Ange’s star is on the wane. That man should not have left Celtic for Spurs.

Another weekend passes, and with it, a little more of Ange Postecoglou’s star fades.

Once again, another withering editorial emerges from south of the border, where his reputation is trashed, his past achievements are written off as irrelevant, and the familiar refrain is sung: the only thing that matters, has ever mattered, or will ever matter in football is how a manager performs in the English Premier League.

This week’s instalment also includes a dismissal of the man’s character, rooted in his increasingly spiky, nippy, and aggravated attitude towards the media. Down there, the press is every bit as bad as the one we deal with up here—except the English media obsesses over the supposed greatness of their league, rather than deifying one particular club. At least they spread their bias around.

Postecoglou’s move to Spurs was a triumph of agenting, the power of money, and the allure of London’s glitz and glamour. Yet, it was also a triumph of those things over common sense. Ange built his career on good decisions—smart, calculated moves that advanced him as a manager. Coming to Celtic Park was the best decision he ever made. But in chasing the lights of London, swayed by agents looking to fill their their own pockets rather help him craft his legacy, he made the worst one.

I dreaded the day he chose to leave us, and I had no illusions about what was coming. Once he refused to sign an extended contract, it was clear he wasn’t sticking around. If it hadn’t been Spurs, some other Premier League club would’ve fluttered its eyelashes, and he’d have been gone just as quickly. That was always the way of it.

Still, I can’t hold his lack of loyalty against him—not entirely. Football is a mercenary business. That’s why, when the time came to replace him, I supported the idea of bringing Brendan Rodgers back. If everyone in this game is a mercenary, you might as well hire the best one your money can buy.

But I didn’t want Ange to take the Spurs job.

I didn’t want him to take it for two principal reasons. First, I believed he’d regret it. Second, I knew that everything he had worked so hard to build over his career would be dismissed by the audience he was most desperate to impress: the English football fraternity. These people care only about what happens in their own league. That’s the yardstick by which they measure success.

Ange wanted to prove that a man from his neck of the woods could walk into the biggest league in the world and teach them how football should be played. But at this point, it’s fair to say he’s failed. No excuses will help him now. The narrative is in full flow, and once it takes hold, perception becomes reality.

It doesn’t matter if the truth is more complicated or if the circumstances at Spurs were stacked against him. All that will matter is the perception that Ange Postecoglou was “found out.”

The Premier League doesn’t forgive and forget. Owners and directors won’t queue up to give him a second chance. The perception will be that his system is flawed, that it’s unworkable in the “toughest league in the world,” and that he should have done better at a club like Spurs. That’s the story now.

At his age, rebuilding a reputation is exponentially harder than establishing one. The weight of failure can crush even the strongest resolve. Ange took a gamble, and he lost. That’s the perception—and that’s all that will ever matter.

The money will no doubt provide some comfort, but let’s be honest—Ange Postecoglou has likely been a multi-millionaire for a long time. I don’t think it was ever his primary goal. Sure, the financial incentives were tempting, and they probably played a significant role in his decision to go, but above all else, he wanted to test himself in that league. He wanted to manage a club of stature, make a splash, and write another chapter in footballing history.

I genuinely wanted to see him succeed, partly because his success would have reflected well on us. That said, I don’t think his failure reflects poorly on Celtic. What he achieved in two sterling seasons here—building one of the most thrilling attacking sides I’ve ever seen as a Celtic supporter—means absolutely nothing to the hacks down south. In their eyes, it might as well never have happened.

The reason I knew he’d regret the Spurs job was simple: Spurs is not a big club. It’s not a great club. It’s the ultimate exercise in smoke and mirrors—a club that sees itself as elite, projects itself as elite, but is ultimately constrained by its thinking, its ambition, and its leadership. Daniel Levy is no master strategist.

This is a man who, lest we forget, was a director at ENIC, the company that once poured money into Rangers under David Murray.

And what happened there? Murray burned through £50 million of ENIC’s money like an English Premier League WAG on a department store shopping spree.

Levy was on the board during that debacle, one of the last people to realise that Murray was a charlatan. Perhaps that experience made him more cautious in the years since, running Spurs on a tighter financial leash. But let’s be real: we’re not talking about a genius here. We’re not talking about someone with a stellar record of success steering football clubs to glory.

To their credit, the Spurs fans haven’t fully turned on Ange yet. The protests at the weekend weren’t aimed at him but at Levy. The banner that’s been plastered across the news summed it up perfectly: “24 years. 16 managers. One trophy. It’s time for a change.” And they’re not calling for a 17th manager—not yet anyway. But we all know that’s the inevitable next step.

Many of us couldn’t believe Ange was daft enough to go to a club with such a disastrous track record. Spurs chew through managers with the regularity of a fast-food franchise churning out burgers. It’s a managerial hot seat that more closely resembles an electric chair, at a club where fans—despite witnessing just one trophy in 24 years—still behave as though silverware should be guaranteed every season. It’s delusional, and it’s one of the most absurd narratives in football.

Spurs is a basket case of a club. Their shiny, multi-million-pound stadium is the very embodiment of institutional hubris—all style and no substance, an outward show of glitz and glamour masking the dry rot inside.

This is a club going nowhere fast. Ange deserves credit for getting them a fifth-place finish in his first campaign. That alone was a minor miracle. But this season? It’s been an unmitigated disaster from the very beginning.

There have been injuries, sure, but in this area, Ange has done himself no favours. His refusal to compromise on his gruelling, hard-taskmaster training regime is likely responsible for many of them.

Even so, Spurs themselves are his biggest issue. He’s like a man who has wandered onto the wrong stage, forced to perform in front of a home crowd that doesn’t know what to expect. He’s trying to deliver lines he hasn’t learned, with a cast he barely knows. Is it any wonder the whole thing has unravelled?

And we warned him. It wasn’t just Celtic fans who sounded the alarm. I’m sure there were smart, sensible people around him who told him Spurs was the wrong club and that this is how it was bound to end. But Ange has an ego big enough to think he could succeed where so many others had failed. Yet as I said at the time, every manager who has walked through those doors—some with bigger egos, some with far brighter CVs—thought they would be the one to turn Spurs around.

The problem isn’t the managers. It’s the club. It’s the man who runs it and the culture that surrounds it. Spurs are a club steeped in failure, a club where the concept of winning isn’t just unfamiliar—it’s completely alien. This is an institution trapped in a never-ending cycle of self-destructive decisions, and nothing about that looks like changing any time soon.

I knew from the moment Ange took the job that this is how it would end: not just failure on a personal level, at a club that was the wrong fit for him, but something far worse. This failure tarnishes the legacy he spent his life building, rendering it meaningless in the eyes of the very people he most wanted to impress.

And that, for him, is the true disaster.

For God’s sake, all he had to do—all he ever had to do—was ask one of his predecessors at Spurs, José Mourinho, what to expect from the English media. Here’s a man who arrived at Chelsea having just won the Champions League with Porto, an achievement that stunned world football. He had already conquered Europe, beating Martin O’Neill’s Celtic in Seville the year before to win the UEFA Cup. Mourinho’s star was blindingly bright, and everyone knew he was the next big thing.

And how did the English press treat him? With sneers. At his first press conference, they dismissed his success and essentially told him none of it mattered. “No experience in a major league,” they said. Could he really compete with the best?

His response went down in history.

“We have top players,” Mourinho said. “And I’m sorry if I am a bit arrogant, but we have a top manager. Please don’t call me arrogant, because what I’m saying is true. I’m a European champion… I am a special one.”

That response was perfect. Mourinho turned the media’s arrogance back on them, daring them to question his credentials. Who are you to sneer at me? Who are you to lecture me? Look at my medals.

But if they treated Mourinho like that—a Champions League-winning manager—what chance did Ange Postecoglou ever have of earning their respect with titles in Japan, Australia, and Scotland?

From the minute he walked into his first Spurs press conference, they were waiting for him to fail. And worse, he chose the one club that all but guaranteed he would.

This has unfolded exactly as many of us predicted. His time at Spurs is going to end in disaster, and everything that came before is now irrelevant. In the eyes of the English press, his achievements don’t exist. He has failed where they believe it matters most. In their world, and there that is all that counts.

Photo by Catherine Ivill – AMA/Getty Images