Tottenham are languishing in 18th place in the Premier League table.
Teddy Sheringham, who spent eight years at Tottenham across two separate spells and understands the club’s operational structure with reasonable clarity, has articulated what increasingly appears obvious to anyone observing Spurs’ trajectory. He is “mystified” by the decision to sack Ange Postecoglou.
The phrasing carries particular weight coming from a Tottenham legend. Sheringham is not prone to theatrical pronouncement. His confusion is genuine. It also represents the first truly honest assessment of the most consequential decision made at Hotspur Way in recent memory. Here is what he told The Standard.
“Ange Postecoglou must still be sitting at home thinking, ‘how did I lose my Tottenham job?’ I mean, he told everyone he was going to win something in two years, and he did…
“They (Tottenham) haven’t won something for a long, long time so when he’s won the club a trophy, he’s somehow lost his job. Why is he still not in charge?
“I understand the league position last season wasn’t great, but he put all his eggs in one basket to win something, because he wanted to win something. We all want to win something. I’m still mystified on that decision to replace him to this day.”
The weight of expectations!
The context matters tremendously. Postecoglou arrived at a club that had failed to win silverware for 17 years. The weight of that drought, the accumulated disappointment, and the psychological scarring of repeated near-misses and false dawns all hung over the institution like a fog that no amount of tactical innovation had managed to pierce. Ange not merely promised to deliver silverware within two years of arrival. He delivered it. The Europa League triumph in May 2025 represented the club’s first major trophy since the 2008 League Cup. By any objective measure, he had accomplished what had eluded every manager preceding him across seventeen barren years.
Yet within three weeks of that achievement, he was unemployed. The narrative provided by the club’s hierarchy focused on Premier League form, citing 22 defeats and a 17th-place finish as justification for immediate dismissal. The argument carried superficial logic. Domestic consistency matters. Top-flight security provides the foundation upon which European competition can be built. Yet, the timing was, let’s say absurd.
A manager who had just delivered continental silverware and secured Champions League qualification through that achievement was being dismissed because his domestic campaign fell short of expectations. Fair, yet not so fair.
What really captures the absurdity is this fact. He did not lose his job through failure. He lost it through success that fell short of simultaneous standards applied retroactively. Had Ange not won the Europa League, his dismissal would be comprehensible. The club would say, “We believed he could deliver on multiple fronts. He did not. We are making a change.” Instead, they sacked a manager immediately after he delivered exactly what he had promised to deliver.