Mission Improbable - The task ahead of Postecoglo

Good Morning Mr Postecoglo. Your mission...should you choose to accept it...is to turnaround the fortunes of one of the biggest clubs in Europe while working with colleagues who have no interest in seeing the club succeed on the pitch. You'll need to either get a different tune out a group of under-performing players or convince them that they'd be better off playing somewhere else while simultaneously trying to coach an entirely different brand of football and raise morale in a dressing room that's hit rock bottom. As always, should you or any member of your backroom staff fail or go crazy during a press conference, the powers that be will disavow themselves from having any responsibility for the current state of affairs. This contract will self-destruct in 5 months.

Queue Mission Impossible theme music

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image adapted from source

Spurs have appointed a new Head Coach in the form of Ange Postecoglou but will he succeed?

Here are the main challenges that Postecoglou faces when he takes charge in what feels like Mission Impossible Improbable.

Winning over the doubters

It's seems likely that Postecoglou wasn't the first choice appointment for Spurs. In fact, he probably wasn't even the 2nd choice with Julian Naglesman and Arne Slot both approached by the club.

Naglesman was not keen to commit to a position without knowing who the new Director of Football will be (see below) and would always likely have taken a role at a club like PSG who can guarantee funds and Champions League football.

Meanwhile Slot, would have wanted significant control over the footballing side of things and have cost the club a lot of money to release from his current contract. I suspect that Slot knew that he was never likely to get those from Levy and used the opportunity to negotiate better terms with his current employers Feyenoord.

Julian Naglesman was approached about the vacant managers job at Spurs. Source shared under a CC license

In many ways then, Postecoglou carries the burden of being Spurs Plan C (at best) and that hardly helps him establish either authority in the dressing room or with the fan base.

In recent days, the link between Postecoglou and Spurs new Chief Football Officer Scott Munn has been indicated as a key factor in the former's eventual appointment. While there is no doubt that the two Aussies will have come across each other in Australian football and via the City Group (Yokohama F. Marinos is part of the City Group), they haven't actually ever worked side by side at a club before.

Coupled to that is the fact that Munn doesn't actually start his role at Tottenham until 1 July while Levy has once again taken charge of head hunting the man to replace Antonio Conte. All in all then, the link between Postecoglou and Munn seems coincidental at best and in fact may just be a clever piece of work by Spurs' media team to airbrush over the fact that Levy once again failed to convince the men at the top of his list that they would be able to gain success as manager of Tottenham.

The one positive is that the club has offered Postecoglou a 4-year deal which is significantly longer than any of the recent men to have filled the role. Mourinho signed a 2 and half year deal, Nuno a 2 year deal and Conte 18 months.

While we know that the managerial merry-go-round continues to spin out of control across the league, none of Postecoglou's immediate predecessors arrived at the club with any sort of permanency attached to their role.

In giving Postecoglou a 4-year deal, the Spurs hierarchy are at least indicating that they understand their will be no quick fix and that it will take time to rebuild this squad to where it was 5 or 6 years ago. That of course still doesn't mean that the Australian will be given too many opportunities and we'll have to wait and see how the early season fixtures fall for him when they are announced on 15 June.

Establishing a winning culture

Despite playing some fairly dire football this season, Spurs actually found themselves in with a decent shout of progressing to the later stages of multiple competitions. Drawn against a relatively weak AC Milan in the Champions League and away to Championship side Sheffield United in the FA Cup, Spurs should have made it to the last 8 of both competitions and entered the final part of the season with a degree of confidence.

However, the cracks in the dressing room and Conte's increasingly tense relationship with both players and other staff, not to mention the impending fall out of the Patarici affair, were already beginning to impact the mood around the club from early 2023 onwards and it was ultimately no great surprise that Spurs were knocked out of both competitions and fell away badly in the league.

In some ways, you might argue that Postecoglou couldn't do a much worse job in regards man-management of players and staff than Conte did but actually pulling this squad of players out of the doldrums and converting them into a side who believes they are capable of winning will take a serious amount of time, effort and skill.

Furthermore, Postecoglou comes into a club which has made a series of very poor player and staff investments in recent years. As noted above, he is yet to find out who his new Director of Football will be and that will undoubtedly be a key appointment in terms of how much impact the new coach and his tactics can have at the club.

With the appointment of Munn, Levy is allegedly taking a less hands on role with the football side of the business but having watched his behaviour for the last couple of decades, it's difficult to believe that he will completely detach himself from the decision making process on things like transfers and key footballing appointments.

It therefore becomes impossible to expect any new manager coming in to really be able to shape the awful culture of underachievement that has been allowed to fester at the club since ENIC took over. As the saying goes, the fish rots from the head down...

Clearing out the deadwood

When a new coach comes in, we're bound to see lots of potential links for new players arriving at the club too. However, while Spurs are certainly in desperate need of some reinforcements, particularly at centre back and goalkeeper, I think the real test for Postecoglou and whoever he ends up working with will be to clear out a lot of the deadwood that is lying around.

The problem for Spurs and most Premier League clubs is that when they invest heavily in overseas talent that then flops, it is becoming increasingly difficult to shift those players on, most of all because of the growing gap in the money in the Premier League vs everywhere else in Europe.

Spurs have found just that with the likes of Lo Celso, Ndombele, Reguilón and Gill. These are 4 players brought into the club for a total sum of around £120 million with the former 2 in particular on very generous wages. We now face the very real possibility of struggling to make even a quarter of that amount back and that's even if we can find some poor rich sap willing to actually take them on a permanent deal!

Add to that, the likes of Eric Dier, Ben Davies and Davison Sanchez who have just been hanging around and stealing a living from us for far too long and you can see the challenge that Postecoglou inherits. Can he or indeed anyone, be expected to get a different tune out of players like this?

It's time to get Glengarry Glen Ross on a few of the hangers on in the Spurs squad

Some Spurs fans would say that it's harsh including the likes of Davies and Dier in this list and you know what, they're probably really good guys in and outside the dressing room. However, I'm afraid the price of success at this level is to be far more cutthroat than Spurs have been in recent seasons.

Again, this might be a real acid test for just how much control Levy has devolved. His approach as a glorified accountant is that player sales should only ever be considered where they directly benefit the immediate balance of the books. You very rarely, if ever, see Spurs act in a manner to bring in or indeed send out players for purely footballing reasons.

Embedding his tactics on this squad

In many ways, Spurs fans can be somewhat more excited to see Postecoglou's brand of attacking football than they will have been following the appointments of Mourinho and Conte. Seasoned winners though they were, both managers have built their reputation playing a rather drab and predictable style of football. Back them in the transfer market and give them all the resources and control that they need over what happens on the pitch and it's likely that they would have delivered in North London too.

However, anyone who has paid even a remote bit of attention to the way Spurs have been run over the past couple of decades by Levy and ENIC knew that it was never likely that they'd find themselves in a position to deliver their particular brand of success.

Postecoglou by contrast looks likely to at least play a style of football that most Spurs supporters can get behind. His preferred formation since re-entering club football in 2018 has been a 4-3-3 very similar to that which he played in under the tutelage of the great Hungarian forward Ferenc Puskás during his playing days at South Melbourne.

During the last 5 years, Postecoglou has developed that system to include inverted full-backs and wide forwards in a formation not dissimilar to that which Arteta (another former City Group employee) has developed at Arsenal.

Basic shape of Postecoglou's teams since 2018 source

The big question is do Spurs really have the personnel to play that particular system?

We've recently invested in 2 of the best young wing-backs in European football in Pedro Porro and Destiny Udogie but are they now square pegs in a round hole when it comes to playing in a formation that calls for inverted full-backs?

Do we have centre-backs with sufficient pace and ball playing ability to succeed in a system that would actually want us to dominate possession rather than sitting back, absorbing pressure and looking to counter attack?

Are the likes of Son and Kulusevki capable of being converted from inside forwards to wide forwards who can occupy the space out wide and create room in the inside channels for a pair of number 8s to exploit? Who would those number 8s be?

Ultimately, does this side have the legs to play the much higher pressing game that Postecoglou has historically demanded and if they don't, is he going to be given the resources to change that?

There seem to me, to be far more questions than answers here!

I don't believe that Postecoglou will be quite as inflexible with his tactics as Conte was but at the same time, all coaches come with a playbook for their particular brand of success and without the right personnel, they will be unable to deliver.

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All in all, Postecoglou faces a series of significant challenges at a club that is far bigger than any he has managed at before. While I'm excited to see that we've chosen a Head Coach who actually seems capable of coaching and improving the squad, the obstacles in front of the big Aussie are significant.

Do you think Postecoglou will succeed at Spurs?