The story starts with Vince Grella, once at Blackburn Rovers and also an international from Australia, who recommends Ange Postecoglou to Frank Trimboli, one of Europe’s biggest football agents. From there, a management career began to take shape.
As of 2015, the current Tottenham Hotspur manager had coached outside Europe just once, a brief spell in Greece in 2008, the country his family had left for Australia decades earlier. As manager of the Australian national team he had won the AFC Asian Cup, the biggest victory in the Socceroos’ history, but his ambition to make it in Europe was no closer to realisation. He was simply not on the lists of coaches that European clubs considered when making appointments, but that was about to change.
It came about through an introduction to former Arsenal and Sheffield Wednesday winger Brian Marwood, who would become champions of Postecoglou. Marwood was an ally – the global head of football at City Football Group (CFG), the now 12-club global business, which has its mothership in Manchester City – the all-conquering team Postecoglou’s Tottenham on Sunday.
“I will be forever indebted to Brian Marwood,” Postecoglou said at the club’s headquarters in Hotspur Way on Friday. ‘He was the first to notice me in Oz. We then started a relationship in terms of him following my career and he was the one who referred me to Yokohama when I was in Australia.
In 2015, that first meeting was still a few steps away. Grella, who played much of his club football in Serie A and Serie B, pushed Trimboli, a fellow Australian of Italian descent, to represent Postecoglou.
Trimboli spent two months on and off with Postecoglou in 2016 when the then Socceroos manager was in Europe catching up with his players. Not easily impressed, Trimboli became convinced that his compatriot had what it took to make a breakthrough for the Australian coaches in Europe. Trimboli himself had done the same as an agent, despite similar skepticism in his early days. The question then was where Postecoglou’s breakthrough could come.
Trimboli called CFG an obvious bridge for Postecoglou to prove himself to European executives who were not yet willing to give him a European job. A real manager, Marwood had worked as a Nike manager after his own playing career ended, then joined CFG in the early days of the Abu Dhabi takeover. Marwood occasionally visited Australia to watch CFG club Melbourne City, and knew something of Postecoglou’s success with Brisbane Roar. Trimboli made the introduction.
Marwood offered Postecoglou the job as manager of Japanese club Yokohama F Marinos in 2017. Leon Angel, Trimboli’s co-head of football at the Base Soccer agency, has been Arsène Wenger’s long-term advisor since the Frenchman’s arrival in England in 1996. Angel and Trimboli reasoned that if the J-League had been good for the career of Wenger outside his native France, this might do the same for Postecoglou.
The only problem was that Postecoglou had just qualified for the 2018 World Cup finals with the Socceroos. Nevertheless, his relationship with Football Australia was strained. He couldn’t see a clear vision for the Australia match. In December of that year he gave up the World Cup to move to Japan.
Postecoglou inherited a team in trouble and a team that had doubts about the direction he wanted to take them. Unlike other clubs, CFG owned only 20 percent of Marinos, with the rest owned by Nissan, and Marwood had to convince rather than insist on Postecoglou’s appointment. In his first season the club narrowly avoided relegation. In the second, in 2019, he won the J-League. The CFG machine had hit the jackpot again.
The key moment in Postecoglou’s relationship with CFG is often seen as the Marinos’ friendly against Manchester City in 2019 – pre-season for the Premier League club and mid-season for the J-Leaguers. Postecoglou’s players famously had more ball possession than Pep Guardiola’s side – a 58 percent share – and made 607 passes to City’s 455. The joke was that Guardiola’s team – in the tradition of the most unexpected reversals against them – held on for a 3-1. to win. Guardiola would then rhapsodize about the Marinos’ performance.
But for Postecoglou the big moment had arrived when Marwood took a chance on him. His career had already taken off in Japan by the time City played there and the connection with then CFG head of recruitment Mark Lawwell, now at Celtic, could not have hurt. Mark Lawwell is the son of Peter, the long-serving and influential CEO of Celtic, who is now back at the club as chairman. Postecoglou would take over Celtic in June 2021.
Postecoglou said the CFG appointment at Marinos had finally given him access to Europe’s elite. He could have visited Manchester and met Guardiola and his then assistant Mikel Arteta. Most of all, he said, it gave him access to the secret kingdom of CFG’s global player database.
“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 wasn’t competing for the same players as them [City]. Our budget was slightly different. But just having access to the information they had at the time and being able to say, ‘This is what I need.’ Talking to the people behind the scenes who were brilliant. Mainly it allowed me to make decisions about foreign players… the world has changed now and most football clubs do their recruitment in a similar way. But for me at the time it was great exposure.”
As for the 2019 game against City, the philosophy was the same as it is likely to be on Sunday. Postecoglou does not want his team to take a step back just because of the opposition’s reputation. “We could have responded to that [2019] match,” Postecoglou recalled on Friday, “and said: ‘Let’s see how we can try to beat Manchester City.’ Or we can go in and say, ‘Let’s just play football and see where that takes us.’ That’s what we did. I said to the boys, ‘Let’s go. Keep the ball. Press it. Be aggressive… and you know what? If we get beaten 6-0, we get 6-0, but we measured ourselves.”
The Marinos’ performance, he said, was vindication in what would be an important season. Postecoglou himself achieved some recognition, although it would be another four years before the two managers met again. “Some nice things were said in the aftermath,” Postecoglou said, “but the next day people moved on and the circus left town and I was left in Yokohama.”