Sacked in broad daylight, just like that, at 5pm on a Friday, two years to the day since his arrival.
Ange Postecoglou is gone.
There will be no fairy-tale comeback, no third act resolution. He rides into the distance on an open top bus, triumphant and defiant, leaving behind a legacy that’s strewn like litter across north London.
It’s a mess, but it’s a fantastic one. Few managers in English football history can match the cultural impact big Ange made in just two years, mate.
The kamikaze football, the petulant press conferences, the absurd highs and the even more ridiculous lows: Postecoglou lived a lifetime in those 24 months and the Premier League is a poorer place without him.
Levy will feel he didn’t have a choice, that the ominous drum beat behind their Europa League celebrations was too loud to ignore.
That’s understandable, and yet his decision to depart with Postecoglou gets to the heart of a very modern debate about the price and the value of football: two very different things with very different meanings for fans and board .
Winning trophies, getting days like those in Bilbao, is football’s only meaning.
It’s the quintessence of the thing, the completion of the journey, and yet the financialization of modern football seems to dismiss its significance in favour of the bottom line and the anxious necessity for incremental improvement every single year.
Nowhere is this more prevalent than in the decision to depart with Postecoglou, who, as in so many other ways, has now become the poster boy for that essential divide in how football is understood.
Ange was the ultimate romantic appointment who played hopelessly romantic football – and it worked.
He won the club’s first trophy since 2008 and qualified for the Champions League. He gave many Spurs fans their happiest football memory, taking them on a journey so emotional and entertaining it created a kind of mania; an infatuation and a fury akin to teenaged love.
That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?
But in the end that journey just wasn’t straight enough, wasn’t reliable enough. He could not be trusted to hit the club’s long-term targets for sustainable growth.
The suits won.
In fairness perhaps the majority of Spurs fans agree with Levy’s conclusion. There are plenty grateful for the night in Bilbao but convinced by the rational argument that things were unlikely to improve in the third season.
Better to part ways now before it got Ten Hag-ugly.
Those ers might live to regret being worn down by the financial imperatives and the Champions League grind.
Because if you can’t dare to dream about an upswing under Ange, if you can’t envision his stripped-back Europa League plan being repurposed to rein in his obtuse tactical idealism in the Premier League, then what’s the point of it all?
The Postecoglou project probably would have gone horribly wrong in the autumn. Ever since that extraordinary eight-man high line against Chelsea in November 2023 – the first moment of cultural cut through, the first iconic image of Ange-ball – the football has got worse and worse.
But it’s a cynical mind that discards what Postecoglou built for fear of a collapse in September.
Live on the edge of your comfort zone. Shoot for the moon. Get your heart broken. Finish 16th. Go on another journey with Postecoglou because you know it won’t be boring and because, who knows, he might just give you the best day of your life.
Today’s news is another victory for money over meaning, for data over vibes.
It’s logical. It’s the right thing to do. But when it hurts that much, when the nostalgia already burns, it’s probably worth listening to that feeling.
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