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

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

When Tottenham beat Crystal Palace 2-1 on their travels two months later, and Postecoglou was on 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’s doing and go from there.”

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

If the above was all you knew about Postecoglou and Arteta, you might expect a north London derby at the Emirates Stadium tonight between two carbon-copy sides, each trying to implement the Guardiola playbook better than their opponents.

In a universe where Arsenal and Spurs are facsimiles of the same original, this game would be decided only by who are the more faithful version. But in reality, nothing could be further from the truth. These two coaches, while both associated with the same ideas and the same inspiration, have built teams who are radically different.

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

Tottenham games are defined by their openness and their unpredictability. Spurs are the most high-variance team in recent Premier League history. People tune in because anything can happen.

Following Postecoglou’s side is like being on a rollercoaster — in the dark. On a good day, they can beat four-in-a-row champions City, as they have done twice already 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 were 2-0 up, as they have been twice this season.

Spurs are the second top scorers in the 2024-25 Premier League (42 goals from 20 matches), but have lost half those fixtures. Which is why they are 13th in the 20-club table.

Postecoglou on the touchline earlier this month (Adam Davy/PA Images via Getty Images)

Arsenal are the polar opposite. You know exactly what you are going to get with them.

They have the best defence in the league, conceding just 18 league goals in their 20 matches so far. They had the best defence in 2023-24 too, allowing 29 in the 38 games.

So, while Spurs matches are open and unpredictable, Arsenal’s are meticulously planned.

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

Arsenal’s matches average just 2.65 xG each. The only teams whose games have a lower average for that metric are Everton and Nottingham Forest (both 2.38), two sides whose entire focus is on keeping it tight and playing on the break. Then at the other end of the scale, you have Spurs. Their games average a league-high 3.54 xG, ahead of Chelsea’s 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 the break then collapsed in the second half, conceding three goals in 18 minutes. It was the kind of risk Tottenham are especially exposed to given how 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 anticipated to be an open game. “We don’t,” he smiled. “Let’s keep it open, that way we entertain everyone, and hopefully get the result we want.”

It is impossible to imagine Arteta ever saying that about an Arsenal match. He is obsessed with control, he just prefers to call it ‘dominance’.

Here you can see the difference between Postecoglou’s thrilling but delicate Formula 1 car, and Arteta’s robust SUV.

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

So much of Arsenal’s success in recent years has been built on dead-ball situations. They are better at these than anyone else, especially since Arteta brought in Nicolas Jover as a specialist coach to oversee them. Something Postecoglou vowed last season he would not do. “Eventually, I will create a team that has success,” he said last May, “and it won’t be because of working on set pieces.” (Spurs did eventually bring in Nick Montgomery during the summer to run their set pieces.)

The contrast with Arsenal is obvious. And not just because Arteta’s team have scored three times from corners on their past two trips to Tottenham, winning both matches. There is a bigger debate here, about which aspects of football are important and which are not.

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

But for Arteta, football clearly is about exploiting every edge to try to win.

Arsenal, who have not won the Premier League since 2004, are relentless about leaving no stone unturned in their pursuit of success. Set pieces and the game’s so-called ‘dark arts’ may be part of that but he is obsessed with wringing the maximum from every single improvable detail.

Last summer while in the United States on a pre-season tour, Arteta was asked what Arsenal could do better in the coming campaign. He specifically referred to “restarts”. No Premier League team is more focused on marginal gains, tweaks and detail. It has felt at times this season that Arsenal have almost forgotten about their core principles, and the brand of football the club used to play, in pursuit of pushing every margin imaginable.

Spurs come at this from the opposite direction.

Their focus is all on mastering their Plan A, rather than making adjustments around the edges. The belief at Tottenham is that if they can nail their game plan, and deliver it with full physical power, nobody can live with them. They do not need to worry about adapting based on the next opponents when they can be the protagonists themselves. And the upside if it works is so big that the little details do not matter. Maximal gains, not marginal ones.

At the heart of this is the question of what tactics are actually for.

In Arteta’s pragmatic mind, every tactic is just a neutral tool to achieve a particular aim. At times under Arsene Wenger’s management from 1996 to 2018, Arsenal were accused of being romantic or artistic, of prioritising other goals than success itself. Nobody would say that about their current team. Everything they do is geared towards winning. Just as it was for Arteta when they low-blocked their way to lifting the FA Cup in his debut season five years ago.

Postecoglou and Arteta earlier this season (Nigel French/Sportsphoto/Allstar via Getty Images)

For Postecoglou, there is clearly a normative dimension, a sense that he needs his teams to play a certain way and to represent certain values. ‘The style’ is not only a means to an end but an end itself. It cannot be disposed of just when times get tough. (It is worth acknowledging here that Tottenham have tweaked their approach in the past few weeks, playing in a more conventional 4-2-3-1 as they finally come to terms with the impact of their injury crisis).

Remember when Spurs hosted Chelsea in November 2023? They scored first, then were hanging on to a 1-1 draw through much of the second half with just nine men. But they continued to defend on the halfway line, sticking with Postecoglou’s approach. Tottenham lost 4-1 in the end, conceding twice in added time, but they proved their commitment to his ideological principles. It was the foundational moment of their manager’s “It’s who we are, mate” football.

Last September, Arsenal were playing at Manchester City, 2-1 up at the break but down to 10 after Leandro Trossard was sent off. They took the exact opposite approach to defending a lead to Spurs that night against Chelsea, defending not on the halfway line but on the edge of their own penalty box. They came within seconds of seeing the match out for the win before City snatched an equaliser.

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

But should it really be that much of a shock? Some like to see Guardiola as a romantic figure but ultimately his career is defined by building relentless winning machines at three of the richest clubs in the world, Barcelona, Bayern Munich and now City. The style was the means, but never more than that.

There is plenty of flexibility too, as you can see from how much more physical City came between their 2018 and 2023 iterations. Arteta’s Arsenal are not radically different from how Guardiola teams play the game when he’s at his most pragmatic. Arteta has spent enough time alongside his fellow Spaniard 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 afar. It is Postecoglou who will test his ideas to destruction, even at the risk of losing his job, keeping playing the same way no matter the circumstances.

Because it is only Postecoglou, rather than Arteta, who thinks that his style of play can speak to a higher value or purpose.

Regardless of whether Guardiola himself would see it like that.

(Top photos: Getty Images)