola and his Manchester City machine. 

What May Have To Give

Maybe, just maybe, Postecoglou might end up winning the odd FA Cup or Carabao Cup by out-attacking everyone along the way to end Tottenham’s trophy drought; they might even do it in Europe, and then go on to ever so quickly list the number of trophies he’s won every chance he gets like Manchester United’s Erik Ten Hag does these days, despite him and his club’s own woes. But maybe, even for that to happen, Postecoglou must be able to exhibit a level of compactness and rigidity he has not yet shown.

A quality Klopp and Arteta had to also figure out on their way to winning trophies during the Pep era. It is not a call for Postecoglou to suddenly abandon his principles for the deepest low-blocks; it is a call for his team to have an organization to the honest chaos—to put the handbrake on within games rather than willingly crushing at 100mph.

However, the lack of evidence thus far to suggest that a Postecoglou side can be pragmatic enough when situations call for it is beginning to raise questions. Is it an inability? Or is it an unwillingness? Whatever it is, this season will answer those questions, but if Tottenham’s first three games are anything to go by, we are probably not going to see anything on the contrary to last season.

Understandably, it might probably be unfair to compare Postecoglou’s Spurs to Arteta’s Arsenal’s or to Klopp’s Liverpool, given it has only been over a year since Postecoglou took charge of the club. Maybe the Spurs manager might yet end up tweaking his game like Klopp eventually did after his first two seasons, or like Arteta did after the heartbreak of Arsenal’s 22/23 season. But when you hear former Spurs man Eric Dier say Postecoglou doesn’t really do any tactical work in training, maybe it’s not even about buying more players either.

Looking Ahead

Crucially, Postecoglou’s Spurs welcome archrivals Arsenal to White Hart Lane on Sunday. And even this early into the season, the magnitude of a North London Derby means that all existing concerns will probably fly out of the window for a while in the camp of whoever comes out victorious. In the same vein, Tottenham fans will certainly ask more questions of their manager if they cannot pick up at least a result against Arsenal on the day.

Arsenal may have key players out injured; they may also be under pressure to win the game given their next match comes against title rivals Manchester City, but the Gunners have won the last two NLDs at the Tottenham Hotspur stadium and are looking to extend it to a record three straight wins. So it’ll be in no way an easy NLD for Postecoglou’s men.

Unsurprisingly, too, Arsenal’s most recent victory against Spurs last season saw the Gunners bide their time to pick Spurs apart as Postecoglou and his charges endlessly pushed up to attack in typical frenzied fashion. And you want to think that lots of teams, including Arsenal, will keep doing this to Spurs all season, just as Leicester and Newcastle have already done, unless, of course, Postecoglou finally decides to evolve his tactics. Time will tell, but whether he does it or not, one thing we know is that Tottenham’s season will come down to it.