Think back to this time last year. After 10 Premier League games, Ange Postecoglou looked like he could walk on water.
Tottenham Hotspur had started the season, started the whole Postecoglou era, better than anyone could ever have expected. Eight wins, two draws, 26 points, top of the table, on top of the world. They were playing a brand of football their fans had been dreaming of for years — dazzlingly bright light after years in the footballing darkness.
It felt vaguely miraculous. Everyone was prepared for early-season teething pains, a learning curve, getting used to life without Harry Kane. But Spurs had skipped all that. They started as if they had been doing this for years. Postecoglou looked like he had fixed the whole football club within weeks of arriving from Scottish champions Celtic.
Compare that to where Tottenham are today.
You can just take a quick look at the league table. At this point in 2023, Spurs were two points clear of Arsenal and Manchester City. They were picking up points so fast, they were on track for a 98-point season — which would have been their best ever, by a distance.
Spurs flew out of the traps in Postecoglou’s first season (Visionhaus/Getty Images)
But now? Spurs are seventh, with 16 points, 10 fewer than they had 10 games into last season. They are seven points behind champions City and nine adrift of first-placed Liverpool. Last season they were leading the field, with only open road ahead of them. Now there are faster cars they will somehow have to catch up to.
The honeymoon period of Postecoglou at Tottenham — which lasted almost three months — is over. The halo effect has dissipated. The Australian has lost his sheen of divinity. He stands in front of Spurs fans now as a flawed, human figure, as contested as any manager in the club’s past. Many of the fans still love him. Some are impatient with him, as the reaction to last month’s away defeats at Brighton and Crystal Palace showed. Plenty are caught in the middle.
But just because Tottenham have not started this season as well as they did the previous one, it does not necessarily follow that they are a worse team today than they were last November. In fact, take a look under the bonnet and you will see that Spurs are better now than they were at this stage of last season. More shots, more xG per game and more goals scored; fewer shots conceded, fewer xG conceded, fewer goals conceded. They lose the ball less in their own defensive third, and win more high turnovers than ever before. By every useful metric, they are a better team now than 12 months ago.
Remember that 2023-24 was about more than just those first 10 games. As thrilling as they were, Spurs probably overperformed during that hot-streak start. Half of their eight wins were by single-goal margins. They benefited hugely from a VAR error against Liverpool in one of those four matches. And when things went wrong — starting with the 4-1 home defeat against Chelsea a year ago today — they took months to recover.
What stands out about that Monday night now, with the benefit of hindsight, was how brittle Tottenham were.
They lost Micky van de Ven to a hamstring injury and James Maddison to an ankle problem, while Cristian Romero and Destiny Udogie were both sent off. Of course, any team would suffer from losing four in-form first-teamers during one game under any circumstances. Especially given that Van de Ven would be out for two months and Maddison almost three. But Postecoglou soon found himself having to call on players who would not otherwise have been starters: Eric Dier, Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg, Emerson Royal, Giovani Lo Celso, Bryan Gil. None of those five are still at the club (although Gil is only out on loan, at Girona in La Liga).
The team today is far more recognisably Postecoglou’s than it was last season.
Injuries to Van de Ven and Maddison in the same game derailed Spurs in 2023-24 (Chris Lee/Getty Images)
Tottenham have not had a crisis comparable to that one so far this year, and when they have had injuries they have coped. They look less reliant on their best individuals than they were last season.
Van de Ven got injured early on against Manchester City a week ago but Radu Dragusin has comfortably slotted in for the two games since. Son Heung-min has missed games — and has not always looked 100 per cent when he has been available — but Spurs have found a way to score goals in his absence. Maddison, on whom the team almost looked too dependent at the start of last season, has not started the past two games. But with a different tactical balance, his colleagues found a way to win them both.
To see how much stronger the squad is now, just compare that Carabao Cup win over City last Wednesday with the FA Cup defeat against them in January.
That Friday night, City brought on Belgium internationals Jeremy Doku and Kevin De Bruyne in the second half. Postecoglou brought on reserve midfielder Oliver Skipp, Maddison to end his long lay-off and then teenager Dane Scarlett. City scored the winner with two minutes left.
Last week, Postecoglou turned to Udogie after Van de Ven’s first-half injury, then Yves Bissouma at half-time to help his team regain a footing in midfield, then Ben Davies to protect Romero, and finally Richarlison and Mikey Moore to maintain Spurs’ threat on the break. Spurs won 2-1, and should have scored more goals in the second half than they did. The difference in depth is there for all to see.
So last week, Postecoglou was asked whether Spurs were a better team now than they had been during their eye-catching start to his debut season. He admitted that he knew last season’s miraculous early form would never last, and that Tottenham are far more robust now.
“We’re more consistent in our football, more consistent in our performances,” Postecoglou told reporters. “The results last year were great and we were playing with a lot of enthusiasm and real energy. I knew that wasn’t sustainable and pretty quickly we found that out, for several reasons. Whereas this year we’ve already had injury disruptions and handled them a lot better. We’ve got a more well-rounded squad to handle what’s ahead of us. We’ve got a heavier games programme, but we’ve held together. We’re in a better place — but we need to be.”
So what does this better place look like?
Check out this table for starters, which shows how Tottenham compare between this season and the previous one. In all the key metrics, they are better now than they were then…
Let’s start with the ball.
‘Angeball’ is nothing if it is not a plan for proactive attacking football. It exists to create chances and score goals. And at times last season, it looked perfectly calibrated for that. But as the season went on, Spurs started to get bogged down. They stopped cutting through opponents, and by the end just resembled any other Premier League team who wanted to keep the ball and play through the thirds.
Of course, 10 games into this season is not a big data set, and we know from last year’s experience that it is not necessarily predictive of the remaining (almost) three-quarters of the season. But, so far, Spurs are the best attacking team in the division.
They have scored the most Premier League goals, with 22, ahead of Manchester City (21) and Chelsea (20). If you think that is too subject to variance and would rather look at expected goals (xG), you will find Spurs are also top there — their 20.13 xG (or 2.01 per game) puts them narrowly ahead of City (20.07), with a gap to third-placed Liverpool (18.43). Or if you want to look at simple total shots, Spurs are second to City, with 172 to their 197.
Compare this to the recent past and you can see the huge improvement.
If Spurs stay just above 2.0 xG per game, that will be by far their best record in the time for which we have solid data. Last season, they averaged 1.81 xG per game — this is 11 per cent better than that. Even in the peak Mauricio Pochettino years, the average was significantly lower: 1.72 in 2017-18, 1.68 in 2016-17.
Spurs celebrate the first of their three goals at Manchester United in September (Catherine Ivill/Getty Images)
So what explains Spurs’ improvements?
When Postecoglou was discussing this last week he said that “players have developed in the last 12 months to another level” and he mentioned two in particular: Brennan Johnson and Dejan Kulusevski.
Last season, those two effectively rotated at the same position on the right wing, although Johnson played a few games on the left, and Kulusevski filled in as a midfielder during the autumn injury crisis.
This time, the thinking has been much clearer. Johnson is the first-choice right-winger, trusted to play high and wide and stretch opponents. Kulusevski has made himself first choice as the right-sided No 8, driving Tottenham forward through the middle of the pitch. Johnson has seven goals already in all competitions and is showing the confidence that comes with always being in the team. Kulusevski also looks liberated by the new role. With two goals and five assists in 15 appearances, he has been comfortably their best player.
This simple change has unlocked Spurs overall. If you look at this graphic below using The Athletic’s playstyle metrics — which outlines how a team look to play compared with Europe’s top seven domestic leagues — you can see they are more efficient in their use of the ball this season. They circulate the ball less (Circulate: 68 out of 99) and attack faster (Patient attack: 83 out of 99). And with a more orthodox winger on the right, rather than someone who always wants to drift inside, they play more through wide areas, progressing the ball through the middle far less often (Central progression: 35 out of 99).
That graphic also points to another big improvement from last season to this one: they are far better at chance prevention (measured by non-penalty xG conceded per 90) than they used to be.
Looking firstly at goals conceded, Spurs are on 11 from their 10 games, joint-fourth best in the league behind Liverpool, Nottingham Forest and Newcastle. If we go by xG conceded per game, they are a bit further back in seventh, although on shots conceded they are joint second-best, alongside Liverpool and behind only City.
This is an even more dramatic improvement than in Tottenham’s attacking numbers. Last season, they were too defensively porous to achieve anything, especially vulnerable against both set pieces and counter-attacks. They conceded 61 goals, more than twice as many as Arsenal (29), even more than Crystal Palace (who finished 10th), Everton (15th) and Manchester United (eighth). Conceding 1.7 xG per game was their poorest return in Opta history, even worse than the brief Nuno Espirito Santo era (1.42), the start to 2019-20 that doomed Pochettino (1.50) or Jose Mourinho’s share of that same season (1.44).
But now that number has come down to 1.16, and Spurs have a solid defensive base again. They have clearly tightened up on set pieces, and even though they conceded from a corner against Aston Villa on Sunday, their overall record in those situations is better than it was last season — they have scored more than they have conceded on set pieces so far.
Spurs have the fourth-best defensive record in this season’s Premier League (Sebastian Frej/Getty Images)
There have been moments when Spurs have been cut through on the counter — especially against Leicester and Newcastle at the start of the season — but they are better in these situations too. This was something Van de Ven pointed to during a press conference before the Europa League game against AZ Alkmaar when asked to compare 2024-25 Tottenham with last season’s version.
“This season, we have more control of the games,” Van de Ven said. “Last season, you saw in a lot of games that we lost control a little bit. Also, when we lost the ball we were quite open and got a lot of counter-attacks. We know better positions for the players and I think players help each other more than maybe we did last season.”
This is clearly a reference to Spurs’ organisation without the ball, and by eye this is better now than it was last year. Tottenham’s PPDA figure is also down, meaning that they press with more intensity and allow opponents less time on the ball.
Put all of this data together and you can see they are far better at both ends of the pitch than they were last year. They are comfortably in xG credit, in the sense that their xG-for far outstrips their xG-against.
The next graph shows that Spurs’ xG credit now is better even than it was in the peak Pochettino years. The only time it was better than it has been this season was during Antonio Conte’s part of the 2021-22 season, as he took over a team going nowhere in early November and propelled them up into a fourth-place finish. This is what a team functioning well looks like. Far more so than going on a hot streak, like Tottenham did at the start of last season.
Remember too that these figures are for Premier League games.
So far this season, Spurs have had 10 of those, with another five in the cups — two in the Carabao Cup and three in the Europa League. They have won all five of those latter fixtures, a feat of resource allocation that Tottenham never had to concern themselves with in 2023-24.
So where will this take them?
Of course, this team are still far from perfect. Their away form is inconsistent, winning just one of their five league games on the road. That may eventually be the difference between finishing in the top four and not. Only time will tell whether the second-half collapse from two up at Brighton to lose 3-2 was a freak occurrence or something more fundamental.
Postecoglou watches his team celebrate beating Aston Villa (Jacques Feeney/Getty Images)
But what we can say from our limited vantage point is that Tottenham look more complete, more robust, more identifiably belonging to the manager than they did last year. They have the depth to change games and maybe even to survive bumps along the road. They are better with the ball and without it than they were last season, and going forward they are better than any Spurs team of recent years.
Nobody knows where this season will end up but if there is another disaster along the way, like that Chelsea game one year ago, they look better equipped to survive it.
And while they have not flown out of the blocks this season, they might just be picking up speed.
Additional reporting: Mark Carey, Duncan Alexander
(Photos: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)
Read the full article here