Ange Postecoglou sees the transfer market a bit like shopping with his wife. When his other half Georgia walks into a store, he says, she already knows what she wants. She goes in, she picks it, and she buys it. Ange, by his own admission, is a bit clueless.
That is, however, until it comes to buying footballers. ‘When I go looking for players, I’m the same as her,’ he once told Australian television. ‘I’ve got a real clear idea.’
It’s a good job, really, as Tottenham’s manager faces a monumental rebuild with a fresh £100m to spend and one of the club’s greatest players in Harry Kane to replace after his move to Bayern Munich.
The question is how do you replace Kane, your captain, leader and scorer of 213 Premier League goals? To borrow Postecoglou’s own analogy, do you take it all to Gucci for a high-end replacement or do you spread the cost further down the high street?
‘You say Gucci,’ says Postecoglou. ‘My wife tells me those kinds of things are one-offs and usually you get a fake replica if you try to get the same one.’
Ange Postecoglou previously claimed to have a clear idea of his wants in the transfer market
He issued a warning about Spurs rushing in to buy a 'fake replica' Harry Kane after his sale
The message is clear, then. You can’t replace Harry Kane so don’t even try. You’ll just get a poor imitation. And we’ve seen plenty of expensive mistakes in recent Premier League years.
‘With Harry, nothing has changed for us,’ he adds. ‘We’ve known this for a while. The business we have done so far has been in anticipation of Harry going.
‘When you look at this summer and some of the transfer business going around, it’s pretty wild in terms of the money going around. But I still think there’s value at that top-end. It’s about getting the right fit. I think James Maddison is a great example of that. We haven’t had to spend over the top but we have got a player who is going to fit perfectly into what we are going to do. There’s always going to be these kind of top-end transfers – that doesn’t mean that’s always the most important business you need to do.
‘I know how I want my team to play, it makes it easier for me to identify the right players. There are so many good footballers out there and the differences between them are very, very small – but I need to picture them in my team. I have real clarity in what we need to bring in and what we require.
‘Over the next three weeks, the priority is to trim the squad down, see where we are, and then fill in the gaps where we need to fill them.’
Amid all the chaos of Kane’s last-minute departure, the 57-year-old former Celtic boss is yet to afford himself the luxury of stepping and appreciating the journey it’s taken to get here, to the eve of his first Premier League match as a manager against Brentford today.
‘I’ve always known that, particularly over the last 10 years, every move I’ve made has come with plenty of question marks around whether I’m up to that level, whatever people perceive that to be. I’ve realised the only way I can keep going is to make sure I have success in what I do. The time for reflection will come at the appropriate day.’
Postecoglou is inspired by his late father to produce teams like Spurs who win in a certain way
Athens-born Postecoglou was five when his father Dimitris, known as Jim, lost his business during the military coup in Greece in 1967 and the moved to Australia.
Postecoglou admits his father was not the ‘warm and cuddly’ type. He’s said before that Jim never told him he loved him. Yet the two bonded over football. They’d watch games together on a Sunday and that was the only time he’d see joy in his father. He knew football was the way to make him happy.
Postecoglou’s motivation is to produce teams his dad, who passed away in 2018, would love to watch.
‘That’s the goal, mate,’ he says in his Australian twang. ‘The primary reason I get the teams to play the way I want to do is because I love winning. That’s what I love doing. I love winning. I’ve loved winning my whole career. That’s what I crave. Within that context, I want to win a certain way.
‘I can produce a team, and I use my father in a metaphorical sense, but give our supporters a team they are excited about watching and you guys want to talk about every week in a positive way then that’s great for me, I love that. That’s what football is about for me.’
If the clips of Tottenham in pre-season passing the ball out quickly from defence, you can see why the fans are excited and you imagine his father would feel pride too.
Those thoughts of his old man are not always metaphorical, though. ‘I’ll hear his voice in my head. Anyone who has had a loss of a significant figure in their life will understand that. At times, I’ll look in the mirror and I’ll see him there and not me, which is pretty scary.
‘If ever I do something I feel he’d give me a whack over the head for, I’ll give myself one because I know that’s what I’d have got. So, you do have those conversations. I don’t think that’s unique, for all of us in life we have somebody who is the driver or motivation or inspiration. Whether they are here in physical sense or not, they twirl around in our heads.’
Postecoglou's first competitive game in charge of Tottenham will come against Brentford
Is Postecoglou the ‘warm and cuddly’ type? ‘I am with my kids,’ he says. ‘In a general sense…nahhhh!’
He’s the obsessive type, that’s for sure. He always has been, especially about football. He developed an encyclopaedic knowledge of English football. He still owns his old Shoot and Match magazines, copies of Roy of the Rovers.
‘My background has been used as a bit of a sign of lack of credibility about my journey but, if anything, it has given me an advantage,’ says Postecoglou. ‘I’ve had to be absolutely obsessed with the game, absolutely obsessed, because it wasn’t readily available to me at a young age as it would have been if I grew up in Europe or South America or a footballing nation. That early obsession has put me in good stead because I’ve not lost that passion for the game, I still love the game in the same way I did as a kid. I still want to know everything about it.
‘I was growing up in Australia in the late 70s. Information wasn’t readily available. You couldn’t just jump on the net and get information. My library were my magazines. They were three-months old because they would come over on an air freight. I would just veraciously read them page to page. There was nothing that I didn’t read about, no small print that I’d skip over, I’d read everything, I’d memorise it.
Tottenham have looked sharp in their pre-season matches since the Australian's arrival
‘We had Match of the Day on a Monday night. First Jimmy Hill, then on a Saturday it was Brian Moore back then. They were a week or two old. We’d all sit around the telly and just lap it all up. That was it. We had nothing else but those one or two hours a day other than trying to pick up BBC radio on a transistor to get some information. That was the way. It wasn’t just me, it was all my friends, all of us who were obsessed with football.”
Those friends will be there to support Postecoglou as he makes his Premier League bow at Brentford. He’s been inundated with requests for tickets. He doesn’t mind.
‘We grew up together. We all had those dreams and we’re all living them together. To me, they are part of it as well. I wouldn’t be sitting here today without them.’
There is a downside, however. For the first time in 20 years, he’s had to pull out of their fantasy football league.
‘I’m gutted about it,’ he says. ‘They may try to draw on me for information but they will get nothing out of me! I am a Premier League manager. There you go. It’s not a fantasy anymore.’
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