We’re already four games into the season so it’s surely fast approaching the time when at least one Premier League club panics and sacks its clearly irredeemably flawed manager.
There is, happily, no shortage of candidates this season and we’d be amazed not to see at least one or two clubs make a desperate move in and around the November international break.
But who will those moves see come in? It will definitely be these guys. Yes, we can exclusively reveal the next manager for all 20 Premier League clubs. Make a note, because all of this are absolute certainties with almost no chance of looking very stupid quite soon (or in some cases, already).
Arsenal: Cesc Fabregas
It seems unlikely it will be Arsenal’s decision as to when Mikel Arteta needs replacing, so brilliant is the job he’s currently doing. When it does come time for Arteta and Arsenal to part, it’s likely he’s either given in and decided to go to Man City on the basis that if you can’t beat them, re-join them, or been spirited away by Barcelona, who remain a) keen observers of Arteta’s progress and b) enormously fond of a managerial change.
Or he may simply decide a la Klopp that he’s had enough of prowling Premier League touchlines half a Richard Keys-baiting yard outside his technical area. He might just walk away.
But if it is indeed any of those or other similar scenarios, Arsenal will be seeking continuity. Evolution not revolution. So who better than a cerebral Spanish midfielder who already knows the club? Fabregas is the perfect choice for a club that is already as we speak proving itself capable of upending the truism that making former players managers generally goes tits up.
Of course, Fabregas’ chances of success will rest on being able to retain the services of Arsenal’s current set-piece coach. If he can’t do that? It’s so Jover.
READ: 16 Conclusions on Tottenham 0-1 Arsenal
Aston Villa: Thomas Tuchel
Doesn’t feel like a thing anyone needs to worry about all that much for a good while, with the match of club and manager here feeling like it’s absolutely perfect. Unai Emery appears to be that absolute sweet-spot of a manager for a club like Villa: plenty good enough to elevate them into the elite without being too susceptible to having his head turned and being whisked away by one of the super-clubs.
He’s a very good manager, but not a particularly sexy one. And that’s great for Villa, but makes life very hard for us. It’s impossible to even make a sensible prediction about when this might happen, but it does seem reasonable to assume we’re talking about an Aston Villa that offers far greater appeal to a far wider range of managers than the Gerrard-schooled relegation scrabblers Emery himself inherited.
We’re pretty sure Thomas Tuchel is going to end up back in England at some point, but aren’t quite convinced the very biggest clubs will touch him. Just too spiky and awkward. But he would nevertheless represent a big-name coup for a team just outside that gilded elite. It does appear inevitable that he will one day manage Tottenham, but that might just be because he’s previously managed Chelsea and that does seem to make it mandatory. An upwardly mobile Villa might be a better fit.
Bournemouth: Inigo Perez
All things happen for a reason. Was supposed to join Andoni Iraola at Bournemouth as assistant manager but couldn’t because of work-permit issues. Six months later, found himself instead back at their former club Rayo Vallecano and this time in charge of proceedings himself.
Iraola has done the business for Bournemouth, and it’s far more likely at this point that Iraola is pinched than sacked. It stands to reason, therefore, that Bournemouth’s next appointment should therefore be of the ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ variety and ‘young Spanish Rayo Vallecano coach’ is obviously unimprovably similar to Iraola even if he hadn’t already worked with him.
Brentford: Graham Potter
Genuinely unpleasant to even think about a Brentford team in the Premier League without Thomas Frank and his hair running things from the sidelines. It’s just not something that any of us are really prepared for. He’s part of the furniture and a huge factor in Brentford even being here in Our League at all, never mind as an absolute fixture like they are now.
We often find ourselves pondering precisely how and where Graham Potter makes his return to top-flight management, and it strikes us now that this might be a decent fit. Potter would perhaps consider it beneath him, but the more time that passes the more willing he may have to become to swallow his pride, and a well-run club beginning with the letter B in the south of England that got itself promoted playing The Right Way before establishing itself as a solid Premier League side would at least have the benefit of familiarity. They even play in stripes. It’s basically perfect, if you think about it.
Brighton: Kosta Runjaic
Overachieving coaches punching above their weight in Europe are the order of the post-Potter day for Brighton.
Runjaci currently has Udinese top of Serie A, albeit we’re only four games into his reign there and the season itself. But if ‘Kaiserslautern, 1860 Munich, Pogon Szczecin, Legia Warsaw, Udinese’ isn’t a managerial run that simply screams ‘Brighton’ as its next stop then we don’t want to know what is.
Chelsea: Ruben Amorim
Mourinho’s heir, isn’t he? Far more so than Andre Villas-Boas ever was. No need to complicate matters here because Chelsea is already plenty complicated enough. Take the low-hanging fruit and the most obvious of all possibilities. Apart from Frank Lampard.
Still, it has long seemed inevitable that Amorim will follow the well-worn path from Portugal’s Primeira Liga to the Barclays, and Chelsea does appear by far the likeliest destination.
We’re as confident as we can be that Amorim will be next through the Chelsea revolving door, but nevertheless remain extremely excited to find out which of the currently warring owners actually gets to make the appointment.
Crystal Palace: Roy Hodgson
Because neither he nor they can frankly help themselves.
Everton: Sam Allardyce
Because if you’ve already got Sean Dyche as manager and have to press the big red managerial firefighter emergency button because you keep losing games after going 2-0 up, then there really is only one further step to be taken down the road of despair you have paved for yourself.
Go and get Big Sam. It’s not all bad news, because it’s also an appointment that offers everyone a shot at redemption. It feels deeply quaint now to imagine a world where a manager steps in before Christmas to rescue a relegation-haunted Everton side and steer them to eighth (eighth!) in the table only to be binned off because fans aren’t happy with the style of play, but that was Allardyce’s fate in his previous spell at Goodison and it was somehow only six years ago.
The other good thing about taking this circular approach is that appointing Allardyce again would logically mean they’re only two years away from having Carlo Ancelotti back, and that would be nice wouldn’t it?
READ: The Premier League sack race has Dyche way out in front
Fulham: Rob Edwards
Feels like Marco Silva has been there a lot longer than three years, and that’s a compliment. He’s established Fulham as a mid-table Premier League side after a fair bout of yo-yo-ing between the top two divisions, and that’s no mean trick.
Tricky to know exactly where Fulham might go next after Silva, but there is a hint in their list of past managers. It’s not a perfect pattern, but in general the Fulham approach is to alternate between ‘Very British’ and ‘Exotically Foreign’. This is a club that within the last 25 years has been managed by Jean Tigana, Martin Jol, Rene Meulensteen, Felix Magath, Slavisa Jokanovic, Claudio Ranieri and Silva but also by Chris Coleman, Roy Hodgson, Mark Hughes, Kit Symons and Scott Parker.
On the basis that it’s ‘Very British’ due up next, we’ll go with Rob Edwards based on little more than a hunch. It’s not always very scientific, this.
Ipswich: Mick McCarthy
If they’re replacing Kieran McKenna they’re probably done for anyway, so might as well do it with their c*cks all the way out and bring back Big Mick for one last Premier League hurrah at a club where he once branded fans ‘numbskulls’ for criticising his style of play.
On-field results will likely be abysmal, sure, but think of the press conferences and post-match interviews. The Barclays needs and deserves this. And with a McKenna-less Ipswich likely doomed anyway, nobody actually loses out at all when you think about it. It’s win-win. Kinda.
Leicester: Gary O’Neil
Another club with a fantastically varied set of managerial appointments over the last 15 years, with names like Paolo Sousa and Sven-Goran Eriksson and Claudio Ranieri and Claude Puel sitting right there alongside your Nigel Pearsons and Craig Shakespeares, your Dean Smiths and the Ian Holloways of this world. And that’s without even mentioning dear old Brendan.
Enzo Maresca was a pretty left-field punt as well that worked out pretty well, while Steve Cooper strikes us a solidly sensible pragmatic piece of business ahead of what was always likely to be a wildly difficult return to the Premier League.
Which all makes predicting where Leicester go next near impossible. They love a big sexy foreign name but are equally at home with a Proper Football Man. Brendan Rodgers seems obvious now, when you look at the full list of names they’ve gone for in the past.
Does feel like we should now be approaching the point where Leicester appoint a member of the 2015/16 Fairytale squad as manager, but there’s no real contender there.
We’re going quite prosaic here, then, with Leicester deciding former Bournemouth and Wolves boss O’Neil (Wolves sack him in November, by the way) is the man to lead them back into the Premier League after relegation is confirmed on the final day of the season and Steve Cooper walks.
Liverpool: Xabi Alonso
But it will be a pure disaster that lasts less than a season, Alonso’s handsomely bearded reputation having already lost some of its lustre with his miserable failure to do any more unbeaten seasons with Leverkusen. All will agree that the perfect moment was right there in 2024 and everyone missed it.
Manchester City: Vincent Kompany
Still not quite sure how he ended up being Bayern Munich manager, but it matters not. He has, and with it the very ideal stepping stone back to Manchester City where the chance to prove whether he’s an Arteta or a Solskjaer or a Lampard feels increasingly like something that is absolutely sure to happen at some point over the next couple of years.
The timing will come down to many things. Really would not be a surprise if Pep Guardiola got bored and decide to Klopp his way off on a six-month farewell tour this season. Then there is the spectre of what happens with the 115 charges.
That, though, is just another feather in Kompany’s cap to help make him the perfect candidate. He’s already if anything over-qualified for the Club DNA and Knowing Our League criteria of any managerial appointment, but now Bayern have provided him with relevant Big Club managerial experience while he’s also a man who knows his way out of the Championship. A perfect all-round skillset, then, to cover any and all the eventualities that could exist in City’s uncertain future.
Manchester United: Ruud van Nistelrooy
He’s already in position, isn’t he? Ready and waiting to take the reins on a temporary basis if/when the Erik Ten Hag experiment finally comes to its grimly inevitable conclusion. And the good news for United fans is that handing a beloved former striker with limited top-level managerial experience the permanent gig after an eye-catching mood-lifting spell in caretaker charge has absolutely never gone wrong before and there’s no reason to think it could possibly do so now.
Obviously, there is one manager out there United have always wanted and he remains the dream. But you can’t just expect to appoint a manager like Gareth Southgate out of the blue. If they want to land that sort of coup they’ll have to be patient, and that gives Van Nistelrooy the chance to at least state his case.
Newcastle: Max Allegri
The next managerial appointment at Newcastle really does feel like it needs to be a statement one. We’re not remotely sure it will be a good one, but it will be an appointment designed to declare and re-affirm their new-found stature despite those pesky rules that have thus far stopped them just buying all the players they want to as they should, by rights, be free to do.
We’re pretty sure Newcastle would be in a much worse state without Eddie Howe, but there’s also a very real chance that relationship does reach breaking point quite soon – especially if on-field results don’t continue on their current excellent if shakily-foundationed path.
That will leave Newcastle on the hunt for a big-name manager not averse to spending a lot of money in an attempt to buy his way to success. And for an added bonus he will need no time acclimatising to a team in black-and-white stripes. These are the sort of marginal gains that can make all the difference, you see.
Nottingham Forest: Bruno Lage
Because if you’re a Premier League club replacing Nuno Espirito Santo as manager, history tells us your choices are either Bruno Lage or Antonio Conte. And Bruno Lage feels much more likely here. To the extent that what began as purely a banter answer now has us thinking it might actually be a good idea.
Lage didn’t have a great time at Wolves, sure, but is now back at Benfica and boasting a 100% win rate in his second spell at the club. Can’t argue with that, as long as absolutely none of you go and check how many games he has managed in that second spell. Please don’t do that.
Southampton: Matt Le Tissier
With Rickie Lambert as his assistant. Premier League managers have dabbled in conspiracy theories about refereeing vendettas and fixture computers being out to get them, but we’d love to see one go full tinfoil hat and blame a tight offside decision on the shadow government or claim vaccines causes handballs.
Tottenham: David Moyes
Most managerial appointments are, by definition, a response to the failure of the previous regime and thus have a tendency to offer a wild change in philosophy and approach. At few clubs is this ‘appoint the opposite of the previous clown’ strategy more transparent than at Tottenham.
ENIC and Daniel Levy have been running the show at Spurs for 25 years now, and their list of permanent managerial appointments amounts in man ways to a quarter-century cry for help.
ENIC inherited George Graham as manager, a man still widely despised in this part of north London despite being the second most recent Spurs manager to win a trophy. They made the populist decision to replace him with club legend Glenn Hoddle.
Since then, they’ve gone for: Jacques Santini, Martin Jol, Juande Ramos, Harry Redknapp, Andre Villas-Boas, Tim Sherwood, Mauricio Pochettino, Jose Mourinho, Nuno Espirito Sante, Antonio Conte, Ange Postecoglou. It’s a wonder the very club itself doesn’t have whiplash given the number and extent of those lurches in opposite directions.
But it does give us a huge clue about where they go next after Angeball’s increasingly inevitable demise. Spurs are fun to watch and easy to beat. They need a manager who can make them excruciating to watch but hard to beat. They need David Moyes.
As an added bonus, he also knows his way around ending an embarrassingly long trophy drought at a London club that isn’t as big as it thinks it is. He’s perfect.
Then after 18 months of that, Spurs will bring Roberto De Zerbi back to Blighty after three wildly successful years with Marseille. He will bring Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg back with him as assistant coach, and another 18 months or two years down the line Hojbjerg will step up to the big chair himself thus fulfilling Mourinho’s prophecy once and for all, bringing a dark and endless winter across the land. None of those managers will win any trophies. There is no point fighting any of this. It is all as inevitable as night following day.
And after that it’ll probably be Thomas Tuchel, on the basis Spurs will be long overdue a former Chelsea boss by the time that lot have all been tried and discarded in about four years’ time.
West Ham: Michael Carrick
A tale to warm the heart as both club and manager get back to their footballing roots. Carrick has been and managed back in the north-east where he was born, so it’s only logical that his next step up the managerial ladder is a return to the club that nurtured and developed him.
Might need things to pick up a bit at Middlesbrough to really put himself back on the radar of any Premier League chairmen with itchy trigger fingers, but has got plenty of time to get West Ham’s attention now. They’ve only just appointed a new manager and, as we know, managers at West Ham always last absolutely ages. No rush at all here.
Wolves: Rui Vitoria
Honestly, we’ve no idea here beyond a sneaking suspicion we might all be about to find out the answer quite soon. So we’ve made a few assumptions, and these are they:
We think Wolves will need a new manager soon, so let’s look at available managers.
We think Wolves will want experience as a response to Gary O’Neil’s rookie stature, so let’s look at experienced managers.
We think Wolves will want a Portuguese manager because frankly it’s been a while.
Sergio Conceicao fits the bill but is surely far too ambitious a catch for their current state. Rui Vitoria, sacked by Egypt after a disappointing AFCON, and still available seven months later, ticks every box.