Postecoglou rules out Socceroos return as he paints bleak picture for the game in Australia

London: Ange Postecoglou does not believe soccer will ever reach its full potential in Australia, arguing that the collective desire to improve the sport’s standing both domestically and internationally simply does not exist – and probably never will.

The extent of Postecoglou’s pessimistic outlook on the code’s prospects was revealed in a brief roundtable chat with London-based journalists, including this masthead, ahead of Friday night’s (Saturday 5.45am AEDT) clash between the Socceroos and England at Wembley Stadium.

Ange Postecoglou celebrates the Socceroos’ victory in the 2015 Asian Cup final at Stadium Australia.Credit: Brendan Esposito

The Tottenham Hotspur manager also said he believed he would never coach the Socceroos again.

“No. I gave up that fight,” he replied when asked about a future appointment with the national team. “It’s a much easier space for me to live in because I was so frustrated for so long. It was my biggest frustration. One of my major drivers for doing what I did was to change football in Australia. And that’s the reason I left. I felt I hadn’t made an impact at all.

“That’s easier for me to deal with than to think maybe I still can now with what I’m doing. I just think I’d be disappointed, so I’d prefer to think it’s not going to happen.”

Having guided Spurs to the top of the English Premier League table after his first eight matches in charge, Postecoglou is a source of increasing fascination in England. And this week’s historic friendly has briefly shifted the focus to his complex relationship with the Australian game – much to his own personal bemusement, considering he was coach of the Socceroos when they last played against England at Sunderland’s Stadium of Light seven years ago.

Postecoglou says the Socceroos’ 2015 Asian Cup victory did not leave a legacy for the sport in Australia.Credit: Brendan Esposito

“You guys are only talking about it because of me,” he said. “Some of you were probably there, but you just discovered me a year ago, mate.”

Postecoglou has previously explained how the failure of the 2015 Asian Cup to create any sort of legacy left him disillusioned with Australian football, albeit still deeply passionate about it. On the eve of the recent Women’s World Cup, when he was in Perth on a pre-season tour with Tottenham, he recalled how hosting the Asian Cup left “barely a ripple” in the wider sporting landscape, and he has revisited the topic on a couple of occasions since arriving in England.

“There’s a couple of things,” he said when asked to expand on why he thought football would never ‘take off’ in Australia.

“One of them is obviously the sporting landscape, where there’s some pretty strong codes there that have generationally dominated the landscape. There’s Aussie Rules, that’s the indigenous sport of Australia, it’s kind of unique to them, and they take great pride in protecting that as their code. The rugby codes, obviously, dominate. It’s very hard for football to make an impact in that space.

“And the flipside of that is just how global the sport of football is. If you want to make inroads when you’re battling those kind of odds, it becomes almost insurmountable. You can’t make the necessary steps. If I can compare that to a country like Japan, who also have the tyranny of distance, baseball’s pretty strong - but they’ve ploughed a lot of resources into football and you can see that that’s making an impact. I don’t see Australia going down that road.”

His view has not changed despite the roaring success of the Women’s World Cup in July and August.

“I just don’t see it. I don’t think it registers,” Postecoglou said. “When you look at what the Matildas did at the World Cup – unbelievable. But you still won’t see an influx of resources to the game. You won’t. I guarantee it. They’ll build stadiums and other codes will use them.

“I just don’t think the nation as a whole has that inside them to understand that you can make an impact on the world of football, but it requires a kind of nationalistic approach that I just don’t think Australians at their core are really interested in.”

While there is little doubt Postecoglou’s success in club soccer in Japan, Scotland and now England is changing how Australian coaches are perceived abroad, and should open doors for others, he is unsure if his own achievements will affect the bigger picture as he sees it.

He said he had no regrets over his departure from the Socceroos: “It was the right decision for me, it was the right decision for where I saw the next stage of my career, and if I didn’t make that decision at that time, if I had waited until after the World Cup, I’ve got no doubt I wouldn’t be sitting here now.”

Postecoglou was even asked if he would consider coaching England one day, to which his response was: “Oh, come on mate.”

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