Ange Postecoglou has said that Tottenham Hotspur have suffered “enormous setbacks” this season and he believes their problems can be traced back to how they approached the start of the 2024-25 campaign in the “wrong” way.
Tottenham are 14th in the Premier League table and have lost more than half of their games. They finished fifth in Postecoglou’s first season in charge and it now looks like they will not even be able to secure a top 10 finish in his second year. Tottenham are 15 points behind fourth-placed Chelsea, who they face on Thursday evening.
Spurs were eliminated by Aston Villa in the fourth round of the FA Cup and were thrashed by Liverpool in the second leg of their Carabao Cup semi-final. Their only chance of lifting silverware this season, and qualifying for the Champions League, is by winning the Europa League. The Athletic reported last week that Postecoglou’s future is in serious doubt due to their bad results.
Postecoglou has had to deal with an injury crisis this term with key players Guglielmo Vicario, Micky van de Ven, Cristian Romero, Dominic Solanke and Destiny Udogie all unavailable for long periods of time. Van de Ven has only made four appearances since October while Romero missed three months with a quad injury. When Spurs beat Elfsborg 3-0 in the Europa League on January 30, Postecoglou named two goalkeepers and five academy players on the bench due to their lack of senior options.
The Australian said that Spurs have shown “glimpses” of their quality but they have been “nowhere near it” in the league and it has been a “disappointing season”.
“My inkling is we probably got the start of the year wrong,” Postecoglou said in an interview with Australian broadcaster Optus Sport. “It is becoming increasingly challenging for footballers these days. They don’t get a traditional break and I just think we went into the season really hard. We probably underestimated the challenges of Europe this year with your two extra games and having a deep cup run. All those kinds of things and you add to the mix that we lost key players early on.
“From my perspective, it feels like we have been chasing our tails ever since. We haven’t been able to get ahead of the challenge. Every time we try to get steady ground something else happens that shifts. A lot of that goes back to the start of the year and we maybe would have taken a different approach knowing the season we had ahead.”
Postecoglou then said that the football schedule is “too demanding” when he was asked about the benefits of a potential winter break by former Australia international Mark Schwarzer.
“It’s not just on the continent they have a winter break but most of them only have one domestic cup competition,” he said. “Most of them give the teams in Europe a break before European games. Most of them have less than 20 teams in their top leagues. Then you add in the international schedule. There will become a breaking point.”
Tottenham take on Chelsea at Stamford Bridge on Thursday and then host Southampton this weekend before playing Eintracht Frankfurt in the first leg of their Europa League quarter-final next week.
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