Introduction
“All the best TV series – season three is always better than season two!” These were Ange Postecoglou’s words at Tottenham Hotspur’s victory parade, days after the club won the 2025 Europa League.
Winning the Europa League was Spurs’ first major trophy since 2008 and their first European title since 1984. It also guaranteed their participation in the Champions League the following season, with its lucrative financial rewards.
The miracle Ange delivered
Ironically, it took a brash, no-nonsense Greek-Australian manager with no prior English Premier League (EPL) experience to mastermind this achievement – something elite managers such as Mauricio Pochettino, José Mourinho, and Antonio Conte had failed to accomplish.
Postecoglou, affectionately known as Big Ange, did so amid an injury crisis unprecedented in the club’s history. For much of the 2024–25 season, Spurs were without their two strongest defenders, Cristian Romero and Micky van de Ven, and multiple first-choice midfielders and attackers were also sidelined.
Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention. Postecoglou turned to youth and fringe players who would not normally feature in his starting XI. Djed Spence, Archie Gray, and Lukas Bergvall became first-choice players and thrived in Ange’s free-flowing “Angeball” system.
What Angeball changed at Tottenham
In his first season, Postecoglou transformed Tottenham Hotspur’s style into a high-intensity, attacking brand of football, often exhilarating for fans and neutrals alike.
Inspired in part by his time working closely with the great Hungarian footballer Ferenc Puskás in Melbourne in the late 1980s, “Angeball” was, in essence, simple: keeping possession of the ball. This involved playing out from the back, precise passing in tight, congested spaces, and committing numbers forward in attack. At its best, it was high-risk and exhilarating, and Spurs finished a respectable fifth.
A season shaped by injury and adaptation
But Ange was no one-trick pony. As injuries worsened in season two, he adapted, growing more pragmatic.
With relegation mathematically impossible, Ange prioritised the Europa League campaign, sacrificing league form. He rotated heavily in the EPL, while fielding his strongest possible side in Europe, where his in-game management became more measured, even conservative.
In that second season, the entire squad, led by captain Son Heung-min, seemed ready to run through a brick wall for the manager. Through masterful man-management, Postecoglou instilled total belief in the evolving project. “I always win things in my second season,” he said.
This ice-cold quote wasn’t empty bravado. Postecoglou had done exactly that at Brisbane Roar, Yokohama F. Marinos, and Celtic F.C. He also led Australia to the 2015 Asian Cup.
The sacking made little sense
The decision by then-chairman Daniel Levy to sack Postecoglou just weeks after this triumph was deeply misguided. The justification – that Spurs should be competing on all fronts, including the EPL – was unconvincing, given the club’s long-standing reluctance to match the wage spending of true elite sides.
“They’ve built an unbelievable stadium, unbelievable training facilities but when you look at the expenditure, particularly their wages structure, they’re not a big club,” Postecoglou said. “When you walk into Tottenham, what you see everywhere is: ‘To Dare Is To Do’ [the club motto] and yet their actions are almost the antithesis of that.”
The Spurs collapse after Ange
Within eight months of his departure, Postecoglou’s replacement was gone. The next lasted only 44 days.
By the time Roberto De Zerbi arrived as Tottenham’s third manager, the damage was severe but not irreversible. A squad that had recently lifted a European trophy now looked unrecognisable. The dressing room, still reeling from Big Ange’s sacking and the abrupt end to their new journey, had lost much of its belief.
For many weeks, Spurs flirted with relegation before ultimately surviving the drop on the final day, escaping the most desperate of seasons by the skin of their teeth.
What season three might have been
The season-long downward spiral of Tottenham Hotspur is surely one of the worst own goals in football history.
Under Ange Postecoglou, with confidence soaring, the injury crisis behind them, and a strengthened squad, Spurs were perfectly placed to build on their European success.
We’ll never know how good season three could have been.
– Marshall, Brisbane, May 2026