Spurs thinks its a great club. Their treatment of Ange shows they’re not.

Alan Shearer, of all people, summed it up best with a post echoing his utter disbelief. He targeted football as a whole.

But football as a whole isn’t responsible for what happened to Ange Postecoglou tonight. That’s a peculiarly Spurs-type thing, from a club with a record for sacking managers that is every bit as egregious as the one enjoyed by the lot across the city. It’s proof of serious dysfunction at one team—not the entire sport.

It ends how we all thought it would end—with Ange coming up short in the eyes of Daniel Levy and the board over there.

To be honest, I think that the Europa League win was an achievement above and beyond anything I expected from him—or that anyone else had any right to expect. I read their statement in utter disbelief at the level of delusional thinking in it. And I wasn’t surprised that Ange didn’t thank the board in his own statement, which fulsomely praised everyone else at Spurs.

He was sacked, they said, because they feel they need to be competing on all fronts. Well, for God’s sake—when was the last time a Spurs team did that? If that’s the standard they’re setting, then that’s chasing rainbows. That’s wandering around the market square looking for magic beans. It’s crazy.

There has always been a kind of free-flowing arrogance at Spurs, which is wholly unjustified considering the recent history of the club. This isn’t a great and storied English football institution like some others.

It doesn’t have long, sustained periods of success. It has sporadic success scattered throughout its long history. That shouldn’t give Spurs the illusion that they’re a super club. They’re not. They’ve never been a super club.

He’s only the third manager in their history to win them a European trophy. I didn’t even know they had two before now.

Those wins are so long ago, so far back, that you’d have to be one of those football geeks to even know. And I guess I’m just not geeky enough.

Turns out they were the first British club to win a European trophy. Turns out they also won the UEFA Cup. A spurt of success at the start of the ‘80s, with a couple of FA Cups and that UEFA trophy, maybe gave them the idea they had some swagger. All it really does is put them in the same bracket as Aberdeen at that time.

Where does Spurs get this idea that there’s something special about them? A whole generation of their fans has grown up seeing a handful of trophies in all those years. And yet, to listen to Daniel Levy and read that statement today, you’d think they were not just a sleeping giant but a genuine global footballing force.

It’s exactly the kind of arrogant, elitist delusion which made us all warn Ange from ever going there in the first place. There is simply no winning with these people unless you’re bringing home a league title and getting to the Champions League semi-final. That’s the bar. These people will always find a reason to think you’ve underachieved.

Look, I’ve got some friends who are Spurs fans.

I congratulated them heartily on the night they won the trophy. But they know how I feel about the general status of the club itself.

They’ve got a lot right—the infrastructure is momentous, the stadium is absolutely world class. But they haven’t had a world-class team on the pitch in decades, and they’re not likely to put one there while Daniel Levy and his ilk are in the boardroom.

They are well-run in some ways. In a lot of ways.

But a club can be well-run and take itself seriously without automatically assuming it has to be a footballing superpower. Yes, the league position was appalling—absolutely, unacceptably bad. But a guy who delivers a European trophy and ends a 17-year drought probably deserves another year in the job.

They’ve sacked managers who’ve done better in the league than Ange. They do it all the time. It’s why we told him not to go there.

It’s not a managerial hot seat—it’s an electric chair. The level of demand at that club is vastly in excess of what they are realistically expected to achieve. A European trophy is above and beyond what any Spurs manager in the last few decades has been expected to win.

And his reward is to be dismissed.

It reminds me in a lot of ways of what happened to Claudio Ranieri at Leicester. Took them to a league title, only to lose his job within 18 months. There should be statues of that guy all around that ground.

He should be a favourite son. He lifted them higher than they ever expected to go. And because they looked like they might get relegated, they fired him. Little over a year later. I found it impossible to wish them well after that.

Rodgers went there, won an FA Cup, got them to the brink of a European final of his own… and they fired him too.

For the same reason—a slump in form that risked their Premier League status. But what is Leicester’s Premier League status? Why are Leicester arrogant enough to consider themselves a permanent fixture in that league?

Their history isn’t storied either.

Their most successful manager before Rodgers and Ranieri was none other than our own Martin O’Neill, who won two of their three League Cups.

Rodgers won their FA Cup. Ranieri won their top-flight title. And of those three, only O’Neill left on his own terms. But what are Leicester? What do they think they are? Well, this season showed it. They got relegated again.

And maybe that’s why Shearer is so down on football in general and not just one club—because there are clubs with hugely overinflated opinions of themselves. The club across the city is one of them.

How many managers have they sacked in the past 10 years for finishing second? But they’re the second biggest club in the country, with a rival miles ahead of them in every department. What else is a manager there supposed to achieve except second place? It’s a realistic target. And they all achieved it.

So they sack managers willy-nilly—for what? For not doing the impossible? That’s football for you. Football is a strange game.

It doesn’t make a lot of sense. But there are outliers in it—clubs whose behaviour makes them outliers, whose craziness should scare off any sane manager from even thinking about taking the job. Our rivals are one. And whether Ange believed it or not before he went there, he now knows that Spurs are another.

What makes it even more incredible to me is the man they’re trying to bring in to replace him: the Brentford manager. His tenth-place finish this past season was better than Ange managed—but does it scream ‘top bracket’?

Does it suggest he’s the next big thing?

No. So I reckon we’ll be right back here in 12, 18, 24 months with another head on a stick outside that wonderful ground of theirs. Another sacrifice to the gods of Didn’t Quite Make It. Another scalp for Daniel Levy.

That is not the behaviour of a big club. Just like Leicester sacking Ranieri and Rodgers wasn’t the behaviour of a big club. It’s what a club does when it wants to be seen as big, but only proves how far away it is. I feel bad for Ange tonight.

I feel bad for their supporters—who can’t get any kind of consistency in leadership from the top of their house. Only one club on this island is as prone to knee-jerk reactions as Spurs, and they happen to be our neighbours.

I don’t know what Ange will do now. In some ways, I don’t really care—it’s not really our concern. I’m more worried about what Rodgers does, and what he gets the chance to do, than about the former Celtic boss and the rest of his career.

But I know he needs to get it right next time. I know that when the time comes, he needs to choose wisely. There are clubs out there with patience. With tolerance. With a willingness to invest and let something grow. And if he goes to one of them, the world will see the benefits of his approach.

Spurs are a club in an endless cycle of rinse and repeat. The same mistakes, over and over. The same rush to judgement. The same overarching egotism getting in the way of stability and growth.

I thought the league position would get him fired—but only if he didn’t win the Europa League. When he won that trophy, I thought he’d saved himself. I thought maybe, just maybe, he’d restored a bit of sanity to a club badly in need of it.

But craziness has a way of winning out at a club becoming famous for it. And it doesn’t send a great message to any manager thinking of going there when not even a European trophy, the first silverware in 17 years, and a place in next season’s Champions League, is enough to keep you in a job.

Whatever targets they’re setting—they are most likely unreachable.

And so, that leaves only the guys who’ll go there because they smell the money. And that’s the problem. As I said before, players don’t go to Spurs to win things. And most managers don’t either.

Ironically, it was Ange who was the exception. He went there to win things. He believed he could. And every hardened cynic told him he was wrong. And like so many times in his career, he proved to be right, he proved to have more in his locker than they have in theirs. He endured. He triumphed. He did the job.

It didn’t save him. What a damning indictment of that club that is.