‘I’m still on the same planet, mate’: Why Ange Postecoglou is a master media tactician

One of the enduring Ange Postecoglou legends is his ability to see everything, everywhere, all the time. Players have spoken of sensing it on the training pitch – an almost irrational perception their every move was being observed, mentally documented – only for a teammate some distance away to feel it, too.

“I always thought, ‘He’s looking at me’,” Matt McKay, who played under the new Tottenham manager for the Socceroos and Brisbane Roar, told The Athletic this week. “It was like the Mona Lisa.” It might sound fanciful, except those watchful eyes had the media on notice, too.

Australian journalists covering the national team’s qualification path to the 2018 World Cup occasionally felt the gaze from the stands of whichever Asian or Middle Eastern training ground they had been sent, and knew that he knew who was there and who was not. Before one of these many away matches, a colleague asked Postecoglou a tactical question. He replied: “How can you ask that when you didn’t even watch training, mate?” From memory, no travelling media ever missed training again.

Was this the myth of which they spoke? Can he see our unseeing? Does he know we went out for a drink in Bangkok on match day minus one? Would he disapprove?

On some level, we knew Postecoglou’s manner would command respect from the Scottish press by acting and reacting in much the same way he always had. In June 2021, when a journalist quizzed him about one of Celtic’s first opponents under his charge, he responded: “I’m still on the same planet, mate, I haven’t come from outer space. You’d be surprised how much I know about Hearts.”

This occurred before former Scotland player Alan Brazil saw the light after his initially strong criticism of Postecoglou’s appointment at Celtic. Any doubters on Fleet Street can expect similar fare. The English Premier League might be a bigger stage than the Old Firm but evidence suggests it will not make Postecoglou smaller, merely place him in a new environment amenable to fresh press conference material. The best of it has spread to the corners of social media and now holds a revered place on Celtic fan pages. Tottenham chairman Daniel Levy has no doubt already seen the “I’m not an accountant, mate, I’m a football manager” line, because there will be no stopping the takedowns once he arrives in north London.

Ange Postecoglou addresses an Australian media throng with his Celtic squad last November.Credit: Getty

“If he doesn’t like something, you’re going to cop it and he’s going to try and unpick your argument. Not in a bullying way, but that’s his kind of intellectual power,” says Kyle Patterson, who was a reporter when Postecoglou made his playing debut for South Melbourne in 1984. Three decades later, he was Football Federation Australia’s head of communications during Postecoglou’s Socceroos tenure.

“I hope the tabloids in London are ready for that, but I don’t think they will be because they love to dish it out. The thing about the British tabloid press is, it’s just hyper-clickbait. They’ll try and wait for his first stumble or suggest that he’s a nobody from Down Under and do cartoons with him with a cork hat or a kangaroo. You hope not, but this is the funny thing about England.”

In March, Postecoglou’s Spurs predecessor Antonio Conte unravelled after a particularly stressful game against Southampton, castigating his players and the club hierarchy in an extraordinary outburst which helped seal his fate. His successor is no less passionate but, certainly in the past few years, has been unimpeachable behind the microphone. The emotion is there, but it does not interrupt the master plan.

Should he sacrifice attacking football for pragmatism sometimes, one journalist once asked, only to be told: “My view on that is, if you are a strict vegetarian, you don’t drop into Macca’s just because you are hungry mate, you know? This is what I believe in.”

We may never be sure how much strategy is knitted into Postecoglou’s public persona. It all appears genuine, underscored by a conviction in his beliefs. We do have evidence he has, at least, thought about it, that he has read what has been written and has possibly even scrolled through Twitter once or twice (hi, Ange). Most recently, that evidence came via the word-perfect media conference he delivered last week before Celtic defeated Inverness Caledonian Thistle in the Scottish Cup final. Eighteen times he was asked questions relating to the intensifying speculation he was about to leave Parkhead, and each time he was immovable.

“I’d love you to be in my shoes and know what my world is and make sure that on Saturday, we perform to the levels we can,” he said. “You don’t understand that because you’d love the opposite to happen. You’d love for there to be a story that we aren’t successful. That would rock your world. Not because you want ill of me, but that would be unbelievable – imagine the headlines you could come up with. That is what generates interest. I have lived that. Every weekend we have a game, there are only two stories that can be told.”

Was he combating the inevitable narrative that a loss would serve as proof Celtic were distracted by the Spurs talk? “Spot on,” he said. “You’ve got that headline ready. That is the truth. The fact I have spent 25 minutes to get you guys to understand that’s not what’s happening, eventually that story gets out. That is why I am on super alert because I am not going to allow anyone to say that.”

Postecoglou has a history of managing his message. During his Socceroos days when, mid-qualification for the World Cup, he switched the set-up to a back three, he sat in a room with Australian media in Iran and explained the new system. Towards the end of his tenure, when he was worn down by relentless “cheap shots” at his methods and infighting within the local game, news broke that he was planning to walk away before the World Cup – even if he succeeded in leading his team to Russia 2018. The bombshell dropped just before a two-legged qualifying play-off with Honduras, and he spent the next six weeks saying nothing but also saying everything.

When he eventually confirmed the worst-kept secret – a week after qualifying – he spoke of the toll the role had taken on him and his family. A month later, he said something revealing in an interview with Fox Sports: that a recent reminder of his infamous television interview with Craig Foster, directly before his sacking as Australia’s youth team coach a decade prior, had made him determined to leave the national set-up on his terms this time (he and Foster have since buried the hatchet).

There is also his background as a Greek migrant brought up in the AFL heartland of Melbourne in the 1970s, and he has spoken about navigating his youth and adulthood as an outsider. “People were questioning my [Celtic] appointment,” he said last year. “I love that stuff.”

It is difficult to pinpoint how much of this lived experience influenced his meticulous approach to the international media, throughout highly successful years in Japan with Yokohama F. Marinos and then his amusingly brusque courtship of Scotland. There, he is no longer the subject of simplistic Ted Lasso cliches. If that is still a view held by any in England, just wait until his first press conference.

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