Manchester United will be weighing up the ‘eye-watering’ severance fee due to Ruben Amorim, but it wouldn’t even be in the top ten biggest manager pay-offs.
Richard Keys was right all along: Amorim is trying to get sacked. That is the only possible conclusion one can draw from his comments after every ignominious defeat.
And there have been a great many of those during his reign. To be exact, it’s 16 in 31 Premier League games. Which really does seem quite bad.
Enough so for the ‘eye-watering’ pay-off to be revealed, at least. But at around £12m there have been far more expensive conscious uncouplings in dugouts across the world. Although mainly at Stamford Bridge.
The biggest ever pay-offs for sacked football managers
15) Unai Emery (sacked by Arsenal in November 2019) – £10.4m
With the realisation having finally dawned about halfway into a three-year contract that Emery and Arsenal were incompatible, the decision was made to part and replace the Spaniard with the far more suitable manager whose appointment they bottled in the first place.
14) Erik ten Hag (sacked by Manchester United in October 2024) – £10.4m
It should forever go down as one of the more absurdly diabolical managerial succession plans in history. Manchester United let Ten Hag survive an internal review, oversee another £200m worth of signings he wanted or had previously worked with, sacked him a couple of months into the season and somehow found someone even worse to take his job.
13) Fabio Capello (sacked by Russia in July 2015) – £10.7m
Even though the Russian Football Union was in significant debt to the point that billionaire Alisher Usmanov had loaned them £3.9m for some unpaid wages owed to Capello, it was felt that one of the more financially lucrative contracts in international football should have been worth more than a dreadful start to Euro 2016 qualifying which put Russia eight points behind Austria and four off the pace of Sweden in their group.
12) Andre Villas-Boas (sacked by Chelsea in March 2012) – £12m
Spoiler: it is not the only appearance Chelsea will make on this list. But Villas-Boas won’t pop up again after landing a paltry £4.5m when Spurs sacked him 18 months later. Poor bloke.
11) Luiz Felipe Scolari (sacked by Chelsea in February 2009) – £12.6m
See? Scolari only lasted seven months at Stamford Bridge and pocketed about £1.5m for each win in severance pay alone.
10) Graham Potter (sacked by Chelsea in April 2023) – £13m
It really is a ludicrous way to run what remains a broadly successful business. Less than a year prior Chelsea paid the biggest manager compensation fee in football history to extract Potter and his coaching staff from Brighton.
9) Nuno Espirito Santo (sacked by Spurs in November 2021) – £14m
A stunningly bungled appointment was only ever destined to end one way, even if all those involved might have expected there to be a slightly bigger gap between the number of days Spurs took to appoint a new manager (72) and the number of days that manager lasted (124).
8) Thomas Tuchel (sacked by Chelsea in September 2022) – £15m
The first fall guy of many in the Boehly era had to make way for Potter six games into the season and about 15 months after following Champions League glory with a new contract.
7) Jose Mourinho (sacked by Spurs in April 2021) – £15m
Daniel Levy had long been obsessed with the idea of Mourinho as Spurs manager and the Portuguese’s stock had finally fallen far enough while the club’s had risen for the stars to align. But the union lasted only 86 games and was ended on the eve of a League Cup final.
6) Roberto Mancini (sacked by Saudi Arabia in October 2024) – £16.7m
It was described in official communications as a ‘joint agreement’ but a sizeable pay-off suggests something slightly less than mutual terminated Mancini’s £21m-a-year deal with the Saudis, who felt their chances of qualification for the 2026 World Cup were in jeopardy.
5) Laurent Blanc (sacked by Paris Saint-Germain in June 2016) – £17m
“I would have liked that things happened in a different manner as it was a bit brutal,” said Blanc, whose alternate timeline would presumably still have included that healthy bank transfer. He was the most PSG of managers, winning 11 of a possible 15 trophies in three seasons but never advancing past the Champions League quarter-finals.
4) Jose Mourinho (sacked by Manchester United in December 2018) – £19.6m
In terms of matches managed it is and will probably forever be the third-longest tenure of Mourinho’s entire coaching career, featuring his proudest ever achievement of finishing second behind Manchester City and waiting patiently for a reallocated Premier League title to go with a decent compensation package.
3) Mauricio Pochettino (sacked by Spurs in November 2019) – £20m
How different things might have turned out if the £20m paid to Pochettino and his staff had been set aside for an actual incoming transfer at any point between February 2018 and July 2019.
2) Jose Mourinho (sacked by Chelsea in September 2007) – £23.1m
The hat-trick is complete. Mourinho has made a small fortune out of burning bridges and scorching earth, with a gargantuan pay-off marking his first divorce from Chelsea. It was another expensive mutual consenting less than halfway through a five-year contract extension he signed in 2005.
1) Antonio Conte (sacked by Chelsea in July 2018) – £26.6m
Chelsea’s own financial accounts listed “exceptional items of £26.6 million” relating to “changes in respect of the men’s team management and coaching staff, together with associated legal costs” after finally reaching a settlement with Conte over what was later judged to be an unfair dismissal. The Italian was ‘disgusted’ – and that was before he took over at Spurs.