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Klopp and Arteta's history tells us Postecoglou is on the right track at Tottenham
The only way any team has threatened Guardiola's Man City in the Premier League has been by sticking with a manager and his long-term visiontheathletic.com
Sometimes, it helps to have a little bit of distance.
I was unable to attend Saturday’s game between Tottenham Hotspur and Crystal Palace, so followed it from afar. The mood on social media at half-time was a mixture of frustration and boredom, with some exasperation that Spurs, having had two weeks without a game to prepare, were playing with such little invention against Palace’s deep block. At the stadium, the mood was said to be similar.
Had I been there, I would almost certainly have shared these feelings, especially with everyone’s tensions heightened after the home defeat to Wolverhampton Wanderers in the previous game.
As it was, I felt fairly confident, from a few miles away, that Tottenham would probably be fine and end up winning — as they have tended to do in tight home matches this season, and as they ultimately did on this occasion, too.
For those of us who follow Spurs obsessively — whether that’s on a professional level or as a fan — it can be hard to step back and appreciate the bigger picture. But to do so is to see how positive this season has been so far; a campaign where the consensus at the start was that qualification for any of the three European competitions would be a decent outcome and one that began with the sale of the best player in the club’s modern history.
With 12 of the 38 top-flight games to go, Spurs are in fifth place and look a good bet for Champions League qualification (Manchester United in sixth have six fewer points and a far inferior goal difference, and have played one more match), and are playing very entertaining football in the process.
To try to put where they are into context, it’s helpful to look at two of the three teams above them in the table: leaders Liverpool and third-placed Woolwich. Over the past few years, both have executed the kind of rebuild that Ange Postecoglou and Spurs are now attempting, and have done so with comparable resources.
But rather than comparing Spurs with those teams as they are now, it’s more useful to look at where they were 26 games into the respective reigns of Jurgen Klopp and Mikel Arteta (the number of matches Postecoglou has been in charge).
As the table below shows, Postecoglou has outperformed both pretty comfortably when it comes to points won. His team have also posted better attacking numbers than his Liverpool and Woolwich counterparts did, but worse defensive ones.
Comparing managers' PL starts
Both Klopp and Arteta had mitigating circumstances to deal with, but this is still a reminder of the fact that Postecoglou has started extremely well at Tottenham — especially given their injury crisis from earlier in the season.
After 26 PL games Postecoglou Klopp Arteta Points 50 43 42 Wins 15 12 12 Draws 5 7 6 Losses 6 7 8 Goals for 55 50 40 Goals conceded 39 35 28 Expected goals 45.9 36.2 30.9 Expected goals against 43.9 23.1 38.3
Unlike the Australian, Klopp and Arteta were appointed midway through a season (in October 2015 and December 2019 respectively), meaning they missed out on pre-season and an initial summer transfer window to start moulding the squad.
The Liverpool players Klopp was dealing with in his first 26 Premier Leaguegames were all ones he had inherited from Brendan Rodgers — save for January loan signing Steven Caulker, who ended up playing three times for him in the league, all as a late substitute. For Arteta, it was a similar story, with only Cedric Soares and Pablo Mari added to his squad during the majority of his first 26 league matches (a stretch that includes the start of the 2020-21 season), both of whom were very much stop-gap signings.
Liverpool’s league results in Klopp’s early period were also affected by their prioritising of the cups, ending up as beaten finalists in both the League Cup and Europa League that season. Woolwich’s priority towards the end of Arteta’s first half-season meanwhile was the FA Cup, which they won in a campaign that was stopped for three months between March and June because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
A strange beast in that first Klopp year, Liverpool were involved in some wild games including a 5-4 win at Norwich, a 3-3 home draw with Woolwich, and a dramatic 5-4 Europa League aggregate win against Borussia Dortmund (from 4-2 down after an hour of the second leg). They also beat Chelsea and Manchester City away (3-1 and 4-1 respectively) in Klopp’s first couple of months and knocked Manchester United out of the Europa League’s round of 16. But, conversely, they lost 3-0 at Watford and 3-2 at Southampton having been 2-0 up (admittedly with an understrength team).
They ended up finishing eighth, as Klopp (who took over with them 10th) began his mission to “turn doubters into believers”.
Woolwich were similarly inconsistent in Arteta’s first 26 league games, and also ended his first season eighth, having been 11th when he was appointed.
They beat Manchester United and newly-crowned champions Liverpool at home (the latter in a game in which they got completely outplayed) and drew at Chelsea, but were battered on a post-lockdown visit to City when they also lost to relegation-threatened sides Brighton & Hove Albion and Aston Villa. In the FA Cup, Arteta abandoned his attacking principles, played a 3-4-3 and dug in to beat City and Chelsea in the semis and the final.
That absence of a summer window at the start for Klopp and Arteta is obvious though when you look at some of the players each was selecting in some of those matches. Alberto Moreno and Joe Allen for Liverpool, for instance, or Shkodran Mustafi and Sead Kolasinac for Woolwich. Players like these were quickly discarded or marginalised.
There were plenty of gloomy days for Mikel Arteta and Woolwich in 2019-20 (Andy Rain – Pool/Getty Images)
There’s an element of that for Postecoglou now too, but largely that concerns his fringe players. He can pick a starting Tottenham team most weeks filled with players who are expected to be in his long-term plans, helped by the fact that six of them are his signings (he also had a more productive first winter window than either Klopp or Arteta did).
Given they were arriving with the season well underway and the general state of their clubs at the time, you could argue that Klopp and Arteta inherited even more of a mess than Postecoglou did. But even if we take the first 26 games for each manager with a pinch of salt and look a bit beyond that, his record so far still stacks up well.
In Klopp’s first full season in charge of 2016-17, which began 10 months after he’d been appointed, Liverpool finished fourth with 76 points. Spurs are currently tracking for 73 in Postecoglou’s equivalent. Neither team had any European competition to distract them. Both had games when they looked brilliant and games where they looked a bit of a mess. Liverpool were boosted for that season by the summer arrivals of, among others, Sadio Mane, Georginio Wijnaldum and Joel Matip, as their team began to take shape.
But the sense that Liverpool were thrilling going forward and an accident waiting to happen defensively actually carried on into Klopp’s third season (2017-18). Mohamed Salah joined that June to make the attack even more potent, but there were still multiple horror shows at the back.
Between September and December 2017, Liverpool lost 5-0 to City at the Etihad (albeit they had 10 men for almost an hour), drew 3-3 at Sevilla having led 3-0 after 30 minutes and by the same score away to Woolwich in a game where they went from two goals up to 3-2 down in five minutes early in the second half. Also in that period was a 4-1 thrashing by Spurs in the October — a full two years after Klopp had been appointed.
The point here is that things do take time and that even if a team improve every season, as Liverpool did up until winning the title in 2019-20, there can still be troughs within those campaigns. Even a manager as good as Klopp at a club with a pedigree like Liverpool’s doesn’t get it right overnight.
It would have been impossible to imagine following that 3-3 with Woolwich in December 2017 that Liverpool would transform the following season into a winning machine who lifted the club’s sixth European Cup/Champions League while conceding just 22 league goals. In Klopp’s first three seasons that figure had been 50, 42 and 38. It was only after the signings of Virgil van Dijk and Alisson in the January and July of 2018 that Liverpool became a serious defensive team.
Klopp didn’t have things all his own way in his early years at Liverpool (Alex Livesey/Getty Images)
Both Liverpool and Woolwich are proof that while Spurs have looked very shaky at the back at times this season, that doesn’t mean they will do so forever. And in some ways, they already look more solid defensively than Liverpool did up until Van Dijk and then Alisson arrived, both more than two years into the Klopp era.
Yes, they have conceded a lot of goals and given up a lot of chances, but personnel-wise they appear to have a goalkeeper and first-choice back four well suited to what Postecoglou wants. The next stage of their development is having back-up players who can come in and not have it feel like there is both a substantial drop-off in quality and a big change stylistically, as was the case when Emerson Royal and Ben Davies replaced injured duo Pedro Porro and Destiny Udogie for the home defeat against Wolves last month.
Returning to Liverpool, where they did show signs of promise that they could become an elite team, right from Klopp’s arrival, was that on their day they could beat anyone.
Tottenham have a bit of that about them under Postecoglou, having taken five points from their three games so far against City, Liverpool and Woolwich. They’ve also won two and drawn one of their three games against Manchester United and Newcastle United, who both finished in the top four last season.
Comparing Postecoglou’s Spurs to the early days of Arteta at Woolwich is very encouraging from a Tottenham perspective.
Even if we discount the madness of that first, pandemic-skewed half-season and look at Arteta’s first full campaign in charge, we’re reminded of how long it took for him to really make his mark.
In that 2020-21 season, Arteta’s Woolwich finished eighth with 61 points — 12 below what Postecoglou’s 2023-24 Spurs are on course for. It’s hard to know precisely but it’s possible the previous season’s FA Cup triumph characterised by deep defending and three at the back meant it took longer for Arteta to instil how he wanted Woolwich to play long-term. Postecoglou has gone the other way, refusing to compromise even when his team has been injury-ravaged.
In any case, it is worth remembering just how bad Woolwich were at this point of Arteta’s reign.
They had just been beaten for the third time in their first six matches of 2020-21 and were about to embark on a dreadful run that saw them lose five and draw two of seven Premier League games.
At that point, in December 2020, Woolwich were 15th — four points above the relegation zone, having played more games than most of the teams below them. One can only imagine how mutinous the fanbase would have been had supporters been allowed in the grounds amid the ongoing restrictions on crowds designed to limit the spread of Covid-19 (of their four home games in that seven-match run, three were behind closed doors, while 2,000 fans were allowed for the other).
One also wonders how much of a clamour there would have been for Arteta to go had Woolwich lost their next game after this sequence — a 3-1 home win over Chelsea on the Boxing Day. With hindsight, it now feels a little crazy that a long-term project could hinge on just one game (in a season where, as stated above, Woolwich ultimately finished eighth, and would have almost certainly have ended up somewhere else in mid-table even if they had lost to Chelsea).
In the same way, Spurs’ 3-1 win over Palace on Saturday will probably end up being quite forgettable and is unlikely to shape the Postecoglou project, even though it felt massive at the time.
That’s where some distance can be useful — remembering that there will be setbacks in a long-term project, but it is possible to recover from them.
Even City under Pep Guardiola weren’t great in his 2016-17 debut season. They finished third with 78 points; decent, but far below what we’ve come to expect from them and not a much better points per game (2.1) average than Spurs have now (1.9).
City lost 4-0 at Everton in Guardiola’s 21st Premier League match (Michael Regan/Getty Images)
As for Woolwich, it wasn’t until Arteta’s second full season in 2021-22 — which followed his second summer window, during which the club spent more than £150million and moved on plenty of dead wood— that there were signs of genuine progress. They ended up finishing fifth with 69 points, but only after losing their first three matches without scoring a single goal (another example of a low point even if the overall direction of travel was positive).
His third full season was when things really came together, as Woolwich led the table for most of the year before ultimately coming second behind City. Now, they are again in the title race and in the Champions League’s last 16 — after another big summer spend, this one north of £200million.
For both Klopp and Arteta, it took three years — and three summer windows — before they could even come close to Guardiola’s City team.
None of which is to say Spurs shouldn’t aim high and be looking to hunt down City sooner than that (especially if Guardiola leaves in the next year or so). But it is a reminder that squad-building takes time — and money. Postecoglou should be given plenty of the former, and so far he’s been given a hefty chunk of the latter. There appears to be an appreciation at Tottenham that his vision can only be realised if he is backed to bring in the players he wants.
This has been the case for both Klopp and Arteta. For the former, nine of his 11 starters in the 2019 Champions League final were players he had signed. In Arteta’s case, 13 of the 16 players used in Monday’s 6-0 win at Sheffield Unitedwere players he had brought in. Spurs have already moved quickly in this regard, but on Saturday, only four of their starting players were Postecoglou’s signings.
Bit by bit, window by window it should become more and more his team — and that should only be good news for Tottenham.
What does all this mean?
Well, there are going to be difficult days in this phase of the Postecoglou project. It happens — Liverpool lost at home to Palace in both of Klopp’s first two seasons. Woolwich lost at home to Burnley, Leicester City, Villa, Wolves and Everton in Arteta’s first full campaign.
None of which is to say that there are any guarantees over the next few years, or that sticking with a manager alone is a recipe for success — Erik ten Hag at Manchester United, anyone? But taking a step back is a reminder that things are pointing in the right direction, and while every case is different, the only way anyone has even nearly threatened City in the past six and a half years is to not take any shortcuts and trust in a long-term approach.
That’s what Spurs are doing with Postecoglou now. And if things go well, then the hope is that, in a few years’ time, we’ll barely be able to remember frustrating first halves like the one against Palace on Saturday.
The fact that this needs to be written after a win and the team on course of the CL places is nuts
Kulusevski our new number 9 confirmed?
Only on course for CL places because 5th gets it, that context is important. That makes it significantly less impressive.
Indeed it is.
Finishing 5th would be more impressive than finishing 8th which was where both of these managers he's being compared to in this article finished.
Both took over worse teams. And one won a cup first season and the other got to two cup finals first season.
League ain’t everything.
It's everything if you're evaluating progress which is what the article is about.
No one cared that Arteta won the FA cup when he had Arse in 15th in November after losing to Burnley at home in the following season.
I can't really remember both those squads, but I can't imagine they were worse than the one Postacoglou took over were they?
I think there were some decent players just arrived, or like Bissouma, who'd been ignored, but I doubt if anyone would have looked at the new players and squad in general and thought "this is guaranteed CL football" based on how they'd performed the season before and having lost Kane too.
I still think we've got a bunch of deeply flawed, bumbling forwards and 4 defenders who aren't exactly top class defensively.
I'm not totally convinced Ange is capable of doing the front door and back door thing efficiently, but I wouldn't exactly say the players he's got are spunktastic either.
Absolutely they were when you consider our summer signings. Vicario huge upgrade, Maddison huge upgrade, Van de ven huge upgrade. We also had Udogie come in as basically a new signing, a settled Porro etc.
Klopps squad when he took over was disgusting. Go have a look. He had to put up with Mignolet or Karius in goal for ages. Woolwich’s was Ozil/Auba post being unarsed and Mustafi .. bloody Mustafi.
Ange is doing really well so far but I think his situation was aided a lot by a bunch of genuinely competent transfers. We essentially got 4-5 starters for the lineup in a summer. Vicario alone over a Lloris or Forster earns us shit loads of points.
Arse 19/20 - Squad of Woolwich 2019-20 Premier League | BDFutbol
Dippers 15/16 - Squad of Liverpool 2015-16 Premier League | BDFutbol
Which is what?
Arteta was a kid in managerial terms when he took over. He probably actually did deserve to be sacked. Ended up all well & good in the end but I do think there was a large element of luck in both them sticking with him and it going so well.
Klopp came in to a properly disgusting side. Their back 5 for the EL final was Mignolet, Clyne, Lovren, Toure, Moreno. I mean Christ.
What are Romero and van de Ven missing, in your eyes, to be' considered top class defensively?
Both have been excellent this season and together when completing 90 minutes together have conceded just 9 goals from open play all season... With 1 of those being an own goal (Romero vs Woolwich) and another 2 being without our full strength back four (Wolves at home and Palace away)
In fact, we have lost just 1 game all season when they've started and completed 90 minutes. Again with that 1 loss coming when we had Emerson and Davies either side of them. Missing both at times has been detrimental to our season.
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Previous season Liverpool challenged for the league and Woolwich got to the EL final and finished 5th, the revisionism need to stop, they weren't bad teams they just had players that didn't fit what the manager wanted.
Edit - Actually Liverpool had another season under Rodgers so maybe their squad was a bit shit.
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Liverpool actually finished 6th the previous season.
I think both squads were probably worse than Spurs' heading into this season on paper. However, I don't think the expectations of those teams were as down as Spurs' were from pundits and fans alike.
There were genuine shouts of a bottom half finish when we appointed Postecoglou and lost Kane. Porro and Udogie couldn't play in back fours, Vicario was a cheap option, Richarlison was a flop, Son was finished etc etc
We were also heading into a season where to even compete, we were up against a treble winning Man City, Woolwich coming off the back of their best season since Wenger and spending close to 200m, An over performing Liverpool, An Emery side that were on title competing form, both United and Newcastle who finished above us last season...
Leicester City won the league when Klopp took over.
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He's still a man child now.
Least inspiring coach at a top club in any sport that I can think of.
He’s an absolute prick and radiates creep/cringe energy but the team play with an insane, scary intensity currently so you have to say something about his schtick is working.
Begrudgingly admit they are in the purplest of purple patches right now.
Were playing like total shit before Christmas and most of this season looked worse than last year. Maybe it clicked, maybe they fade back to the mean. Tbh I'm not that interested in them, I just watch Spurs games.
They’ve scored the most and conceded the least.
The similarities with 17/18 Spurs are all there, and like us back then they’ll probably just miss out due to a team who are just a bit cannier.
Unlike us though, they’re prepared to go ‘100m for Rice? Do it’.
Will we ever do that for Ange?
I think if you look at those squads that
Airfixx
posted, and then add that they both added decent other players before their first full seasons (see the actual article I posted - Liverpool added Nane, Matip, wijnaldum), I don’t think you could say they had it much worse than Ange in their first full seasons. To be honest though, I’m not sure how much attention we should pay to an article like this. Ange’s XGA is really not good, and if he doesn’t sort that out, his trajectory isn’t going to change loads.
Can't argue with that. We've never seen that level of commitment to winning from our owners. I don't think Rice is 100m player but that's not really the point.
This summer we can all see what a star quality forward might do for this team. Will they do it?