Ange Postecoglou has restored optimism at Tottenham Hotspur and now wants to return them to glory, just like he did at Celtic and Yokohama F Marinos. His 27-year-old coaching journey has proved circuitous – at one point he couldn’t even get a job in his native Australia – but he explains to FFT why he never stopped believing
Words Chris Flanagan Portraits James Cheadle
The journey from Athens to Melbourne took 30 days by boat, and it changed Angelos Postecoglou’s life. Three years earlier, when Postecoglou was 20 months old, Greece had been turned upside down. Born in the Nea Filadelfeia suburb – home to AEK Athens, the team his father Dimitris supported – Ange was too young to understand what was going on when tanks appeared on the streets of the capital in 1967, weeks before planned elections. A right-wing military coup had taken place, and everything was about to change.
Under the new rule, Greece became a police state, protests were outlawed and businesses were nationalised, among them the Postecoglou family furniture-making firm. Fearing for the future, Dimitris and wife Voula made the decision to get out, for the sake of their children – joining an exodus to Australia, a migration route taken by 180,000 people in the years since the end of World War Two.
Such was his age, Postecoglou has no real first-hand memory of the month-long trip to the other side of the world, accompanied by his parents and his elder sister Liz. “Not really,” he tells FourFourTwo now, thinking back to those formative years of his life. “We left Greece when I was five, and most of my memories are stories that were passed on, that kind of became images in my mind. My clear recollections of childhood begin when I started school at six or seven, but I’ve been told the story of our journey, the difficulties, and settling in Australia.
“Being young, I was shielded from all of it. My parents made the ultimate sacrifice. For all intents and purposes, we were refugees. We knew no one in Australia and my parents didn’t know the language, but they chose to give the opportunity of a better life to their kids rather than themselves, because it was a tough life for my parents.
“That stays with you, that resonates with you, you take that along with you in your life. I understood that to make good the sacrifice that my parents made, I needed to live a life that they wanted me to live.
“Football was the one thing that glued the whole family together. My journey in football allowed us to navigate the difficult
