Turns out we’re terrible judges of character and coaching quality having flip-flopped over these ten managers from last season to now.
Some are still in their jobs while others have moved on; we misjudged them all.
Ange Postecoglou: Being a great bloke
Tottenham’s descent into perhaps the purest form of Spursiness we’ve ever seen has gone hand in hand with the Aren’t We All Having A Bloody Good Time? mask slipping from their manager’s face to reveal an easily irritated man whose sentence-ending forms of address are becoming more menacing by the day. You’re a bit of a d*ck, mate.
As he approached the away fans after the defeat to Bournemouth at the Vitality Stadium on Thursday, we suspect better-placed audio equipment may have picked up on a Roy Keane-esque request to meet them all in the car park outside.
Mauricio Pochettino: Doing The Impossible Job well
We were Pochettino apologists last season. What was he supposed to do with so many players? If only the Chelsea players could finish chances. Just imagine how much better they would be with a proper goalscorer. Look what he’s done with Cole Palmer. Etc. etc.
Enzo Maresca has exposed him, making The Impossible Job look incredibly easy.
He’s been helped by European football to keep the majority of the players happy, and winning games also means there can be few complaints from those not in the Premier League XI, but clearly defining the positions the players would play in at the start of the season was a simple stroke of genius.
He’s also clearly coached them to finish in training, which sounds obvious now we think of it but didn’t seem possible under Poch. That’s done wonders for Nicolas Jackson, who now looks to be well on his way to being the £100m striker Chelsea apparently needed. And let’s face it, it makes f*** all difference who Palmer is playing for; he will be brilliant in any circumstance.
Mikel Arteta: Next in line
How very annoying it must be to finish second to possibly the greatest Premier League side ever twice in a row only to fail to take advantage when they slip up. We don’t know that for sure of course. Arsenal look a helluva lot better now Martin Odegaard’s back and it’s only a seven-point gap to Liverpool.
But we were all pretty convinced, particularly with Jurgen Klopp leaving, that Arteta was nailed on to be the next manager to win the Premier League, possibly even the next era-defining stalwart, after Guardiola, whether that dominance started this season or – more likely – after the Manchester City boss yielded his crown by leaving the club. No one saw Arne Slot’s Liverpool coming.
Jurgen Klopp: Getting the best out of Liverpool
We don’t want to entirely pooh-pooh the work Jurgen Klopp did at Liverpool last season. Other legendary legacy managers of similarly giant football clubs in England have left with their squads in a decrepit mess, while the German undoubtedly left Liverpool in a far better state than when he arrived. Arne Slot is reaping the rewards of his excellent rebuilding job.
But Klopp could have reaped those rewards too. 78 minutes from one of the most pointless signings in Premier League history aside, Slot has used exactly the same players as Klopp and has got a better tune out of them. How did he not use Ryan Gravenberch as the No.6?
Pep Guardiola: An indomitable force
Now they’ve fallen apart we can’t believe we didn’t see it coming. All it takes is a long-term injury to the best footballer on the planet to expose their lack of prime-age footballers and turn them into a bog-standard football team short of any of the fingerprints of their world-class manager, who apparently doesn’t have an answer for everything.
Rodri got injured and we half expected Phil Foden to become a pace-setting fixer at the base of Manchester City’s midfield or for Guardiola to win games without a midfield at all in a bid to further assert himself as an otherworldly genius whose tactics the brains of us mere mortals aren’t equipped to comprehend.
Turns out he’s just a bit f***ed without Rodri.
Nuno Espirito Santo: A dying brand
Just about kept Nottingham Forest in the Premier League but it felt as though a lot had changed since he had last been in the English top flight. And although we’re all for a team that does something apart from passing the ball out from the back, we couldn’t see how launching it forward to a target man and winning second balls would reap enough reward to keep the Forest fans off his back.
What do we know? Four points off Manchester City and the Champions League spots.
Oliver Glasner: Destined for bigger things
Jean-Philippe had turned into a prime Nicolas Anelka, Adam Wharton got himself on the England plane along with the similarly brilliant Eberechi Eze and – in what retrospectively looks to have been the key to everything – Michael Olise was on fire.
Palace are too good to go down this season, but having been the Premier League’s great entertainers, everyone’s second team at the end of last season, even having to point out that they’re too good to go down suggests quite the shrinking back into the shadows after their brief period in the sun.
David Moyes: Holding West Ham back
There were plenty of times last season when we all looked at the front three of Jarrod Bowen, Lucas Paqueta and Mohammed Kudus and thought it would be lovely to see what a less cautious manager might be able to do with them and the Careful What You Wish For brigade were eventually drowned out by those searching for the long lost West Ham Way.
The board believing Julen Lopetegui should be their pioneer in that search was baffling and West Ham have lost all of the pragmatism and efficiency they had under Moyes while predictably gaining none of the attacking fluency they had hilariously misplaced hope in adding to their game under the Spaniard.
Erik ten Hag: Had a plan
We weren’t among the surprising number of people duped into thinking Ten Hag still had A Plan worth backing on the basis of one good performance at the end of last season, but we were all convinced he was the right man for the job at the start of the campaign.
While there perhaps wasn’t a clearly defined style there was a general footballing ethos that we all thought could be built upon and develop into The Ten Hag Way at Old Trafford, before he played Mason Mount and Bruno Fernandes with Casemiro in front of a back four and we questioned whether he had lost his mind or at least all of his tactical acumen.
It got no better from there, with the lack A Plan frequently the sizeable stick to beat him with ahead of an FA Cup final win which briefly and expensively delayed the inevitable.
Eddie Howe: Struggles thanks to Champions League
An often over-used excuse, but in Newcastle’s case – in the PSR era – blaming Premier League form on Champions League commitments felt perfectly valid. They surprised everyone including themselves in qualifying for the European showcase, didn’t have the squad depth to cope and weren’t able to spend anywhere near as lavishly as they would have liked to remedy that problem.
It was something of a free-hit season for Eddie Howe, who had earned a huge amount of leeway through what he had achieved in the previous campaign, and it didn’t go well. They failed to qualify from a very difficult Champions League group and never really got going in the Premier League, finishing the season level on points with Manchester United, God forbid.
But the uplift that we didn’t particularly expect but should have arrived this season if European football was the strong excuse Howe’s allies claimed it was hasn’t happened, with a good performance typically followed by at least one abject one.