The Barclays is back and that means we can only be about a fortnight at most from the first manager officially entering crisis mode and facing three games to save his job. Last season was a quiet one for manager departures, with by far the biggest one of the lot only happening at the very end of the campaign after a six-month farewell tour. But it did prompt a fair bit of early summer managergeddon and does mean quite a few new or returning faces among the 20 men in the race none of them want to win.
All hail the return of the Premier League Sack Race. Here’s a rundown of who’s likeliest to be packing their bags first and who can, for now, luxuriate in relative safety and security. 1) Enzo Maresca Has taken charge of a top-flight game for the first time in his managerial career at a club with sky-high expectations, alarming recent underachievement and a fondness for manager-binning that has quite clearly survived the shift from Abramovich to Boehly.
And lost . 2) Erik Ten Hag A messy few months at Manchester United amounted to what is perhaps the longest, most drawn out and least convincing vote of confidence ever issued. There are surprising signs of competence and even some financial good sense at long last in the transfer market, but it still doesn’t quite feel like Ten Hag has full unwavering support from above and any repeat of last season’s (relative) struggles will see Ten Hag thrust firmly back into the full glare of the Sack Race spotlight.
Winning the first game of the season – however tightly – surely earned him a little grace which was duly squandered by losing yet again to Brighton. And it was his fault . 3) Sean Dyche Appears so resolutely determined to stay and fight back whatever tides of despair are currently crashing into Goodison Park’s walls that if you didn’t know better you’d think he was positively revelling in all the adversity.
Go ahead, take more points off him. It only makes him win 1-0 more. We can’t see Dyche as the first manager to leave at all, but it’s also true that it is near impossible to overstate just how grim things could get for the Toffees over the months ahead and thus absolutely nothing can be ruled out with any confidence.
And they did get tanked by Brighton. 4=) Nuno Espirito Santo Definitely feels like a solid contender for the first actual manager culling of the season. Did the necessary last season by keeping Nottingham Forest’s head above water but another tough season appears to be in the offing and if they were willing to bin Steve Cooper you can be damn sure Santo isn’t bulletproof.
4=) Steve Cooper You can tell just how thoroughly Euro 2024-and-Olympics-pilled we’ve been this summer because the other day we saw a picture of Cooper in a Leicester tracksuit and damn near had a panic attack. The return of domestic football reality is something we have put off as long as we can but must now face. Really feels like Leicester could go either way on their return to the Premier League, but would be a surprise to see them panic instantly about what does appear to be a pretty sound reaction and appointment in the wake of Enzo Maresca’s shock departure for Chelsea.
6=) Eddie Howe While he’s not entirely immune from the sack – particularly with key allies Amanda Staveley and Mehrdad Ghodoussi no longer around – clearly Howe’s early prominence here had a lot less to do with the chance of him being forcibly removed or even mutually consented, and a great deal to do with the England job. Now Lee Carsley has got that job on a temporary basis at least, Howe can get on with the job of (narrowly) winning football matches for Newcastle. 6=) Russell Martin A sworn devotee of Pepball, it’ll certainly be interesting to see how that translates to a Southampton side likely to find dominating the ball rather trickier in the rarefied Barclays air after promotion back to the top flight.
Could go really well, but also pretty easy to see how this could go very wrong very quickly for an inexperienced manager attempting what Vincent Kompany will confirm is quite a tricky transition. Russell Martin is the next manager of Bayern Munich, is what we’re saying here. 8) Oliver Glasner His Crystal Palace side finished last season at a genuinely absurd sprint and how they go after a full pre-season under the Austrian is going to be one of the more interesting early storylines in this campaign.
Early prominence in this market can surely only be down to the possibility of some big beast on the continent having an early-season managertastrophe and turning their unwanted attentions Palace’s way. 9) Marco Silva Fulham have spent the last couple of seasons in near invisibility in mid-table, which is very much a good thing. Rode out the loss of Alexander Mitrovic really well last season and could once again be set for a year of bobbing about harmlessly enough in mid-table.
But it’s getting to a tricky point for Silva, in a way. He’s doing a perfectly adequate job, but almost if anything too adequate for me, Clive. He’s in danger of finding that unwanted zone where he’s invisible to bigger clubs who might be on the lookout for a new manager while by far the most likely way he does get noticed is if things start going very badly rather than very well.
10=) Andoni Iraola Iraola’s Bournemouth ended the season in perfectly solid mid-table territory with plenty of signs they could kick on this year. We suppose he could be in trouble if that doesn’t materialise but seems unlikely it could unravel fast enough for a manager clearly seen as a long-term plan by a club that did take quite brutal action to replace Gary O’Neil just over a year ago but is reaping the benefits of that hard-nosed approach now. Far more likely, surely, that Iraola is poached rather than sacked, in which case he would be at worst the second Premier League manager to leave.
10=) Julen Lopetegui Stormed out of Wolves days before the season began a year ago and West Ham is a club that could test the patience of a saint. But he does have the advantage of a fanbase that was and is ready for a change from Moyesball and thus might give the new man longer than would otherwise be the case at a club where ambition and reality are only very occasionally aligned. Really does have some of the very best attacking players outside the Big Six to work with, which hopefully reduces the potential for huffing off at the first sign of trouble.
12=) Kieran McKenna Ipswich spent a good chunk of the start of the summer fending off interest in their manager and a difficult start to the season on their long-awaited return to the Premier League is surely baked in. Glib and simplistic it may be, but the comparisons between Luton and Ipswich and thus Rob Edwards and McKenna are easily made. And Luton never once looked like getting rid of Edwards last season.
12=) Ange Postecoglou Could be a bit of value here. The second half of last season raised more questions than answers about the long-term viability of Angeball and Spurs are ever partial to a whiplash-inducing change of direction around November. Interesting, too, to see whether Postecoglou’s bizarrely po-faced response to Spurs fans not wanting Arsenal to win the league has caused any long-term damage to the relationship.
It had the distinct feel of a honeymoon period ending, of both sides of the relationship starting to see the flaws as well as the qualities of the other. Worth noting too the uncertainty is reflected in Postecoglou having the widest variance across the various bookmakers; he’s third favourite to be first out with one and fifth safest with another. 12=) Gary O’Neil Did a quite brilliant job to keep Wolves clear of any trouble whatsoever last season after accepting an absolute hospital pass just before the season started and has now for the first time in his managerial career had the luxury of a pre-season.
Interesting to see how he goes and is in a very different place on this list now to the one he occupied when last season kicked off. 12=) Thomas Frank Sits in the top 10 for quite a lot of other jobs and does feel distinctly more likely to therefore be a very quick second manager out rather than first. Brentford did flirt with serious trouble for uncomfortably long periods last season, but there was never any really serious chat about binning the manager who has done so very much for them and it would need to be going really, really badly for that to change this time around, you’d think.
16) Fabian Hurzeler Another intriguing new face in Our League, tasked with getting Brighton back to where they were a year ago before things just took a turn for the dreary in Roberto De Zerbi’s first and final full season in charge. They almost completely forgot how to win games in the second half of the season, which isn’t ideal, and the new manager will need to enact a pretty hefty momentum shift to avoid any early grumblings. An opening-day win at Everton will help.
17) Arne Slot Liverpool’s recent Premier League points hauls offer a bit of a warning to the new manager. Going back over the last five seasons, starting with the most recent, Liverpool’s final tallies read: 82, 67, 92, 69, 99. It’s a small sample size, sure, but a pretty clear and understandable trend that shows perhaps why trying to compete with Man City grew so wearying for Jurgen Klopp.
The problem for Slot, though, is that while Klopp was obviously and correctly able to ride out the fallow seasons it’s going to be far harder for a new manager to start with one. Does feel like he’s going to need a good start in what may well be the impossible task of following Klopp, but at the same time Liverpool are not going to want to look kneejerk. This Means More Patience.
He probably can ride out a slow start, but he’ll need to be showing something pretty quickly to prevent the chattering starting. 18) Pep Guardiola It would be absolutely no surprise if this is his last season at Manchester City, but it would be a huge one if he leaves for any reason before its conclusion. Unless the FA somehow manage to turn his head with the England job .
Like we say, he’s not going anywhere. Not until next summer, anyway. 19) Unai Emery And now we reach those managers who absolutely definitely will not be the first to leave unless something absolutely extraordinary occurs.
Having steered Villa into the Champions League, Emery is going absolutely nowhere. 20) Mikel Arteta We’re still a bit in awe of just how quickly ‘Arsenal are 90-points-per-season title contenders now’ has just been entirely accepted and normalised. It’s still barely two years since they were bottling fourth place in really quite pitiful fashion.
A lot has changed. Could this be the season the apprentice finally gets the better of his master? Don’t know, but we are supremely confident neither of them will be the first manager out of a job. No fence-sitting for us.
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