Sacking Ange was a huge mistake. Spurs are now in a mess of their own making

December 19, 2025 — 5.15am

Forget the line about always winning trophies in his second season.

There’s another quote from Ange Postecoglou that should be resonating more strongly with Tottenham Hotspur fans: “At some point in time I’ll get replaced by John the Pragmatist and you can all be happy and revel in it.”

A typically snappy Postecoglou said this during the 2017 FIFA Confederations Cup, the tournament that crystallised in his mind his decision to quit as Socceroos coach later in the year. It was a warning for those who felt uncomfortable about his attacking philosophy, and who were beginning to wonder whether the grass was greener on the other side. It wasn’t.

For Australia, “John the Pragmatist” was Bert van Marwijk, the Dutch coach parachuted in to take over from Postecoglou for the 2018 World Cup. Having refused to take a backward step under their old boss, van Marwijk set the Socceroos up to not get smashed.

The result? Australia’s least-memorable World Cup campaign.

Spurs are now experiencing the same sense of regret. For them, John the Pragmatist is Thomas Frank, the Danish coach who was identified as the sensible, middle-ground alternative to the wild and risky ways of Angeball. With just a bit more tactical maturity, and some “proper coaching”, the team that malfunctioned under Postecoglou would become consistently competitive, not just in flashes. That was the entire premise of Frank’s appointment.

Ange Postecoglou and Thomas Frank before a Tottenham-Brentford clash in 2024.Credit: Getty Images

“It is crucial that we are able to compete on multiple fronts and believe a change of approach will give us the strongest chance for the coming season and beyond,” the club said in their statement when Postecoglou was sacked, just 16 days after he delivered them the glory he had promised in the Europa League.

How’s that working out?

On all possible criteria – including the above, which the club publicly set out – Frank is failing miserably, opening up old wounds about the decision to part ways with Postecoglou, and highlighting how much of the surrounding debate was based on perception and narrative, not reality.

Frank’s Spurs are already out of the Carabao Cup. They will need a series of miracles to win either the Premier League or UEFA Champions League. And while there’s still the FA Cup to come, the natives are restless. They do not like what they have seen so far.

Monday’s 3-0 loss to Nottingham Forest, Postecoglou’s ill-advised rebound club, was the nadir of Frank’s short reign. Spurs generated only one shot on target for the match; under Frank, their attacking swagger has completely disappeared.

When Frank was appointed, senior football writers in England immediately declared that he was an upgrade on Postecoglou. Those opinions have aged like milk. Frank is a good coach, who did an excellent job turning Brentford into Premier League mainstays, but he is not doing at Spurs what he’s there to do.

The basis for sacking Postecoglou was that his team wasn’t “defensively solid” enough. Frank used those exact words this week to describe how he claims to have improved Spurs, but the numbers don’t stack up: after 16 games, Spurs have conceded more goals than Postecoglou’s team did at the same point in their disastrous 2024-25 campaign.

In fact, every metric – ladder position, wins, goal difference, chances created, touches in the opposition box, you name it – says they have gone backwards.

Ange Postecoglou shows the pressure at Spurs.Credit: Getty Images

Frank’s commitment of more numbers in defence has not only failed to make them more “solid”, but it also destroyed their strengths in attack. And this is happening with a better squad than what Postecoglou had last season, after the summer recruitment of Joao Palhinha, Randal Kolo Muani, Mohammed Kudus and Xavi Simons, and with central defenders Cristian Romero and Micky van de Ven seemingly past their chronic injury problems and available, for a change.

Where critics complained Postecoglou never “adapted” tactically for the opposition, they now say Frank is adapting too often, and so Spurs now have no identity of their own. Postecoglou, the idealist, needed to be more pragmatic; now Frank, the pragmatist, needs to be more idealistic.

Striking a balance between the two extremes sounds easy, but there is no perfect system or philosophy that prescribes success. It’s a matter of selecting a method and executing it as best you can, and motivating a group of people to follow your lead, while hoping that a thousand other variables fall in your favour.

But this particular method feels hollow at a club such as Tottenham. Having coveted the idea of pragmatism from afar, the Spurs community now realises that it’s just not who they are. Again. They knew this after the Conte-Mourinho years, and loved the thrill and ambition of Angeball, but lost faith and then lost themselves. This is a club whose motto is “To Dare is To Do”, which, for all his imperfections, Postecoglou totally embodied.

Now they have what they asked for, and they don’t like it.

Was it the right decision to part ways with Postecoglou? Was Frank the right replacement? Some Spurs fans would prefer to keep these questions separate, but they are inextricably linked; every managerial appointment is, to some degree, a comment on their predecessor.

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The other problem with chopping and changing with managers is that it costs you in hidden ways. Squads end up crammed with players signed for one, two, three different tactical ideas conceived by other coaches over many years, handcuffing the new guy to a weight that holds them back from enacting their own plans.

When Frank arrived, he said Postecoglou had left him a good foundation to work with. Now he has changed his tune.

“If no one gets the time, no one can turn this around,” he said after the loss to Forest. “This is not a quick fix.”

Tottenham’s board will reportedly give him the backing he has asked for. But it’s still no less galling that his predecessor didn’t get more of it.

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