In the halcyon early days of Ange Postecoglou’s Tottenham tenure, it was a joke he was happy to be a part of.

After his Spurs team won 2-0 away against Bournemouth in the third game of the 2023/24 season, analyst Joe Cole asked Postecoglou live on British broadcaster TNT Sports how he had already managed to get his full-backs into midfield and close turn to attack from there. Postecoglou smiled and pulled the trigger: “I’m just copying Pep, mate.”

When Tottenham beat Crystal Palace 2-1 on the road two months later and Postecoglou was top of the world, Sky Sports pundit Jamie Carragher joked with him that he was still just “copying Pep”. Postecoglou was happy to run with it. “I just study one game a week, see what he does and go from there.”

The only other manager who has been accused of copying Pep Guardiola as often is Mikel Arteta. And while Postecoglou was always at the very edge of Guardiola’s orbit, having managed Yokohama F. Marinos, the Japanese side of the City Football Group, Arteta was right at the heart of power. For three and a half years he sat at Guardiola’s right-hand man and acted as his sounding board and tactician at Manchester City. From there he went to Arsenal in December 2019 to build his own team.

If the above was all you knew about Postecoglou and Arteta, you could expect a north London derby at the Emirates Stadium tonight between two teams both looking to implement Guardiola’s playbook better than their opponents.

In a universe where Arsenal and Spurs Are With facsimiles of the same original, this game would be decided solely by who is the more faithful version. But in reality, nothing could be further from the truth. Although these two coaches have the same ideas and inspiration, they have built teams that are completely different.

The experience of watching both this season was almost like watching two different sports.

Tottenham games are characterized by their openness and unpredictability. Spurs are the team with the highest variance in recent Premier League history. People tune in because anything can happen.

Following the Postecoglou site is like riding a rollercoaster – in the dark. On a good day they can beat four-time champions City, as they have done twice this season, including 4-0 in Manchester. On a bad day they can lose to Ipswich Town or Crystal Palace. They can be defeated in games where they have a 2-0 lead, which has already happened twice this season.

Spurs are the second top scorer in the 2024-25 Premier League (42 goals from 20 games) but have lost half of those games. That’s why they are in 13th place in the 20-club table.

Arsenal is the exact opposite. You know exactly what you will achieve with them.

They have the best defense in the league and have only conceded 18 league goals in their 20 games so far. They also had the best defense in the 2023/24 season and allowed 29 in the 38 games.

While Spurs’ games are open and unpredictable, Arsenal’s games are meticulously planned.

Rank all 20 Premier League clubs by total expected goals (xG) – for and against – in their top games so far this season and you’ll find the two north London teams at opposite ends of the table.

Arsenal’s games average just 2.65 xG each. The only teams whose games have a lower average on this metric are Everton and Nottingham Forest (both 2.38), two teams whose entire focus is on staying tight and playing on the counterattack. At the other end of the scale are the Spurs. The average of their games is a league-high 3.54 xG, ahead of Chelsea with 3.47. On this basis, Tottenham are the most entertaining team in the country.

Remember Spurs’ 3-2 defeat at Brighton in October 2024? The visitors were 2-0 up at half-time, then collapsed in the second half, conceding three goals in 18 minutes. It was the kind of risk Tottenham are particularly exposed to given the way they play and the kind of result Arsenal avoid.

But before kick-off that day, Postecoglou was asked on Sky Sports how he planned for Spurs to control what was expected to be an open game. “We don’t,” he smiled. “Let’s keep it open so we can keep everyone entertained and hopefully get the outcome we want.”

It’s impossible to imagine Arteta ever saying that about an Arsenal game. He’s obsessed with control, he just prefers to call it “dominance.”

Here you can tell the difference between Postecoglou’s exciting but fragile Formula 1 car and Arteta’s sturdy SUV.

You can also look at their contrasting approach to set pieces.

Much of Arsenal’s success in recent years has come from dead balls. They are better at it than anyone else, especially since Arteta hired Nicolas Jover as a specialist coach to look after them. Something Postecoglou swore he wouldn’t do last season. “At some point I will build a team that has success,” he said last May, “and it won’t be because of working on set pieces.” (Spores did eventually bring in Nick Montgomery to manage their set pieces in the summer.)

The contrast with Arsenal is obvious. And not just because Arteta’s team scored three times from corners in their last two games at Tottenham and won both games. There is a larger debate here about which aspects of football are important and which are not.

Even now, Postecoglou finds it difficult to hide his feelings about this side of the game. “I know I’m on my own there, I don’t like them,” he admitted in November, after another row over a corner conceded by Spurs. “It looks like a (rugby) scrum. I just don’t think that’s what football is about.”

But for Arteta, football is clearly about taking every advantage to win.

Arsenal, who have not won the Premier League since 2004, are relentlessly leaving no stone unturned in their pursuit of success. Set pieces and the so-called “dark arts” of the game may be part of it, but he is obsessed with getting the most out of every single detail that needs improvement.

Last summer, during a pre-season tour in the US, Arteta was asked what Arsenal could do better in the coming season. He specifically referred to “reboots.” No Premier League team puts more emphasis on minor improvements, tweaks and details. At times this season it felt like Arsenal had almost forgotten their core principles and the style of football the club used to play in order to gain every possible advantage.

The spores come from the opposite direction here.

Their focus is solely on mastering their Plan A rather than making adjustments around the edges. Tottenham believe they can do it her Developing a game plan and implementing it with full physical strength is something no one can live with. They don’t have to worry about adapting to the next opponents when they can be the protagonists themselves. And the advantage when it works is so great that the small details don’t matter. Maximum profits, not marginal ones.

The central question is what tactics actually serve.

For Arteta, every tactic is just a neutral tool to achieve a specific goal. Under Arsene Wenger’s management from 1996 to 2018, Arsenal were at times accused of being romantic or artistic and prioritizing goals other than success itself. Nobody would say that about their current team. Everything they do is aimed at winning. Just like it was for Arteta when they blocked his path to winning the FA Cup in his debut season five years ago.

For Postecoglou there is clearly a normative dimension, the feeling that he needs his teams to play a certain way and represent certain values. “Style” is not just a means to an end, but an end itself. It cannot be discarded when times get tough. (It’s worth acknowledging here that Tottenham have In recent weeks they have tweaked their approach, playing in a more conventional 4-2-3-1 as they finally deal with the effects of their injury crisis.

Remember when Spurs hosted Chelsea in November 2023? They scored first, but then held on to a 1-1 draw with just nine players for most of the second half. But they continued to defend on the halfway line and stuck to Postecoglou’s approach. Tottenham ended up losing 4-1 and conceding two goals in stoppage time, but they proved that they remained true to their ideological principles. It was the defining moment for their manager’s “it’s who we are, mate” brand of football.

Last September Arsenal played at Manchester City, trailing 2-1 at half-time but down to 10 points after Leandro Trossard was sent off. That night against Chelsea they took the exact opposite approach to defending Spurs’ lead, defending not on the halfway line but on the edge of their own penalty area. They had tied the game with just a few seconds left before City equalized.

It was a surprise to some that Guardiola’s long-time apprentice used Jose Mourinho-style football against him, but nobody at Arsenal would have cared if it had worked.

But should it really come as such a big shock? Some like to see Guardiola as a romantic figure, but ultimately his career is defined by building tireless winning machines at three of the world’s richest clubs, Barcelona, ​​Bayern Munich and now City. Style was the means, but never more.

There’s also a lot of flexibility, as you can see by how much more physical City has become between the 2018 and 2023 iterations. Arteta’s Arsenal is not fundamentally different from the way Guardiola’s teams play the game when he is at his most pragmatic. Arteta has spent enough time with his compatriot to know where his true priorities lie.

Perhaps it is Postecoglou who sees a different side to Guardiola; the idealism, the romanticism that we like to project onto the city manager from a distance. It is Postecoglou who tests his ideas to the point of destruction, even at the risk of losing his job, and who continues to play the same way no matter what.

Because only Postecoglou, and not Arteta, believes his style of play can speak to a greater value or purpose.

Regardless of whether Guardiola himself would see it that way.

(Top photos: Getty Images)