Learning humility from Sir Alex Ferguson, changing a tyre on the motorway while chauffeuring the great Ferenc Puskas, and being snubbed by so many Premier League and Championship executives it felt as if he was being “taken for auditions in Hollywood and getting rejected all the time”.
For 45 minutes back in his Australian homeland this week, new Tottenham Hotspur head coach Ange Postecoglou gave a small group of reporters a window into what has shaped him, as a person and as a manager.
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It was a fascinating insight into what makes Postecoglou tick, as he explained the importance to him of sincerity, listening and the desire to prove people wrong.
“It was their missed opportunity, not mine,” he says of those executives who wouldn’t give him the time of day, some of whom hadn’t even heard of him. “I’m still here now and maybe if they had been a little bit more open-minded I could have brought success to their football club. Hopefully some of them are thinking, ‘Maybe next time a guy walks in and he’s from Japan or he’s English or whatever, maybe I’ll pay a little more attention to him’.”
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Postecoglou’s managerial journey is outlined in full here, and there will be people who feel they already know him well. But he is someone with a constant ability to surprise, explaining to us at our sitdown in Perth during Spurs’ pre-season tour how it is that he can be such a skilled public speaker yet so bad at small talk. So empathetic and yet so distant from his players.
This is Ange Postecoglou — in his own words.
Learning humility
Speak to any of Ange Postecoglou’s former players, and they will wax lyrical about his empathy and emotional intelligence. Only this week, Perth Glory striker Adam Taggart, who played up front for him for Australia’s national team told The Athletic: “The messages he gave and the way he delivered them have always stuck with me.”
During our interview this week, Postecoglou explained that the importance of treating people well was imprinted on him by early meetings in his career with legendary figures in the game such as Alex Ferguson and Ferenc Puskas. Their humility and generosity left a lasting mark — as did seeing the opposite from other prominent people in football.
Postecoglou first met Ferguson when he was managing South Melbourne, a semi-professional side, at the Club World Championship in Brazil in January 2000 — up against the Scot’s famous 1998-99 treble-winning Manchester United team. It wasn’t a long interaction but Ferguson left a lasting impression and shaped how Postecoglou treats his players and people he meets to this day.
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“It must only have been about 10 or 15 minutes. But he was kind with his time when he didn’t have to be, and there are plenty I’ve come across that aren’t kind with their time, and that leaves an impression on you as well. Because you go, ‘I don’t want to be like that’. You realise that and think, ‘I don’t want anyone to think that about me’. So the fact that he spent the time talking to a young manager — I was 34 at the time — it was significant. We were walking to a press conference, and he said, ‘You’re never going to like this stuff. I hate it’. So I kind of hung on his every word. But more important was the impression he made on me that if you can do that to a person, that person then leaves thinking or feeling like you’ve given them that time of day, and that that has an unbelievable effect.
“They were under siege a bit (having pulled out of the FA Cup to compete in Brazil, with the tournament clashing with the third round back home), but he handled it really well, and he just said, ‘Look, it is an important part of the job, how you handle this aspect of it (the media)’. I remember I had his book as well, because one of my best mates is a massive Man U supporter and he said to me, ‘If you meet Fergie, get him to sign this for me’. I said, ‘I can’t do that! I’m managing against them, that’s pretty embarrassing’. To be fair, he signed it for me. And I said to him, ‘It’s for my mate’, and he went, ‘Yeah, right’.”
Even earlier in his career, Postecoglou was managed at South Melbourne in the late 1980s and early 1990s by the former Hungarian forward Ferenc Puskas, who is still considered to be one of the greatest footballers of all time. Postecoglou was only in his mid-twenties but was already the team captain, and ended up effectively being Puskas’ translator (Puskas didn’t speak English but had passable Greek, which Postecoglou translated). Again, Postecoglou realised the power of humility.
“I used to pick him up from his house, drive him to training, drive him to the games. For those three years, I was just blessed to be in his company. I just loved the way he thought about life. He was the most humble of people, which resonated with me. We really bonded with him really strongly so I thought, ‘Well, that’s kind of important if you want people to do things for you. If they care about you or don’t want to let you down, that’s pretty important’.”
Postecoglou cared so much about Puskas that he went to great lengths to get him from A to B — even if now he has regrets over his choice of vehicle…
“I was 23, 24. I was captain, because I’d grown up at the club and we had a really young group, and he wanted me to pick him up and drive him, and I had the shittiest old car, a Datsun 200, because I was on hardly any money.
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“So I’d be literally pulling up and putting a guy in my car, which was worth 500 quid at the time, didn’t have a window winder because my mate had broken it the year before, so he couldn’t even wind his window, and I’m driving one of the world’s greatest players around in this car — that’s bloody embarrassing. For one game, I was driving him to the airport and I got a flat tyre on the freeway and had to pull over to the side. So here I am, in the club tracksuit, driving one of the world’s greatest footballers to the airport so we don’t miss our flight, I get a flat tyre, and I’ve got the jack and I’m in the middle of the highway. He didn’t get out of the car. He stayed in the car. I’m going, ‘Boss, d’ya mind just…’ — because he was a big guy at the time — ‘…d’ya mind getting out?’. And he goes, ‘No, I’m not going anywhere’. I think about it now and think, ‘Man, I would have done things differently — I would have paid for a taxi for the man’.”
Learning the game
Postecoglou’s commitment to attacking football has been well-documented, and in this regard Puskas was also a big influence, especially as in his role as captain and translator he ended up “half-coaching”, too. On the pitch, Postecoglou and the rest of the South Melbourne players were liberated by Puskas’ philosophy of essentially: if they score four, we’ll score five.
Continuing the theme of what he remembers from those Puskas days, Postecoglou says: “Just his outlook on football. Anyone would say his teams just wanted to outscore the opposition; that’s all he wanted to do.
“He goes, ‘We will win 5-4 every week and I’ll enjoy it’.
“I was a defender, so we copped four goals and I was, like, ‘Shit’, but he was buzzing, because what a game. They scored great goals, we scored great goals. That’s just not right! But it was right because what it did was, for us as players, it released us of that fear of, ‘Oh, we’ve just conceded a goal, what a tragedy’. (It became) ‘Oh, we’ve conceded a goal. Let’s go up and score two. It doesn’t matter; it’s all right’.
“He provided that security blanket. We ended up being champions that year.
“We had a really young group and I think it only would have worked because we were a young group. And that planted a seed in my mind. I think if we were an experienced group predominantly, they would have questioned him all the time saying, ‘You can’t win things like that’.
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“As a defender I’d get exposed all the time with three players attacking me because our wingers wouldn’t come back. We played with wingers and back then — we’re talking the 1980s — 4-4-2 was the game. That filtered down to Australia because we had a lot of British ex-pats and everyone was playing 4-4-2. He goes, ‘No, no, we’re going to play with wingers’. No one had played with wingers for years. But that’s how we played.
“We loved playing like that because we weren’t worried about making a mistake or conceding a goal. As long as we won at the end of the day, he didn’t care about the rest of it.
“I just thought to myself, ‘What a fantastic outlook to have’. Because as a manager you’re bogged down by all these things as much as the players are, of failure, of things not going right, of potentially getting the sack. All these things are there to stop you actually playing the football you want your team to play.
“That had an effect on me of, ‘OK, that’s the kind of manager I want to be’.
“That’s all in theory. Then you get in a (managerial) job and you realise all these things, but I’ve tried to resist that as much as I can with all my teams: play football the fans want to see, play football the players want to play and provide the structure that’s going to make you successful.”
The biggest influence when it comes to how Postecoglou views football, however, is his late father, Jim — as The Athletic has explored here. Postecoglou’s father was distant but he bonded with his son through football, and Ange never loses sight of his father’s footballing mantra: “Κάτω η μπάλα” — a Greek phrase which roughly translated means ‘Keep the ball down’.
When asked why he has such an evangelical commitment to attacking football, Postecoglou replied: “Because that’s how I fell in love with the game. I speak about my old man a lot. He hated Italian football — it was the era of Catenaccio. Whenever it came on, he would turn it off (saying), ‘I’m not watching this’. But if somebody exciting was playing, like Ajax or at that time Liverpool were a fantastic passing, attacking team, or if there was a player in there that he really liked — like a Glenn Hoddle at Spurs — he would point him out, and so that resonated. That’s why he loved the game. He didn’t love the game in itself. He loved the entertainment of the game, and that resonated with me.
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“Like I said, the influences I had after that, I naturally gravitated towards teams like… when we watched the 1974 World Cup together, he was desperate for Holland to win it just because of what (Johan) Cruyff was doing. They didn’t and he was heartbroken. He didn’t like the Germans. He just thought they were too mechanical all the time. So all those kind of things, whether I realised it at the time, were sort of playing in my head and then when I watched it, the influence it had after that was on the sort of teams and managers I naturally followed in that formative stage. And when you think, ‘Well, this is what I want to do with my life’, they were always the ones that made me think, ‘When I get into it this is the way I want to coach’. I immersed myself in how that happens: how did these teams become that way? How do these managers coach? How do these football clubs become these kinds of football clubs? And that gave me that clear idea that that’s who I wanted to be and how I wanted to coach.”
Postecoglou the pragmatist
Despite his appreciation of aesthetics in sport, Postecoglou also has a more pragmatic side. As he showed when asked about the Jonny Bairstow stumping incident in the recent second Ashes cricket Test between England and Australia, which was within the rules but deemed by many to be against the ‘spirit of cricket’…
“I thought it was fair game. I get the whole ‘spirit of cricket’ stuff, but that doesn’t seem to be written down anywhere, and depends on people’s definition. Yeah, I was OK with it; I didn’t think it was that bad. I know it was obviously us taking a wicket, so that helped.
“I don’t think it was dirty. I didn’t see it as dirty. I like winning within the confines of the rules, I’m very respectful of that. You want to win the right way, for sure. I’ve seen other things that I think, ‘I wouldn’t have done that’. We’ve seen it in football at times, where you score a goal and you go, ‘Well, that was really a foul (in the build-up)’, and you don’t feel good about it. But ultimately, for those kinds of things, I’ve always thought, ‘We’ve got referees and officials, let them decide’.
“The old moral high ground, mate, it shifts a fair bit at times, depending on who’s at the summit.”
Postecoglou the listener
Postecoglou is known for his powerful oratory, but just as important for him is the ability to listen. This is linked to the earlier section on how key it is to remain humble, and has been a crucial part of his first few weeks at Spurs.
“You listen a lot, don’t do a lot of talking (he says of his start at Tottenham, having moved on from winning the Scottish title in both his seasons as Celtic manager). That’s important. You say I don’t go around with allies (a reference to him not bringing any coaches with him from Celtic). That’s not always healthy. That can just disguise a lot of things. If I’ve got a group who come with me, three assistant coaches, a conditioning coach and a goalkeeping coach, maybe I’m sitting here thinking we’re having a good time because there’s all these allies but the problems are still there.
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“It’s just a matter of being really alert, having eyes and ears open to get a real picture and as quickly as possible fill the gaps and rectify things that need rectifying, because it will be different from the previous managers, because we all work differently.
“I’m still in that stage. I haven’t got a full picture of everything I need to have real clarity about, but in the 12 or 13 days I’ve been at the club, the fog is lifting. I can see more of what needs to be done. The West Ham game (a 3-2 loss here on Tuesday) revealed some things that you can’t see unless you play that first game.”
Returning to the theme of listening, Postecoglou expands on the point, and again refers to the influence of that meeting with Ferguson in Brazil over two decades ago.
“When I say I listen, it’s not me asking questions — it’s just listening to how they talk, what their own thoughts are about things in general rather than things specifically. Those things, I think, reveal themselves if you let them.
“I’ve learned lessons in life. If you do get to meet someone, you want them to do all the talking. You don’t want to meet somebody for 10 minutes and you’re talking for nine of them, and you walk away going, ‘I found out nothing’. I say it to people about me all the time. They say they look forward to meeting me and spend 10 minutes talking about themselves and they haven’t really met me. So (with Ferguson), I didn’t really say anything, I just let him talk. I just let the conversation go where it went.”
The importance of sincerity
Something you often hear managers and coaches talking about is the importance of being true to yourself. Players can tell if the person in charge of the team is trying to be something they are not, and the fundamental importance of being sincere was something Postecoglou returned to again and again during our interview. We see this in how he behaves and talks.
This sincerity came up when he was asked about Tottenham midfielder Yves Bissouma saying that Postecoglou was “like a dad” earlier this week.
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“It’s hard for me to talk about myself. I’m just me. When I’ve heard players I’ve managed talk about me, they do talk about me in those kinds of terms. That’s the kind of relationship, and maybe that’s the influence I had from my father. He got the best out of me like that, so maybe I think that’s the way, but it’s not something I consciously do; it’s just me being me. And it’s funny, because whenever I’ve moved on from whatever club I’ve been at, and I bump into ex-players, they’re always a little bit stand-offish and I tend to be a little bit more relaxed, and that unnerves them even more, and they go, ‘No, we liked the old you’. I say, ‘Let’s have a coffee’, and they go, ‘No boss, I’m leaving’. That’s me. That’s who I am as a person, and I think people respond to that better, because at least there’s some certainty about my behaviour. I’m not doing something because I saw Sir Alex managing that way and thought, ‘I’m going to be like him’, or because that’s how I should react after a good game or a bad game. I’m just going to react like me.”
Another part of himself that Postecoglou won’t compromise on is his refusal to self-promote. Having mentioned this earlier in our chat in relation to his interviews for the Spurs job, when it was put to him that he’s not someone who would self-promote “a huge amount” he responded instantly, “At all, mate”.
He accepts that this, and his being an Australian football manager, may have held him back. But that absence of self-promotion is not something he will ever change. Even though the combination of his nationality and this characteristic has led to some excruciating exchanges with club executives down the years…
“I’ve had success wherever I’ve been, but apparently that success has been perceived as something not that credible because of where I’ve done it, whether it’s in Australia, Japan or up in Scotland. But if I was doing it in a small (continental) European country, if I was winning the Belgian first division or the Dutch first division, I would have gone up a lot quicker.
“So some of it has been that, and that has held me back. I don’t go around promoting myself.
“I remember going to London a few years ago, and people representing me wanted me to meet and greet all these people. This was after winning the (2015) Asian Cup with Australia, going to a World Cup (in 2014), coaching in Japan and having success (winning the 2019 J-League title)…
“I walked into a lot of corporate boxes, met a lot of CEOs of English Premier League clubs and Championship clubs. They had no idea who I was, mate. It was a waste of time.
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“I used to tell them (his representatives), ‘Mate, it’s like you’re taking me for auditions in Hollywood and I’m getting rejected all the time’. It was doing nothing for my self-esteem. It just didn’t register with people, and that’s why I’ve moved fairly quickly in my career.
“I’ve been in jobs where I could have stayed for a lot longer but I’ve just tried to go, ‘OK, I’ve had success, what’s the next option?’, and then go there and have success because I couldn’t have any missteps along the way. It’s definitely held me back for sure but that’s why I’m here now.
“What I think now is that all of those people I was introduced to, it was their missed opportunity, not mine. I’m still here now and maybe if they had been a little bit more open-minded, I could have brought success to their football club. Hopefully some of them are thinking, ‘Maybe next time a guy walks in and he’s from Japan or he’s Australian, I’ll pay a little more attention’.”
Postecoglou the outsider
Tying into the above, where Postecoglou was ignored because of his relatively low profile, he has said previously that: “I enjoy it when I’m questioned. It brings out a resilience in me.” Here, he expands on this, and says he likes being underestimated because it gives him an advantage. And he expects to continue to be underestimated, despite his achievements.
When asked if it might be more difficult in the Premier League now he’s a known entity, Postecoglou said: “No, because I still think people will underestimate me. People have underestimated me my whole career, and I don’t want to change that — that’s good for me. And I still think people probably predict that I won’t be able to cope and that things won’t go well.
“I detect that just from the way people talk about you, or address you. I’m pretty intuitive about these things. And to be fair, I don’t try and change that. I’m quite comfortable in that space. That’s fine. I think the more people underestimate me, the better a chance I have of getting under their guard’ because I’m always well prepared, I don’t underestimate anybody.”
One of the fascinating elements of Postecoglou is the apparent contradiction between how empathetic he is with the players despite barely ever talking to them one on one. He has explained previously that part of his approach is to not get too close to anyone, in case those emotional connections cloud his judgments.
Another apparent contradiction is the fact he is such a powerful, confident public speaker but someone who hates small talk and making conversation. He explained how these different elements of his personality coexist, and again we return to the theme of sincerity. He begins by addressing his claim from 2020 that: “If you talk to all of the players that I’ve coached over the years, they’ll probably be consistent in saying they’ve never had a conversation of longer than a minute with me in the whole time.”
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“It’s exaggerated a little bit; I still interact with people — I think it’s important. It’s not just about taking the emotion… it’s just me.
“I sat up there this morning (Postecoglou took part in a leadership Q&A session) and spoke for three-quarters of an hour and I’d like to think I was fairly eloquent and talked pretty comfortably. But the 20 minutes I had to sit next to somebody and do small talk, I was terrible! I couldn’t wait to leave. It’s just not me as a person. I’m not someone who is going to sit down with you and have a chat about things. It’s not who I am. Even with my friends — they know me, I’m like that.
“I think the way you connect with people is if people know you and understand you and that’s you as a person, they’ll accept that.
“Other managers are really engaging with players, I get that. If you look at it, that’s probably their personality. They walk into a room and everyone gravitates towards them. That’s not me. I just try to be me. But within that context, it doesn’t mean I don’t talk to players. If a player has got an issue, I’ll sit down and engage. It’s really important for the players that they know that I have their back, that I care for them.
“But that doesn’t always have to come by me sitting down with them at lunch and talking with them about how their day was. It’s just not who I am.”
Being “like a dad”
Linked to Postecoglou’s paternal-figure skills, he explained that one of his key tasks early on at Spurs was to, like any good father or mother, provide clarity and security.
“When you’re dealing with people and the change the club’s had in the last five years with different managers — even longer, when Mauricio (Pochettino) was here — I guess that creates instability in people. That’s the bit you try to clamp down early on and say, ‘Listen, I’ll give you some security here about what we’re going to do, how we’re going to behave, how we’re going to work’. There’s no guarantee I’ll be here but that’s my presumption and that’s the feeling I try to get across because then people relax and you see them as their true selves.
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“Invariably at the start, they’re (the players) trying to impress but doing it with the anxiety of the past — so many changes and different ways of doing things. There are certain things you try to implement straight away and say, ‘What we’re doing here will be here for as long as I’m here, that won’t change’. It’s fair to say there were a lot of people just seeking clarity, which wasn’t really a surprise to me or anyone. But it was one of the first things I felt I needed to provide.”
Being an actual dad
Postecoglou’s tough father is such a major influence on him, so I was curious to know what Ange the dad is like. He has three sons, aged 23, nine and seven.
“I’m totally different (from my father), mate. My kids are soft. I tell them I love them and cuddle them every day. We have our own upbringing, and I talk about it; my generation, our fathers were different people — it was the school of hard knocks. They felt like they had to be really hard on us, and that was our upbringing and that made me the man I am, where whatever gets thrown at me, even from you guys (the media), I can withstand because whatever gets thrown at me is going to be nothing like what my dad used to throw at me on a daily basis — not in a negative way, but I always could be better: ‘That’s not enough, you can do more’. Now, if he was alive, he would be saying, ‘Great, you’ve done well, but you need to do even better. Don’t stand still’.
“So I’m a different dad, but it’s a different world too, to be fair. You know that you need to spend more time with your kids than my father (did). I hardly saw my dad, he was working all the time. He had no time to do things with me because his sole purpose was to provide for his family, so he didn’t have time to take me to birthday parties and school functions and stuff like that. Nowadays, children need that. We were all left to our own devices when we were young: we could be outside for hours and they didn’t even know where we were, there were no mobile phones, (and) as long as it was daylight we could be outside. That doesn’t happen anymore. So it was a different upbringing — I’m a different dad because of that. I’d like to think my kids know I love them and I want the best for them and I’m trying to create a balance of both those worlds, because I also know that you do need to expose children to the realities of life. Life isn’t all rainbows and sunshine. It’s not all stormclouds either, which is what my dad seemed to think.”
This discussion was one that gave us an insight into why Postecoglou is held in such high regard by his players. He is a master communicator, with fascinating views on football and life.
Spurs fans have a lot to look forward to with him in charge.
Just don’t expect him ever to compromise on who he is.
(Top photo: Paul Kane/Getty Images)
