Only some individuals in football are so likeable and successful that Australian fans will celebrate them even if they hate the club, and Ange Postecoglou is undoubtedly one of them.
As a five-year-old on a boat from Athens travelling to Melbourne for a better life, his future was uncertain, and he couldn’t have known he would one day become a football manager with a winning streak.
He will become the first Australian coach to manage in the Premier League after confirming a move to Tottenham Hotspur — a London club flush with cash in dire need of success — on a four-year deal on Tuesday.
His appointment is easily the biggest move by an Australian football coach.
He was in hot demand after winning the treble – Scottish Premiership, League Cup, and Scottish Cup – at powerhouse club Celtic, where he rapidly transformed the culture and success rate in two years.
Ange Postecoglou’s rise to the best league in world football
Ange or Angelos Postecoglou’s story begins in Athens, where he was born in 1965.
When he was two, his father lost his business amid the rise of a military junta regime in 1967.
In 1970, his parents, Dimitris and Voula, took two suitcases, Ange and his sister Liz, and set sail for Melbourne.
“I just can’t believe what my parents went through,” he told the Scotsman newspaper in 2021.
“What they would have gone through to take a young family halfway round the world, on a ship that takes us 30 days, to a country where they don’t speak the language, they don’t know a soul, they don’t have a house, they don’t have jobs.
“People say they go to another country for a better life. My parents did not have a better life, they went to Australia to provide opportunities for me to have a better life.”
As was common for Greek immigrants then, they shortened their names to Postekos, and Dimitris went by the anglicised ‘Jim’.
But their son didn’t go by his new name.
“It was a fad in those days to shorten your name if you were Greek,” he told the Sydney Morning Herald in 2011.
“I never liked it, and I never used it. I was proud of my background, but when it came to my first passport and my first driver’s licence, there was nothing I could do about it.”
Life was hard for the family, but Jim worked harder.
Football became an obsession for Postecoglou and a way to bond with his father.
“The only time I ever got to see any joy in my dad was when we went to the football on a Sunday. So that made an impression on me because I made a quick connection that football makes him happy… so if I love this like he does, it will get me close to him,” he told the Scotsman.
Postecoglou said his dad never hugged him, so he ensures he is affectionate to his three sons, James, Max and Alexi.
Postecoglou had a strong playing career for the South Melbourne Hellas, including a spell managed by Hungarian legend Ferenc Puskas but retired at age 27.
He then took over the coaching reins at the club and won three trophies.
The Australian national football team realised his potential was being wasted at a Greek side in the suburbs and appointed him as coach of the national Under-17 side and later the Under-20s.
Following a poor string of results, an interview with broadcaster and former Socceroo Craig Foster in 2006 left him “unemployable,” Postecoglou said.
In a heated exchange, Foster called on him to resign as coach of the youth team after failing to qualify for the Under-20 World Cup.
In 2008, Postecoglou wore a coaching hat in Greece for a year where he took charge of a third-division team. Then, for the second time in his life, he moved to Melbourne towards an uncertain future.
He took a coaching job with Whittlesea Zebras in the Victorian Premier League. The team were relegated to a lower league, a process which can often break a coach’s career.
But A-League outfit Brisbane Roar knew there was more to Postecoglou than the results on paper and signed him as coach in 2009.
It turned out to be an inspired decision, and soon his attacking football style led them to win titles before he signed with A-League heavyweights Melbourne Victory.
The Socceroos decided they wanted to join the Postecoglou party, and he, in turn, led them to the World Cup in Brazil in 2014 and a victory at the Asian Cup in 2015 on home soil.
But he shocked the football community in Australia by quitting the national team on the eve of the 2018 World Cup in Russia.
His next move was to Japan, where despite not speaking the language, he led Yokohama F. Marinos to the title in 2019.
That success helped open the door for his eventual move to Scotland.
“I understand what sacrifice is about, I understand what being in a privileged position like I am now is about,” Postecoglou said in 2021.
“I am not going to take this for granted because I know how hard my mum and dad worked. They sacrificed their whole life for me to be here.” His father died in 2018, but Postecoglou said he uses his spirit to motivate him.
Current Socceroos coach Graham Arnold said he was “just so happy” to see his mate being appointed to the Tottenham job and attributed it to his “obsession”.
“(I) always knew that he had that mentality of where he wanted to go, that was to the top,” he said at a press conference on Tuesday.
“He had a few setbacks but that is coaching. You learn from those types of setbacks and Ange has always been someone that has always (been) so determined to prove the doubters wrong.”
Arnold said Postecoglou was blazing a trail for Australian coaches.
Postecoglou is reportedly on a family holiday but will no doubt be bracing himself for a life in England, competing in the world’s richest, fastest, and most-watched league.
He has a big job rebuilding a winning culture at Spurs – the team finished eighth last season – but knows more about hard work than most.
