Ruben Amorim will get his wish when he is sacked by Man Utd, with a familiar name replacing him. But not Jose Mourinho; he’s off to Nottingham Forest.
We’ve already lost one Premier League manager this season thanks to the rapid and total collapse of Nuno’s relationship with literally anyone in any position of power at Forest.
And it’s fair to say there are a couple more sitting increasingly uncomfortably after a pair of honking 3-0 defeats at the weekend against just about the worst possible opposition for either of them to suffer honking 3-0 defeats against.
So Nuno is already gone and it doesn’t take a particularly skilled soothsayer to determine that Graham Potter and Ruben Amorim might be next. But what about a bit further down the line? What about the next 10 Premier League managerial changes?
That would take some predicting, wouldn’t it? It’s a task so fundamentally impossible that only a damn fool would even consider it.
Here are the next 10 Premier League managerial changes.
Gary O’Neil replaces Graham Potter at West Ham
Having spoken well, I thought, as a guest on Everton’s 1-0 win over Graham Potter’s hapless Hammers on Monday Night Football, O’Neil is immediately installed as favourite to take the job when the axe falls, as fall it must, the very next day.
With the entirety of the football media in smugly self-satisfied ‘Careful what you wish for’ mode as West Ham languish at the foot of the table and David Moyes has Everton purring, everyone agrees to forget what an angry shambles O’Neil’s final few months at Wolves descended into, preferring instead to focus on the correctness of the Hammers appointing a Proper Football Man to bring back a bit of Moyesy steel to the Irons.
Having spoken well, I thought, at his West Ham unveiling, O’Neil goes on to lose six of his first seven games. It is unanimously agreed that this is Potter’s fault, and a little bit David Sullivan and Karren Brady’s.
Unai Emery replaces Ruben Amorim at Manchester United
After a 4-0 defeat at Anfield sees United slip into the bottom three, cryptic Ruben Amorim cryptically tells confused baffled reporters that United “should sack me” because “I am real sh*t at this”, prompting some to wonder if actually, you know, he might even be trying to get sacked.
Amorim goes on to reference “Sir Scrooge McRatcliffe” unprompted before muttering darkly about midfielders who are actually capable of breaking into a jog, before the beleaguered Portuguese is quietly led from the press conference room.
A vote of confidence follows the next day, prompting Amorim to issue a statement of his own calling United’s bosses “cowards” who are “too frit” to make a decision. Journalists and pundits stroke their beards and wonder if, in fact, Amorim is actually trying to get sacked before expressing standard head-shaking befuddlement at this state of affairs befalling this of all clubs when it is Manchester United We’re Talking About Here.
Amorim is finally put out of our collective misery, and attempts to lure Oliver Glasner from Crystal Palace fail embarrassingly. Unai Emery, though, senses the way the winds are blowing at Villa Park and willingly leaps directly from frying pan to fire as he restarts the process of trying to steer a once-proud English football club from embarrassing relegation fights to restored on-field dignity and an unsustainable wage bill.
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Edin Terzic replaces Unai Emery at Aston Villa
We can’t exactly put our finger on why, but of all the available managers out there who have no direct connection with the Premier League as player or manager, Terzic somehow feels the most Barclays.
We’re almost certain it’s not a couple of years being Slaven Bilic’s assistant at West Ham that’s giving us that vibe, but whatever it is, the man who led Dortmund to the 2024 Champions League final finally gets his chance to be a for-real Premier League boss at the other claret-and-blue shambles following Emery’s defection to Old Trafford.
Terzic watches a 1-1 Europa League draw with Go Ahead Eagles from the stands, meaning his first games in charge are against Manchester City and Liverpool. ‘It gets easier, Edin!’ jokes everyone before vaguely encouraging defeats in those two games are followed by a 2-0 home defeat to Bournemouth and the most joyless yet predictable 0-0 draw conceivable against fellow committed goal-avoiders Leeds.
Nuno Espirito Santo replaces Daniel Farke at Leeds
Failure to beat a confused and dishevelled Villa proves the last straw for Leeds’ owners as Daniel Farke’s inability to bridge the admittedly sizeable gap twixt Championship and Premier League approaches the level of performance art.
In comes Nuno Espirito Santo to create widespread neutral confusion where everyone wants him to do well to prove a point to Mr Marinakis but not that well, because Leeds.
Michael Carrick replaces Scott Parker at Burnley
With a tough fixture list and far more conspicuous nonsense occurring elsewhere, it’s not until November when Arsenal beat Burnley 1-0 via a late, late, Celebration Police-bothering penalty that people realise Scott Parker’s side have in fact lost every game to late penalties since August.
When not even a trip to West Ham can save them something has to change. With O’Neil speaking well, I thought, after the Hammers lift themselves out of the bottom three with victory at the London Stadium, Parker is out to be replaced by another former Tottenham midfielder in Michael Carrick.
With a suitable amount of time having now passed, nobody is too interested in how or why his time at Middlesbrough ended, and this is at least a job that takes him closer to the Manchester United job that clearly remains his. If only in a very literal, geographical sense.
Jose Mourinho replaces Ange Postecoglou at Nottingham Forest
To widespread shock, Nottingham Forest’s dalliance with Angeball proves unsuccessful. Matters come to a head when a shirtless Mr Marinakis, menacingly wielding a Motorola Razr V3, confronts Postecoglou on the pitch after Forest concede a late equaliser to Sturm Graz.
The relationship has broken down, and Postecoglou’s position is now untenable. A win over Leeds buys Postecoglou some time but a 6-1 defeat at Anfield after going down to nine men and deploying his patented 0-7-1 formation proves the last straw.
With relegation now a genuine possibility, Mr Marinakis finds himself in a pickle. Having decided that Forest are now once again a big club, he is unwilling and unable to walk that back entirely and appoint a genuine out-and-out firefighter. But he does need to appoint a manager who can carefully excise all lingering remnants of joy from Forest’s football while desperately attempting to cling on to Premier League status by the fingernails and making some self-serving quips and digs about the former manager’s methods to anyone who’ll listen.
So a big-name, available manager who allows Mr Marinakis to continue indulging his Big Club delusions but won’t try to play expansive or fun football like that Australian fool insisted on.
There is only one man for the job.
READ MORE: Forest go for Postecoglou chaos, but Mourinho might actually be less mad choice
Sergio Conceicao replaces Vitor Pereira at Wolves
We’ve checked and double checked, and bizarrely it seems Wolves don’t in fact sack their manager every November because they’re in the bottom three with only two wins all season, and bring in another Portuguese fella who goes on a run that contains some genuinely impressive moments to end the threat of relegation and start to generate a sense of renewed optimism for the future before losing the last five games of the season, selling all their players in the summer and continuing the cycle anew.
But it sure feels like that is precisely what they do, doesn’t it? And what’s more important, at the end of the day: things that are actually true, or things that feel like they are true? A quick look around the world in big 2025 tells us conclusively that this timeline is about vibes not facts.
Pereira is out, former Porto and – briefly – Milan manager Conceicao is in. Next.
Kieran McKenna replaces Keith Andrews at Brentford
We’re not really at all sure about this one, but surely someone has to replace Andrews at some point this season? Surely this cannot turn out to be an appointment that actually works?
Xavi replaces Enzo Maresca at Chelsea
If anything, Clive, Maresca almost has too many options to pick from. Confusion reigns at the Chelsea Football Player Trading Company with Maresca having absolutely no idea what his best team is, or indeed even apparently who some of his players are, or why despite the vast numbers of players coming into and out of the facility not one of them ever happens to be a viable elite-level goalkeeper.
Having slipped out of realistic Premier League title contention and in danger of messing up the Champions League group stage following back-to-back home defeats to Barcelona and Arsenal in November, Maresca is on borrowed time.
Maresca makes 11 changes between disappointing draws against first Newcastle and then Aston Villa over the Busy Festive Period, with a home defeat to Bournemouth days later proving the final straw and prompting Chelsea to act in order to get a new manager in just in time to provide at least a vague hint of plausible pretence that he has some say or influence over the players that will be signed and immediately shipped off to Strasbourg.
Barcelona legend Xavi is the man tasked with sorting out the unnecessarily complicated mess Maresca has made of things, while the tabloids lament the fact that Frank Lampard has been overlooked yet again despite heroically leading Coventry City to the very fringes of the Championship play-off picture. When or when will British managers like Super Frankie Lampard get a chance?
Sean Dyche replaces Jose Mourinho at Nottingham Forest
After a goalless draw at the London Stadium which breaks new and boffin-baffling ground by becoming the first Premier League match in history in which both teams manage to record negative xG figures, a fully naked Mr Marinakis pursues a visibly shaken Mourinho around the old running track while brandishing a Nokia 3210.
Two days later, Mourinho is sacked and Mr Marinakis at last faces the reality of his situation and appoints Sean Dyche to stave off relegation fears.
Dyche is startled to discover that Forest still have some European games to play, promptly declaring the existence of additional Europa League group games in January to be Utter Woke Nonsense before going on to insist that these days, if you call it the UEFA Cup, you’ll be arrested and thrown in jail. These days.
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