Standing on the grass inside a small, Norwegian stadium north of the Arctic Circle this month, Ange Postecoglou, the manager of the English soccer club Tottenham, blew kisses to his wife in the crowd. Around him, players and fans who had made the trek joined in the celebration of a rarity in the club’s 142-year-old history: a berth in the championship final of a European tournament.
Tottenham’s palatial stadium in north London, modern practice facility and international fan base rival those of its biggest competitors in the sport’s richest league, the English Premier League. Its trophy case, however, does not. The club has not won a major trophy since 2008 or a major European tournament since 1984. Its history of coming close but failing to win during both the domestic season and the European championships that play out in parallel has spawned a pejorative description — “Spursy.”
That drought could soon end. And so, too, could the tenure of Postecoglou, the manager who got them there.
Because when Tottenham won in Norway to advance to Wednesday’s Europa League final against Manchester United in Bilbao, Spain, it put the club in the bizarre position of being on the verge of a trophy it has long dreamed of to end a dreadful season it would otherwise rather forget.
That discordant contrast between Tottenham’s awful Premier League season with its run to the Europa League final — which guarantees the victor a position in next season’s Champions League, Europe’s most prestigious club tournament, and millions in revenue that come with qualification — has reignited the debate of what defines success in the upper level of global soccer and whether a trophy would be enough to save Postecoglou’s job.
“Winning the club’s first trophy in 17 years and its first European one in 41 years would be one hell of an achievement and it would transform him from the club’s worst manager statistically to one of their most successful,” Alasdair Gold, a longtime Tottenham beat reporter for Football.London, told NBC News by email.
Yet win or lose Wednesday, Gold believes, “a parting of the ways seems inevitable.”
In the 20-team Premier League, in which the bottom three teams are unceremoniously relegated to a lower division in English soccer’s hierarchy, Spurs sit 17th with one game left. (Their opponent Wednesday, Manchester United, is 16th and mired in its own strange season.)
Injuries have wiped out many of Tottenham’s best players. Reaching the semifinals of an English tournament led to even more attrition for a team already short on fresh legs. And yet Marcus Buckland, a television presenter who hosts a popular podcast about the club, said the most “catastrophic” domestic performance since he began following the club in the late 1970s went beyond injuries.
“There is an element of disbelief as to just how bad Spurs have been,” Buckland wrote.
“To have 21 defeats in the Premier League is embarrassing and cannot completely be put down to the injury crisis during the middle three months of the campaign,” Gold said. “Wednesday night will bring one game to decide for a lot of people whether the pain was all worth it or not.”
It would be for Buckland — with a caveat. The methods that helped Postecoglou and Tottenham advance through the Europa League, largely against competition with fewer resources, should not be confused with a foundation the club should continue to build upon.
“It’s all about silverware for the supporters so, if they do win the Europa League, all else (in the short term) will be forgiven and the 2024-25 season will be considered successful, particularly as Arsenal failed to win a trophy and Manchester United will have been left in the doldrums,” Buckland wrote by email. “That doesn’t mean the manager should keep his job though.”
When Tottenham hired Postecoglou in 2023, it was a stark difference from his predecessors, which included celebrity managers Jose Mourinho and Antonio Conte, whose huge personalities and championship track records Tottenham hoped would rub off. Instead, each burned out any goodwill within two years.
Postecoglou, by contrast, was Australian, affable and well-liked among his players, and he had worked his way up through lower-profile leagues.
He immediately faced skepticism that his style of play, which earned his teams some level of trophy during his second seasons coaching in Australia, Japan and Scotland, would work against wealthy Premier League opponents. Called “Angeball,” the system aggressively pushes to score, even at the expense of a vulnerable defense. Last season, his first, Tottenham finished fifth in the league.
This season, despite numerous injuries, Postecoglou continued to play according to his ideals, without tweaking the system to account for personnel, aggravating fault lines between the manager and the club’s fans that first opened last season. At one point, fans could be heard this season chanting from the stands, “You don’t know what you’re doing.” When, in April, Postecoglou cupped his ear in the direction of fans after a Tottenham goal, it was taken as a response; he later tried to wave off that interpretation, saying he wanted to hear fans celebrating after a “cracking goal.”
Both Gold and Buckland said that though the team’s terrible injury luck was widely acknowledged, Postecoglou’s breakdown in communication with the fans had contributed to this season’s dissatisfaction. Still, considering the club’s history, “I think it has to” qualify as a successful season if Tottenham wins the Europa League title, Gold wrote.
“It would be a huge moment for the fans and the club but whether it becomes more than a moment and something that changes the narrative around the club depends on what Spurs do next with it and whether they invest and improve,” he wrote.
When Tottenham and Manchester United line up Wednesday, it should be possible to forget, for two hours, the brutal results in the months that preceded it, said NBC Sports analyst Robbie Mustoe, a former Premier League midfielder. Playing for a championship is rare, and it should be relished.
Nonetheless, Mustoe acknowledged that “I can’t detach it from a horrific Premier League season and a style of play that’s risky at best, reckless particularly if you haven’t got your best defenders out there.”
“Can you imagine a success, a victory, an on-field celebration with the fans that are there, a trophy lift, a manager that really is liked by the players, jumping up and down, a joyful Tottenham Hotspur Stadium on Sunday to celebrate that, an open-top bus ride through the city or the area of north London, and then they fire the manager?” Mustoe said.
“When they finally got a guy that gets them over the line, they’re going to just get rid of him and say, ‘I don’t care, it’s not good enough’? I think that would be harsh.”
The question is how much value Daniel Levy, Tottenham’s inscrutable top executive, who rarely talks with media, would take from a trophy. The celebratory scene in Norway on May 8 reminded Gold of happier days early in Postecoglou’s tenure. It was also, he said, “something we haven’t always seen this season through some fractured, difficult times.”
Postecoglou said Tuesday: “I don’t think my job is done here. There has been some growth that I would like to see through.”
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