Tottenham Hotspur are winners, Manchester United are losers, and the season has turned on its head.
All the preparatory groundwork and analysis was for nothing. When the theoretical becomes reality, when the purity of the emotion hits, everything changes.
Ange Postecoglou’s second-season promise has become legendary. His absurd tactical journey is now a rich, folkloric part of Tottenham history. The painful journey is recast as glorious, romantic, inevitable.
"I ALWAYS win things in my second year" 👀
— Sky Sports Premier League (@SkySportsPL) September 15, 2024
Ange Postecoglou with a big statement 💥 pic.twitter.com/FEQq0dpIik
He is a champion and a man entirely vindicated, so much so he even pulled off an audacious reframing of the 2024/25 season after the game, merrily rewriting history.
“I just had this thing inside me, that finishing third wasn’t going to change this football club,” he told TNT Sports after the game.
“The only thing that was going to change this football club was us winning something.”
The Premier League never really mattered, it turns out. This was all part of the master-plan, a deep and unshakable belief only Postecoglou, messianic, could see.
Ange is no clown.
And it’s a convincing pitch, not just because Spurs’ tactical ideologue has shown with gritty backs-to-the-wall Europa League knockout performances that he is willing to adapt, but because there is something about winning silverware that is instantly, magically transformative.
Postecoglou said that winning the first trophy “gets the monkey off their back,” creating the conditions for a new football culture. He said he is building a team for the next “four, five, six years”.
He said he wants to stay.
Maybe all of those things are now true. Maybe those things become true simply because the Europa League-winning manager said so, because Ange winning silverware by abandoning Ange-ball is too good a story to be refuted.
But even if it does turn out to be the end and not the beginning, the high point that obliterates all those lows, that will be enough.
Where Ruben Amorim sits in his Man Utd journey is anyone’s guess.
In typical style he was bullish, he was gruesomely honest, after the game. He won’t quit. But he’ll also leave without compensation if that’s what the board want.
It was at best unhelpful, opening the club to questions it does not want to answer.
But they, too, must confront the new reality.
United’s Europa League campaign has always been the life raft, the insulation, the excuse. Not winning it makes the entire process a pointless distraction and leaves Amorim with no cover to hide a miserable and perhaps unforgivable record in his first six months as manager.
He won 24 points from 26 Premier League games in charge. In most seasons that is relegation form.
All talk of an Erik ten Hag hangover, of poor recruitment, of the difficulties changing things mid-season, has subsided. Nothing can explain away a record that bad.
Defeat in the Europa League final merely confirms this is the worst Man Utd season in 50 years - and worst managerial performance, too.
Of course, defeat also means there will be no Champions League cash windfall to make the summer rebuild easier, although that isn’t necessarily a bad outcome.
A cluttered autumn defined by morale-sapping defeats against Europe’s elite would probably have undermined Amorim further, whereas now he can enjoy free midweeks to drill those idiosyncratic tactical demands into muscle memory.
That’s the theory, but the reality will probably be a lot worse.
There is quite simply no example in modern football history of a manager starting this badly and surviving. Some beginnings are just too damaging, and faith in Amorim must already be waning, particularly among a squad that will largely be forced to stay together for lack of interest elsewhere.
Man Utd have endured failure after failure over the last ten years. They’re used to it. And yet until now they always had the cups to soften the landing, had trophy lifts in May to convince the players that dawn was rising.
Not anymore.
Amorim has from the fans and the board. But cup finals cause ruptures, colouring perceptions that seemed so reasonable right up until the gut punch of defeat.
The morning after the night before, he is dangling by a thread.
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