The story begins when Vince Grella, once an Australian international with Blackburn Rovers, recommended Ange Postecoglou to Frank Trimboli, one of Europe’s greatest football managers, and from there her managerial career took off.
In 2015, Tottenham Hotspur’s current manager had only coached outside Europe once; In 2008, he served briefly in Greece, where his family left for Australia decades ago. As manager of the Australian national team he had won the AFC Asian Cup, the biggest victory in Socceroos history, but his ambitions of doing so in Europe were nowhere near being realised. He was not on the list of coaches that European clubs considered when making appointments, but this was about to change.
This came about when Postecoglou met Brian Marwood, the former Arsenal and Sheffield Wednesday winger who would go on to become a champion. Marwood was an ally of Postecoglou in Manchester City, the all-conquering team Tottenham face on Sunday, who is now global head of football at City Football Group (CFG), a 12-club global organisation.
“I will be forever grateful to Brian Marwood,” Postecoglou said, speaking at the club’s Hotspur Way headquarters on Friday. “He was the first one to notice me in Oz. “We had a relationship at the time in terms of him following my career and he was the one who referred me to Yokohama when I was in Australia.”
In 2015, the first meeting was still a few steps away. Grella, who plays most of his club football in Serie A and Serie B, was pushing Trimboli, an Australian of Italian descent, to consider representing Postecoglou.
Trimboli had a two-month break with Postecoglou in 2016 when the Socceroos manager went to catch up with his players in Europe. Not easily impressed, Trimboli is convinced his compatriot has what it takes to make a breakthrough for Australian coaches in Europe. Trimboli had done the same himself as an agent, despite similar skepticism in his early days. The question then was where Postecoglou’s breakthrough could come from.
Trimboli described CFG as a clear bridge for Postecoglou to prove himself to European managers who were not yet ready to give him a job in Europe. Marwood, who played a decisive role in the management field, worked as an executive at Nike after his own playing career ended and then joined CFG in the early days of the Abu Dhabi takeover. Marwood occasionally visited Australia to check in on CFG club Melbourne City and knew something about Postecoglou’s success at Brisbane Roar. Trimboli introduced.
Marwood offered Postecoglou the job of managing Japanese club Yokohama F Marinos in 2017. Leon Angel, head of football at Trimboli’s Base Soccer agency, has been a long-term adviser to Arsene Wenger since the Frenchman arrived in England in 1996. Angel and Trimboli reasoned that if the J-League had been good for Wenger’s career outside his home country of France, it could have done the same for Postecoglou.
The only problem was Postecoglou qualified for the 2018 World Cup finals with the Socceroos. Yet his relationship with Australian Football was strained. He could not see a clear vision of the match in Australia. He gave up the World Cup to move to Japan in December of the same year.
Postecoglou took over a team that was in trouble and had doubts about the direction he wanted to take them. Unlike other clubs, CFG only owned 20 per cent of Marinos, the rest was controlled by Nissan, and Marwood had to persuade rather than insist on Postecoglou’s appointment. In his first season the club just avoided relegation. In the second, he won the J-League in 2019. The CFG machine had hit the jackpot again.
The pivotal moment in Postecoglou’s involvement with CFG is often described as Marinos’ friendly against Manchester City in 2019; It’s pre-season for the Premier League club and mid-season for the J-Leaguers. Postecoglou’s players were known to have more possession of the ball than Pep Guardiola’s team (a share of 58 per cent) and completed 607 passes to City’s 455. The joke was that Guardiola’s team – in the tradition of most reckless comebacks against them – held on to a 3-1 lead. earning. Afterwards, Guardiola was full of praise for Marinos’ performance.
But for Postecoglou the big moment had come when Marwood gave him the chance. His career was already taking off in Japan when City played there and his connection with then CFG head of recruitment Mark Lawwell, now at Celtic, couldn’t hurt. Mark Lawwell is the son of Celtic’s long-serving and influential CEO, Peter, and now returns to the club as chairman. Postecoglou will take charge of Celtic in June 2021.
Postecoglou said the CFG appointment of Marinos finally gave him a way into the elite European game. He had the opportunity to visit Manchester and meet Guardiola and his then assistant Mikel Arteta. Best of all, he said it gave him access to the secret kingdom of CFG’s global database of players.
“I was able to log into their database and they could literally track every football player in the world,” Postecoglou said. “It’s fair to say I’m not competing for the same players as them. [City]. Our budget was a little different. But just being able to access the information they have at that moment and say, ‘This is what I need.’ I was talking to the amazing people behind the scenes. It helped me make decisions especially based on foreign players… Now the world has changed and most football clubs do their recruitment in a similar way. But it was great exposure for me at the time.”
The philosophy of the game against City in 2019 was the same as what is likely to happen on Sunday. Postecoglou does not want his team to back down just because of the opponent’s reputation. “We could get into this [2019] “In the game,” Postecoglou recalled on Friday, “he said: ‘Let’s see how we can try to beat Manchester City.’ Or we can come in and say, ‘Let’s play our football and see where it takes us.’ So we did. I said to the kids, ‘Let’s go.’ Hide the ball. Press them. Be aggressive… and you know what? If we lose 6-0, we lose 6-0, but we measured ourselves.’”
He said Marinos’ performance was a testament to what was turning out to be a big season. Postecoglou himself received some recognition, but it would be another four years before the two managers met again. Postecoglou said, “Some nice things were said afterwards, but the next day people moved away and the circus left the city and I stayed in Yokohama.”