Ange Postecoglou knows how hard it can be to fit in a long way from home. At the age of five, he moved with his family from Greece to Australia, a 30-day journey by boat to a place where they had no accommodation arranged, spoke none of the language and had no family or friends.
He tells a story about his father hearing of a mattress left outside a house, walking to pick it up, getting lost on the way home and being unable to ask anyone for directions. So he lugged the mattress around for hours until he found his way.
That journey, Postecoglou has been at pains to point out, was not made so his parents could have a better life. Staying put was the easier option. Instead, they moved solely so that he and his sister would have greater opportunities. They forewent their own wellbeing for their children.
Postecoglou has repeatedly discussed using his father’s sacrifice as motivation for his own life. One of his greatest wishes was that his son’s career would allow him to return to Europe. Three years after his father’s passing, Ange did just that.
From almost as early as he can remember, Postecoglou understood the power of football not just as pure sport but as a unifying force. As a child, he and his father would go to watch South Melbourne Hellas, a club formed in 1959 by Greek migrants as a means of maintaining a bond within that community. After a long week of hard work, this was his father’s chance to speak his native tongue and eat traditional Greek food.
For Ange, it was a chance to shine. He joined the club’s youth system at the age of nine and stayed with them for two decades as a player and four more as manager. He captained them to the league title, won consecutive titles as manager and took South Melbourne to the Club World Championship in 2000 after being crowned champions of Oceania the previous year. A managerial career was born that ultimately led to a 56-year-old Greek-Australian standing on the touchline at Celtic Park, arms folded as his team laboured past St Mirren.
When Postecoglou was appointed by Celtic last June, after a long saga in which Eddie Howe appeared to be the shoo-in candidate, he knew that few supporters had even heard his name, let alone trusted him with the keys to their club.
Neil Lennon’s tenure had been allowed to drift for so long that conventional wisdom suggested Celtic needed someone dependable to reorganise a creaking team but they chose the opposite strategy. Postecoglou was entering from left field. All he asked is that supporters take the same leap of faith their club had. Eight months on, almost all at Celtic Park are convinced.
Results make the biggest difference; it would be foolish to suggest anything else. The other aspects of Postecoglou’s personality would mean far less if his team had lost the majority of their matches. But after a slow start during which the new manager was still imprinting his style on the squad, Celtic are on the up again.
After finishing 25 points behind Rangers last season, they now hold a three-point lead at the top and have taken 60 points from a possible 66 in the league since the beginning of October. European exit to Bodo/Glimt was a significant setback, but fans are more than happy to focus on establishing dominance in Glasgow for now.
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That Japanese connection is potentially game-changing for Celtic because it represents a potential new frontier for their recruitment. Over the last few years, the club’s transfer market strategy had come in for serious stick. But without Champions League group stage participation, it was a hard sell. Now Celtic have a relatively low-cost (transfer fees and wages) avenue in an untapped market and a manager who knows what he’s looking for in it. And what of the “What if?” – could these players be shaped to flourish in a high-intensity, pressing system? How could far this go?
But if Celtic supporters have taken quickly to Postecoglou, that goes beyond what happens on the pitch. This was a community that had lost faith in the club’s hierarchy after the departure of Brendan Rodgers, the appointment of Lennon, the insinuation from the board that fans should be happy with their lot even when ceding dominance to Rangers. They admire the gruffness and plain-speaking of Postecoglou, a man who has walked into Celtic Park, detailed exactly how he hopes to achieve success and made it emphatically clear that he will not compromise on those principles for anyone.
More than anything, Postecoglou deliberately makes the point of discussing how lucky he is and how much he appreciates the chance to manage Celtic. That might sound a little twee but it matters here, particularly after Rodgers chose to leave for Leicester. He concedes that he is a transient figure in the context of Celtic’s permanence, which creates a responsibility to be manager of everything a football club embodies, not just the team. “Irrespective of whether you’ve been at this football club for five months, like some of us, or 10 years like some, we’re putting on a shirt that represents something,” he said after the funeral of Bertie Auld, one of Celtic’s Lisbon Lions.
This is not a schtick. Postecoglou understands his place in Celtic’s historical hierarchy and his role in reconnecting supporters with their club, but he is not projecting a false persona to impress. This is his personality. He regularly speaks of his coaching career as a gift that he cannot waste, of the need to make good on the sacrifice of his parents and the working-class values they instilled within him.
“Celtic’s whole background and why the club was actually formed was to feed the Irish immigrants,” Postecoglou said in an interview with Australian media outlet Stan Sports last month. “There was a purpose behind this club that’s stayed with it right to this day. For me that obviously resonates strongly being an immigrant in our own country. South Melbourne Hellas, Melbourne Croatia, Sydney Croatia – all these clubs were set up the same way. They weren’t set up solely to be football clubs, they were set up to actually help people adjust to life in a new land.”
Postecoglou clearly wants to be successful, but there are different ways to measure success. Win and they will remember you as a winner. Concentrate on connecting people – players, staff, supporters – and make winning a result of that and they might remember you as a hero. Celtic appointed a manager from the other side of the world, but they could not have found someone with ideals that aligned more closely with their own.
There were doubts; there are always doubts. Could a manager with no experience of European football really be parachuted into a club where the pressure and the noise had suffocated others and will suffocate more in the future? The lines about how your principles can shape a football team sound wonderful in theory, but practice is usually 10 times more complicated.
And now there are eight league games left. Nobody quite dares to jinx it but everybody is acutely aware that there is something to jinx. Given the goal difference advantage, Celtic could technically lose to Rangers on 3 April and regain their title. But win at Ibrox, and the what ifs quickly transform into what will surely bes. Dreams of domestic dominance and European progression that had been left strewn across the streets outside Celtic Park are slowing being rebuilt. Right now, there is no manager they would rather have rebuilding them.
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