Ange Postecoglou

He's my favourite manager in my Celtic supporting life (99/00 ish), bar none. Not just about what he's achieved but who he is as a person.

 

bosstecolglu = elite level manager
we are so lucky and proud as * to have him as boss. some team he will give us next season HH

 

He's just such a humble man who is loving the opportunity that Celtic have given him. Unlike other managers and footballers who've used Celtic as a stepping stone to another team I really do think we are his dream job, I really hope we are. He has a class about him that has everyone's respect, also looks like the sort of man you don't get on the wrong side of . Now get Saturday out the way go get a well earned rest and holiday and come back for next season recharged and ready to show Europe what you're all about.

 

Record reporting that we're giving the big man a long term deal

 

Make no mistake and don’t let any hun out there tell you otherwise. We know it and they know it.

 

Celtic are set to hold new contract talks with Ange Postecoglou as a reward for his debut season double-winning heroics.

The Aussie has upset the odds to return the title to Parkhead in his first year and just 12 months after the brutal collapse of the 10-in-a-row bid.

Celtic clinched the Premiership crown with a game to spare at Tannadice on Wednesday evening to set up a party at Parkhead in Saturday’s final game of the season against Motherwell.

Attention will then turn to the next stage of Postecoglou’s rebuild with a money-spinning place in the Champions League group stage now secure.

And the Hoops hierarchy plan to open talks with the boss himself and his representatives over the coming weeks as they look to tie the 56-year-old former Socceroos boss down for the long-term.

The Celtic board have been delighted with the progress the club has made on and off the pitch and know Postecoglou has been central to that.

After clinching the title with the 1-1 draw at Dundee United, Celtic will go directly into the group stages of the Champions League and will net a game-changing £40 million in the process.

Postecoglou initially penned a one-year rolling contract when he arrived from Japanese side Yokohma F Marinos last summer.

But the Celtic board want to reward him with improved terms and are also keen to open negotiations over a longer deal.

Postecoglou had won titles in Australia and Japan and now adds Scotland to that impressive list.

The 56-year-old was relatively unknown to Celtic fans when their club turned to him after a move for Eddie Howe collapsed last summer.

He rebuilt a squad that had run out of steam in their 10-in-a-row charge.

Postecoglou brought in the likes of Joe Hart, Carl Starfelt, Josip Juranovic, Kyogo Furuhashi, Liel Abada and Georgios Giakoumakis, while Cameron Carter-Vickers and Jota arrived on-loan with options to buy.

It was a rocky start as his new-look team took time to find their feet and fell out of the Champions League.

He kept faith in his style and it started to pay off on the park and then he strengthened his squad further in January with the captures of Daizen Maeda, Reo Hatate, Yosuke Ideguchi and Matt O’Riley.

 

The Japan Times

Celtic boss Ange Postecoglou silences doubters with unexpected run to Scottish Premiership crown

• 
  Celtic manager Ange Postecoglou defied expectations in Scotland this year the same way he did in previous stops in Australia and Japan. | REUTERS

May 12, 2022
Ange Postecoglou is back on top — not that those who believed in him expected anything different.

Nearly a year after his bombshell move from Yokohama F. Marinos to Celtic, the Australian coach has added yet another title to his distinguished resume by winning the Scottish Premiership, clinching the trophy with Wednesday’s 1-1 away draw against Dundee United.

Prior to arriving in Glasgow, Postecoglou’s personal silverware cabinet already featured league championships in Japan and Australia — as well as the 2015 Asian Cup that established him as one of the continent’s brightest talents in the dugout.

Now he has a domestic double in Europe to his credit, having won the Premiership as well as the Scottish League Cup in what many had anticipated would be a rebuilding year for the Hoops.

“If you had told me 12 months ago I’d be standing here — I wasn’t even sure I’d be on this continent let alone be manager of this football club,” Postecoglou told the BBC. “The dream was always to manage a famous club and try to make an impact. When something is almost a lifelong obsession and you finally get there, it’s hard to put into words.

“It almost feels like two seasons in one. We’ve jammed in a rebuilding season and a season to win. We had a lot of work to do, and with the support of everyone at the club, we got there.”

The title comes as joyous relief for Celtic fans who were in despair at the end of last season, sitting at the wrong end of a 25-point gap between themselves and archrival Rangers. But it’s also the ultimate vindication for those who have backed Postecoglou from the start.

The 56-year-old only emerged as a candidate to lead the storied club after Bournemouth legend Eddie Howe turned the job down, leading local media and fans to question whether Celtic was making the right move by approaching someone who many thought to be a complete unknown.

But as he did in Australia and Japan, Postecoglou turned doubters into believers. With characteristically unshakable confidence in his attacking style, he overcame early stumbles — including a narrow defeat to Rangers at Ibrox — and steered Celtic to the top of the table soon after the winter break.

That confidence extended from the technical area to the news conference podium, where Postecoglou deftly deflected jabs from Glasgow’s notoriously antagonistic sports media with his no-nonsense attitude and dry wit — endearing himself to Celtic fans who love nothing more than a fighter wearing their colors.

“Supporters sing songs about him, they parade his face on their social media accounts like a badge of pride, some have even bought up the black jumper he wears from the club shop to wear as a sartorial tribute,” wrote Vince Rugari in the Sydney Morning Herald.

“(His) methods are standing up in Glasgow, through the constant tension and turmoil of the Old Firm rivalry, despite all the predictions that Postecoglou might buckle in that unique environment.”

In Japan, Postecoglou has joined the likes of former Nagoya Grampus and Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger as well as Wim Jansen — who transitioned from Sanfrecce Hiroshima to Celtic and subsequently denied rival Rangers a 10th consecutive championship in 1998 — in an elite fraternity of J. League managers who found European success.

“He was the first to prove that an Asian manager could succeed in Europe,” tweeted freelance journalist Wataru Funaki, who covered Postecoglou closely during his time in Yokohama. “Over the past 4½ years, he has taught us what real football is, what we have to do to win every single game and the importance of believing.”

But perhaps more importantly, Postecoglou’s decision to bring over a quartet of Japanese players — three of whom had a significant impact on Celtic’s title run — has brought new attention to the J. League and potentially given Japanese soccer a boost in preparations for the upcoming FIFA World Cup.


Celtic’s (from left) Yosuke Ideguchi, Daizen Maeda, Reo Hatate and Kyogo Furuhashi all played roles in helping the Hoops win the league title. | KYODO

In the space of one season, summer arrival Kyogo Furuhashi and winter signings Daizen Maeda and Reo Hatate have become cult heroes at Celtic Park, each contributing to key results on the pitch — whether it was Furuhashi’s hat trick in his home debut on Aug. 8 against Dundee, Hatate’s double in the Feb. 2 Glasgow derby against Rangers or Daizen Maeda’s equalizer against Hearts on May 7 to assuage concerns of a late stumble.

The three combined for 20 goals and seven assists in the domestic league — figures that are all the more impressive when considering that Furuhashi missed several months with a hamstring injury and how little he and his Japanese teammates have rested since the J. League’s pandemic-impacted 2020 season.

Since June of that year, Furuhashi, Maeda and Hatate have each recorded just over 100 competitive appearances for their clubs and Japan’s senior and Olympic teams — figures exceeded only by Celtic captain Callum McGregor’s 125, according to independent Celtic media outlet The Cynic — and racked up astonishing amounts of time spent traveling between Scotland and Asia for international duty.

They — along with Yosuke Ideguchi, who also arrived in January but made just two league appearances due to injury — will have a full summer to relax and recuperate, a break that will ideally help them to prepare for what is perhaps the biggest prize Celtic clinched on Wednesday: a place in the Champions League group stage for the first time in five years.

The lack of Japanese players in Europe’s marquee club competition has been a major point of concern in recent seasons, with Liverpool’s Takumi Minamino a rare exception. But Celtic’s return will give the four players a chance to test themselves against some of the biggest clubs in the world — as well as make their case to Japan head coach Hajime Moriyasu for inclusion in the Samurai Blue’s squad for Qatar 2022.

“I’m looking forward to seeing how far Postecoglou’s style will go in the Champions League, and it will be an incredibly important experience for the Japanese players,” Funaki told From the Spot.

“If they cause a few upsets, it will be vindication for Postecoglou’s attacking philosophy, and it will show that F. Marinos and the players who worked under him all took the right path.”

While Celtic fans across the world will take the next few days to celebrate — including Saturday’s season finale-turned-coronation against Motherwell — Postecoglou is already looking ahead to the challenges that will face him this fall, declaring this week that he intends to lock down his transfer targets early and go into the preseason with a full squad.

It’s an ethic that is all too fitting for the man known affectionately to his players and fans as “The Boss.” Now, after seeing what he can do in just a year, they’ll be all too excited to watch him get back to work.

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/sports/2022/05/12/soccer/celtic-league-win-ange-postecoglou-boss/

 

If he's getting a long term deal, I hope he has had assurances about the budgets over the next few windows.

 

I just want to say thank you to Ange Postecoglou and congratulations to him on his earned success. I'm currently listening to your interviews.

Congratulations to Ange and your family, if they ever read the football forums. You've brought so much joy and happiness to Scotland from Australia.

I think of your words, "We never stop" and play it forward in my head in my own career. A true and real inspiration.

What a time it is to be a Celtic supporter.

Thank you.

 

Question for those in the know: What was the reaction like when Wim was appointed? I know it's probably difficult to compare due to social media and the Internet today, but would there have been widespread doubts similar to those expressed in this thread? And was he derided by the media similar to how Ange was?

Also, how would you compare the scale of the rebuilds? Obviously coming in and stopping 10IAR was a monumental achievement, but what was the state of the squad when he took over? I'm asking purely out of interest.

 

Would love to see us bringing in a few 10 million pound players with the Champions League money, to have a real crack at the CL.

 

Hard to measure because the lack of social media at the time and folk on here will probably have very different opinions but the general feeling I got at the time was one of cautious optimism. He had the unknown quantity about him like Ange did but arguably carried more favour given he had a background in European football and did a decent job at Feyenoord.

Can't really remember the newspapers deriding Wim the same way they did Ange. I'm sure he was mocked but they were generally too busy milking the huns bid for 10 in a row and David Murray's "£40 million financial war chest"...

The rebuilds were different for both managers. Ange pretty much had to stitch a brand new team together from scratch. Wim took a deflated Tommy Burns team then refined and improved it. Ange had the harder rebuild, but Wim had the higher stakes imo.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/n...ng-at-the-church-of-saint-angelos-postecoglou

 

I was about to say I'd have been raging if the board didn't give him a long term deal.

 

I very much doubt that will happen. The problem with most players that would cost that amount of money, and are of a known CL standard, isn't the transfer fee itself it's the wages most of them would be expecting (likely the same amount again, or even more, over the course of a 5 year contract) that we just can't compete with.

It's all well and good saying just break the wage structure for them, but it's the knock on effect it has, like if they bring in someone on more than our captain he would, rightfully, be expecting a rise, and if he's getting a rise why wouldn't the rest be expecting one? It's a recipe for disharmony in the squad, especially if the £10m player turns out to be a dud for us and the rest are delivering more for the team but getting paid significantly less.

I expect most of our signings will be in the £2-4m range, maybe with one (other than Jota and CCV) in the £5-6m, and the rest to be made up with loans in the vein of said Jota and CCV, hopefully with an option to buy.

 

"Postecoglou is already looking ahead to the challenges that will face him this fall, declaring this week that he intends to lock down his transfer targets early and go into the preseason with a full squad"

Loving this.. something we havnt done in a long long time, we might actually give ourselves a fighting chance next season.. make it happen Celtic and give the Big Man a new deal and full support..