Tottenham are no longer playing the football that Ange Postecoglou had insisted he would never veer from, but his new pragmatism has them on the brink of Europa League glory.
Tottenham’s 4-1 defeat to Chelsea in November 2023 has become infamous for Spurs’ persistence in playing with a high line despite having only nine men left on the pitch. And afterwards, manager Ange Postecoglou gave an interview which told a lot of the people who then knew little about him what kind of manager he was.
“It’s just who we are, mate,” the Australian said of his side approaching being two players down with a tactic never before or since seen at that level. “It’s who we’re going to be as long as I’m here. [Even if] we go down to five men, we’ll have a go.”
Postecoglou was pretty much a completely unknown quantity in England when he joined Tottenham a few months before that Chelsea loss, but it had become apparent from reports on his time in Australia, Japan and Celtic, and from the early evidence of his time in London, that he deemed entertainment almost as important as results.
He’d basically said as much after winning the Scottish Premiership title with Celtic: “I still think [scoring lots of goals is] the best part of football, it goes beyond winning. Sometimes you can win and not really enjoy a game, but never do you not enjoy a goal. Even the most scrambling, ugliest of goals still gets celebrated. I love the joy goals bring.”
But after that Chelsea defeat, which brought to a sudden end the unbeaten start Postecoglou had made at Spurs, he was roundly derided for his tactics. Former Spurs and Chelsea manager Glenn Hoddle described the approach as “football suicide”. Spurs might have continued to create chances despite their numerical disadvantage, but they also conceded enough chances to lose the game a few times over, and were only saved by some wayward finishing from Raheem Sterling and Nicolas Jackson. “Mad, but a great watch!” Jamie Carragher reflected on X.
If entertainment was the aim, Postecoglou was certainly succeeding.
But as Tottenham’s season unravelled in the months afterwards and Postecoglou’s reign soured in a miserable league campaign in his second season at the club, entertainment has been a big part of the problem. Spurs’ games have produced more goals (122) than any other side in the Premier League this season, but they have lost 21 of their 37 Premier League matches and look set to finish the season 17th, just outside the relegation places.
Spurs have shown plenty of attacking intent, with – remarkably – only five teams scoring more than them this season (63). That’s as many goals with one game to go as Chelsea scored in the whole of 2018-19 when they finished third, and as many as Blackburn scored in a 42-game season when they finished second in 1993-94.
And even if they lose their last game, Spurs could still finish the season with a positive goal difference. They could break the previous record for the lowest position any team has ever finished a Premier League season with a positive number in that column (Man City, 16th in 2003-04 with +1 GD).
But they have been almost completely incapable under Postecoglou of balancing attacking intent with defensive solidity, leaving themselves criminally open and conceding chances all too freely. Only the three relegated sides have conceded a higher expected goals total in Premier League games this season than Spurs (62.1 xG), a rate of 1.68 xG against per game.
Their six-game rolling average of xG conceded per Premier League game has only twice in Postecoglou’s entire reign – and very briefly both times – dipped under 1.0 xG, as the below graphic shows. For most of the 2024-25 season, that average has been above 1.5 xG against. Tottenham have consistently conceded too many chances for much of the Premier League campaign.
Injuries have played their part, with first-choice centre-backs Cristian Romero and Micky van de Ven simultaneously missing four months of the season.
Destiny Udogie, Guglielmo Vicario, Rodrigo Bentancur, Dejan Kulusevski, Richarlison, Dominic Solanke, Son Heung-min and Wilson Odobert have all missed significant chunks of the season.
Postecoglou endured a significant portion of the winter without a full team of players and with barely 11 fit players available while he navigated a demanding schedule that included a European campaign alongside a run to the EFL Cup semi-finals as well as league games and a couple of FA Cup ties.
Throughout that injury crisis, Spurs kept attacking. They had enough players to play the Postecoglou way, so they continued to do so. Or try, at least.
Whatever complaints there might be about Postecoglou, nobody can say his teams don’t create much. There has barely been a game under him when Tottenham haven’t troubled their opponents. At their best and strongest, they have shown they can be utterly devastating in attack, and they almost always score at least once.
But they have also barely ever looked even remotely solid at the back. Postecoglou has been consistently, publicly and pretty universally criticised for much of his time at Tottenham for asking his team to play the same way whatever the circumstance, whoever the opponent, whatever the score, and whoever he was missing due to injury.
Then came this run to the Europa League final.
Tottenham face Manchester United in Bilbao on Wednesday night with an opportunity to end their 17-year trophy drought, having battled their way to the final with a string of very un-Postecoglou-like performances. There has been a pragmatism, an acceptance that changing their approach, which has been otherwise lacking from the Australian’s entire time at the club, is the best route to success.
With injuries limiting what the team could do and confidence at rock bottom, Postecoglou, for the first time, decided that a defence-first approach, with little desire to keep the ball, was worth using.
In the first leg of the semi-final at home to Bodø/Glimt, Tottenham had just 41.4% of the ball, going direct to a dynamic front three rather than playing through the lines as they always have done under Postecoglou. They were compact and controlled in defence, allowing their opponents chances worth just 0.26 xG, their lowest in any game in any competition since Postecoglou joined.
In the away leg, without the injured James Maddison, one of their goalscorers in the first leg (from a long, direct ball up field, as it happens) and one of their best players at keeping the ball in advanced positions and unlocking a set defence, they were even more extreme in their tactics. They had less possession than they have ever had under Postecoglou (31.6%) and allowed the Norwegians just 0.43 xG, their lowest in any away game under him.
In the previous round, Spurs had gone to Eintracht Frankfurt needing a win after a first-leg 1-1 draw at home. They had just 36.6% of the ball and ground out a 1-0 win with a professional, attritional and efficient display. A Solanke penalty was the difference.
Their five-game rolling average xG against in the Europa League paints a picture of a very different Tottenham when playing in that competition. It’s now down at around 0.5 xG against per game – under half of what it has ever been in the Premier League under Postecoglou.
The quality of opposition in the Europa League may well have played a part, but there is no doubting, from both watching Tottenham approach the latter stages of their European campaign and from the stark difference in their numbers, that they have completely changed their style of play. Angeball is no more.
While Tottenham were chasing Champions League qualification towards the end of last season, Postecoglou was unwavering in his view that seeing progress on the pitch was more important than sneaking into fourth place and earning a spot in Europe’s biggest competition.
“My position on it is not so much, particularly this year, where we finish, it’s what kind of team we are,” he said in April as the 2023-24 season reached its climax. “Because if we finish fourth and we’re 25 points off the top, I’m not sure that’s the kind of trajectory we want to be on.”
He wasn’t interested in finishing fourth. He wanted to see progress on the field with performances that convinced him the team was moving in the right direction, towards becoming a consistent force at the top of the Premier League.
But with such evidence not forthcoming this season – be that due to the injury crisis or not – Postecoglou has veered completely off course. The journey is no longer important; only the destination matters.
The way Spurs are playing in this Europa League run is nothing like we’ve seen from Postecoglou before. He has eschewed his philosophy in favour of something that the fans would have been more accustomed to seeing in the days of Antonio Conte or José Mourinho.
Spurs have had more than 60% possession in 42 different games under Postecoglou. They’ve had over 70% 10 times. They even once had over 80%.
But while seven of the 10 lowest possession figures they’ve recorded have come in games against Manchester City, Liverpool or (with nine men against) Chelsea, the final three have come in the last two rounds of the Europa League against two teams in Bodø/Glimt and Eintracht Frankfurt against whom Tottenham certainly have enough quality to dominate the ball.
In the games against City and Liverpool, they saw so little of the ball because they were playing superior opposition. In the last couple of rounds of the Europa League, they have purposefully set up to play that way.
So, what does all of this mean heading into Wednesday’s final in Bilbao?
First of all, while winning trophies has obviously always been Postecoglou’s main aim, he is now clearly not fussed about doing it while playing his way. He has not approached these last few rounds of the Europa League as if he is concerned with sticking to the principles to which he has been so staunchly and openly wedded for most of his Tottenham reign.
Spurs have beaten United three times already this season with possession shares of 60.5%, 55.8% and 46.5%, so they have it in them to play Postecoglou’s possession-dominant style and beat this United side.
But this time they face the nightmare scenario of being without all three of their best creative midfielders in Maddison, Kulusevski and Lucas Bergvall. They have only played without all three of them twice this season – in March at home to Bournemouth and on Friday night versus Aston Villa when they were all already injured, so this isn’t a situation that they will be used to.
Last season, before Bergvall had been signed, they played without both Kulusevski and Maddison only three times, although one of them was in a 2-2 draw at Old Trafford in January 2024. That day, they dominated possession (63.7%) despite a grossly weakened squad with those two injured alongside half a dozen others and Son, Yves Bissouma and Pape Sarr away on international duty.
But that was a different time. Postecoglou was building something then. A good performance playing Angeball as it was meant to be played was important to him, regardless of personnel. That simply isn’t the case now.
Whether he has lost as much confidence in his philosophy as much of the fanbase isn’t quite clear, but you can be almost certain that we’ll see the new, more pragmatic, defensive version of his side in Bilbao on Wednesday night.
If Postecoglou is to come good on his wild assertion from September last year that “I always win things in my second year”, you can be fairly sure that he won’t have done it playing his usual brand of football.
This one game is more important to just about every Tottenham fan than years of progress on the pitch, and Postecoglou has come to realise that. What that means for his future beyond this season remains to be seen, but it is pretty likely that he won’t be in London next season, so even he has become aware that there has been no need to think beyond this competition for weeks now.
This new style of play has taken them to the Europa League final, and it might just give them the best chance of winning it, too. For this one game, at least, and quite possibly beyond, Angeball at Tottenham is no more.
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Angeball Has Gone, But Does it Matter? Opta Analyst.
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