by The story begins with Vince Grella, once of Blackburn Rovers as well as an international from Australia, recommending Ange Postecoglou to Frank Trimboli, one of the biggest football agents in Europe – and from there a managerial career began to take off.
Back in 2015, the current Tottenham Hotspur manager had only once coached outside of Europe, a brief spell back in 2008 in Greece, the country his family left for Australia decades earlier. . As manager of the Australian national team, he had won the AFC Asian Cup, the biggest win in the history of the Socceroos, but his ambition to make it in Europe was no closer to being achieved. He was not on the list of coaches that European clubs considered when making appointments, but that was about to change.
It happened by introducing former Arsenal and Sheffield Wednesday player Brian Marwood, who would become Postecoglou’s champion. Marwood was somewhat of an ally – the global head of football at City Football Group (CFG), now the 12-club global enterprise, whose mothership is Manchester City – the all-powerful team that will face Tottenham Postecoglou on Sunday.
“I will forever be indebted to Brian Marwood,” Postecoglou said on Friday, speaking at the club’s Hotspur Way headquarters. “He was the first person to notice me out in Oz. We started a relationship again when he continued my career and he was the one who pointed me towards Yokohama when I was in Australia.”
Back 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, was pushing Trimboli, another Australian from Italy, to consider representing Postecoglou.
Trimboli spent two months off and on 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 it to the Australian coaches in Europe. Trimboli himself had done the same as an agent despite similar doubts in his early days. The question then became where Postecoglou’s breakthrough might come from.
Trimboli identified CFG as a clear bridge for Postecoglou to prove himself to European executives who were not yet willing to give him a European job. Something of a managerial kingmaker, Marwood worked as a Nike executive after his own playing career ended and then joined CFG in the early days of the Abu Dhabi takeover. Marwood had visited Australia from time to time to check on CFG club Melbourne City, and knew something of Postecoglou’s success with Brisbane Roar. Trimboli made the introduction.
Marwood offered Postecoglou a job managing Japanese club Yokohama F Marinos in 2017. Trimboli’s co-head of football at the Base Soccer agency, Leon Angel, has been a long-term adviser to Arsene Wenger since the Frenchman arrived in England in 1996. Angel and Trimboli claimed that if the J-League good for Wenger’s career outside his native France, he could do the same for Postecoglou.
The only issue was that Postecoglou had just qualified for the 2018 World Cup finals with the Socceroos. However, his relationship with Football Australia was strained. He could not see a clear vision for the game in Australia. In December of that year he gave up the World Cup to move to Japan.
Postecoglou inherited a team that was in trouble and a squad that had doubts about the direction he wanted to take them. Unlike other clubs, only 20 percent of the Marinos were owned by CFG, with the rest controlled by Nissan, and Marwood had to insist on Postecoglou’s appointment rather than demand it. In his first season the club just avoided relegation. Second, in 2019, he won the J-League. The CFG machine hit the jackpot again.
The key moment in Postecoglou’s relationship with CFG is often identified as Marinos’ friendly against Manchester City in 2019 – pre-season for the Premier League club, and mid-season for the J-Leaguers. Postecoglou’s players had more possession than Pep Guardiola’s side – a 58 per cent share – as well as 607 passes to City’s 455. win Afterwards, Guardiola would rhapsodize about the performance of the Marinos.
But for Postecoglou, the big moment came when Marwood took a chance on him. His career was already over in Japan by the time City played there and the link with CFG’s then head of recruitment Mark Lawwell, now at Celtic, couldn’t have hurt. Mark Lawwell is the son of Peter, a prominent Celtic chief executive, who is now back at the club as chairman. Postecoglou would take over at Celtic in June 2021.
Postecoglou said CFG’s appointment at Marinos finally gave him an entry into the elite European game. He was able to visit Manchester and meet Guardiola and his assistant at the time Mikel Arteta. Most of all, he said it gave him access to the secret kingdom of CFG’s global database of players.
“I could log into their database and they had every footballer in the world tracked,” Postecoglou said. “It’s fair to say I wasn’t competing for the same players as them [City]. Our budget was a little different. But just being able to access the information they had at the time and being able to say, ‘This is what I need’. Talking to the people behind the scenes was brilliant. It especially allowed me to make decisions about foreign players … the world has changed now and most football clubs do their recruitment the same way. But for me back then it was a great revelation.”
For that game against City in 2019, the philosophy was the same as it probably will be on Sunday. Postecoglou does not want his team to take a step back just because of the reputation of the opposition. “We could have gone into that [2019] game,” Postecoglou recalled on Friday, “and he said, ‘We’ll see how we can try to beat Manchester City’. Or we can go in and say, ‘Let’s play our football and see where that takes us’. That’s what we did. I said to the boys, ‘Let’s go. Keep the ball. Press them. Be aggressive … and you know what? If we get smacked 6-0, we get out 6-0, but we are measured”.
The Marinos’ performance, he said, was a vindication of what has become a great season. Postecoglou found some recognition for himself, although it would be another four years before the two managers met again. “After that, some nice things were said,” said Postecoglou, “but then the next day people moved on and the circus left town and I was left in Yokohama.”
