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In football, there is always a lot of light and noise. There is always a lot of emotion. That is both its appeal and why it is so difficult for those in the game to make decisions. Ange Postecoglou gave Tottenham one of the great nights in the club’s history when they won the Europa League in Bilbao.
A first trophy in 17 years. A first European trophy in 41. It’s easy to understand why the instinct is gratitude, to hope that somehow victory can be self-replicating, that silverware begets silverware and something fundamental in Tottenham’s being was transformed at San Mamés.
But the question really shouldn’t be how you felt about Postecoglou at 11pm CET on 21 May, but how you felt at 9pm. It makes no sense for anybody to have changed their mind on whether Postecoglou should stay on the basis of a dreadful performance from Manchester United and a goal scrambled in off Luke Shaw’s arm.
When Postecoglou said he always wins something in his second season, the underlying logic was that it takes that long for the players to absorb his principles and put them into practice. Was there any sense of that in the Europa League success? Did it feel Tottenham had slowly been building to that?
On the contrary, the wins against Eintracht Frankfurt in the quarter-final, Bodø/Glimt in the semi-final and then United in the final weren’t rooted in Angeball as we had come to understand it, but in sitting deep, playing without the ball and striking on the break. On the one hand, credit is due for adapting, albeit largely because the high-intensity football Postecoglou prefers became unsustainable with a squad of injured and exhausted players, but on the other that removes any argument that the Europa League win was the result of an ongoing process.
A case perhaps could be made that the new pragmatic Postecoglou would have prospered in the Premier League next season. He was unfortunate with injuries – while acknowledging the intensity of his style may have played a part in that crisis. He was dealing with a very young squad. But that requires a leap of faith Daniel Levy was not prepared to make. Who did not watch Paris Saint-Germain ripping through Inter in the Champions League and wonder with a shudder what that might look like against a Postecoglou defence in the Super Cup in August?
Precedents in football should be treated with caution: there’s no reason to assume what happened with one particular manager at one particular club in one particular set of circumstances will necessarily repeat with a different manager at a different club in a different set of circumstances. But the memory of Erik ten Hag casts an unavoidable shadow: Spurs could not afford to find themselves in the position United did last October, sacking a manager three months after allowing his ideas to shape summer spending and in effect writing off another season.
Tottenham have their own precedents: Juande Ramos went eight months after the 2008 League Cup final and Mauricio Pochettino five and half months after the 2019 Champions League final. Ramos’s side were bottom of the league, Pochettino’s 14th. Levy has experienced the cost of an autumn sacking.
If there were doubts, best to act upon them; Levy signalled his intention fairly clearly in his programme notes for the final game of the season. And, for all Danny Blanchflower’s line that the game is about glory has been thrown at Spurs since the decision was taken, Postecoglou’s departure leaves the glory of Bilbao unsullied by future failure.
There is a beauty in the simplicity of the narrative arc: glory at the last, delivering on the promise of a trophy in the second season (albeit a glory that owed a lot to having significantly more resources than most clubs in the competition). That Postecoglou was dismissed two years to the day after his appointment was announced underlined the sense of a cycle ending.
The question then is what comes next. Tottenham’s preference is for somebody with Premier League experience, which is understandable enough. The league is uniquely relentless, as evidenced by Bruno Fernandes’s comment about Ruben Amorim’s surprise at how good Ipswich were. That presents particular pressures that can grind managers down. It removes some of the risk to turn to a manager familiar with that.
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There is, though, always the fear that a manager cannot step up. The level of scrutiny, the expectations, at Tottenham are far greater than those at, say, Brentford or Fulham. Another autumn sacking must also haunt Levy: that of Nuno Espírito Santo, whose reign lasted 17 games over four months. He never seemed the right fit for the club and had been undermined by so obviously being not the first, or even the second or the third, choice for the role.
Thomas Frank seems the preferred option, but that would require paying compensation to Brentford in excess of £10m. Levy is renowned for his willingness for protracted negotiations, but this is a case where swift resolution should take priority, even if it ends up costing a couple of million more than it might.
Already there has been some online grumbling that Spurs should not be appointing from Brentford, which is absurd given the job Frank has done (Brentford finished the season 10th on the 19th-highest wage bill in the Premier League) and how things turned out with the two big-name managers Tottenham have recently appointed, José Mourinho and Antonio Conte.
But Postecoglou has left a problem for whoever succeeds him, both in terms of style and achievement. If the new manager starts slowly, there will be immediate grumbles that they are not building on the Europa League success and that the football is not so much fun as it was under Postecoglou, the 22 league defeats last season occluded by the gleam of silverware. Does a trophy win outweigh finishing fourth-bottom of the league?
Perhaps that’s not the right question. Personnel decisions should be based less on what has been done than on what is likely to be done and Levy evidently saw Bilbao as a glorious blip rather than a harbinger of a spectacular future. On that logic, change was the only option.
