Football is changing. Will Nottingham Forest manager Ange Postecoglou adapt, or perish?

Postecoglou experienced some of this darkness in the Europa League last season, partly due to the necessity of injury. It’s not his job, but it served a purpose. Now he’s back to where he feels most comfortable: standing proudly in the crossfire.

While football is moving in one direction – the direction in which Postecoglou’s beloved predecessor at Nottingham Forest, Nuno Espirito Santo, led them to great success – it is taking them in the other.

The problem is that Forest are winless after their first seven games and their fanbase can’t stand the sight of him. You could see and hear the crowd turning on him as soon as they conceded the third goal of their 3-2 Europa League defeat to FC Midtjylland last week.

They have been praying for him to go and talking about him every day since then. – check social media yourself; They get progressively worse and more personal.

Personal attacks aside, you can kind of understand why. They never wanted Nuno to leave and Ange to come. They saw what happened at Spurs from afar; Defensive laxity, weakness at set-pieces, long periods of possession without reward, and they feared this would happen to them. There is.

Postecoglou has made the worst start to a new Forest coach in 100 years. He is the manager with the most defeats among managers in Europe’s top five leagues this calendar year. The solidity they had at the back is gone and they are now set for a relegation battle after spending most of last season in the UEFA Champions League.

The primary measure of a coach’s success is results. When the results are not there, the coach needs to make an explanation as to why they are not winning and why they should continue to push their ideas if they are not going to change.

Postecoglou can also point to other figures: Forest are No. 1 in the Premier League for successful passes in the opposition half, passes in the final third, passes into the opposition penalty area and passes from more than 10 in open play. They also rank second in forward passes and fifth in ball control. In fact, they are a bit unlucky not to win at least one of these seven matches. So when Postecoglou insists the goals will come soon, you can see where he’s coming from.

And you know… It’s only been seven games. If he were sacked today it would be one of the shortest tenures in Premier League history.

Forest’s dramatic identity shift from the comfort of Nunoball to the risk of Angeball was never going to go smoothly, especially without pre-season. The weight of expectations further complicates matters: team owner Evangelos Marinakis loaned Postecoglou to win the Europa League. But Forest cannot afford to collapse domestically while chasing Europe and have yet to prove they can balance the two.

Another thing Postecoglou can point to is his past: His teams are often going through a tough patch when he takes over, and there’s always a trophy on the other side. It’s worth examining. And that’s actually his biggest problem, and explains why he’s become such a polarizing figure.

In Australia he is probably the greatest coach in our sporting history. His achievements speak for themselves. But his performance in England is meaningless. In their view, his successes were achieved in fewer countries, against easier opponents, and are therefore not valid. So the question arises: ‘What have you done for me lately?’ And in the Premier League, the correct answer is: not much. His fifth-place finish with Tottenham in 2023-24 is actually a long time ago. Since then their team has lost many matches. The conversation ends there.

Believers believe in exactly what he has accomplished in the past, which tells them he can do it again. They think there were extenuating circumstances at Spurs last season, it’s a disaster Still He received his first trophy after 17 years. They love the way he defends himself and his beliefs.

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On the contrary, skeptics are not prepared to grant him any favors because they see no reason to do so. They are more likely to see him as someone who ’emerged’ at the highest level. They just see the same problems that Spurs repeated at Forest.

This makes him the target of more ridicule than ever before. Bullish press conferences, once exhilarating, now seem hollow; His sermons sound self-indulgent, with no consequences, no reason to believe they will come.

One thing is certain in all this: Postecoglou will not change. He will live and die by the ideas that took him to the Premier League because they are part of him, for better or worse. The question of whether they are still working in an era when big ideas are long gone will decide their fate and perhaps say something about football itself.

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