Sean Dyche has been appointed manager of Nottingham Forest. It’s a move that makes a lot of sense after the disaster that was Ange Postecoglou’s time in charge.
Often, when it all goes wrong, it’s all too easy to lean on hindsight.
In the case of Ange Postecoglou’s reign as Nottingham Forest manager, however, it always looked like it could go wrong.
The high-risk, high-reward, high-pressing and possession-based style of football the Australian espouses could scarcely have been more of a contrast with the defence-first, low-to-mid-block, reactive and direct game with which his predecessor, Nuno Espírito Santo, had so much success at the City Ground. Many onlookers saw plenty of problems with trying to change things so dramatically mid-season.
Premier League block heights used
The aim was, by all accounts, to transform Forest into a more proactive team, something that owner Evangelos Marinakis patently considered necessary for Forest to take the next step and break into the Premier League’s elite following the exceptional achievement of finishing seventh last season – Forest’s best finish in 30 years.
So, after the deterioration of Marinakis’ relationship with Nuno, he spied an opportunity to wield the axe, get rid of the Portuguese manager, and bring Postecoglou in as his replacement.
As well as promoting a brand of football that tends to be more commonly associated with the bigger and better teams, Postecoglou also brought with him one more key ingredient: he wins trophies.
Forest were back in European competition for this season, and Marinakis wanted Postecoglou to repeat his Europa League success from last season with Spurs.
Clearly, the Forest owner’s thinking wasn’t entirely without logic. There is a hypothetical world in which his plan worked and Postecoglou made it back-to-back Europa League titles. On the day he was appointed, the Opta supercomputer gave Forest a 10.8% chance of winning the competition.
But this grand masterplan also had serious flaws, not least because Postecoglou’s appointment came three games into the new season. With a squad built for Nuno’s football and totally used to playing that way, and just a few days here and there between games for Postecoglou to work on the training ground, the transformation that Marinakis had dreamed of proved beyond everyone involved.
To many, this was no surprise. It was always doomed to fail. Replacing Nuno with Postecoglou? No need for hindsight here.
And so, after the second-shortest managerial reign in Premier League history at just 39 days, Postecoglou was shown the door just 20 minutes after the final whistle of Saturday’s 3-0 defeat to Chelsea.
Now, having lurched from Nuno to Postecoglou, Marinakis is going back the other way. Sean Dyche, one of the Premier League’s most infamous purveyors of direct football, a focus on set-pieces, and less regard than most for possession, is the new man at the Forest helm.
The jump from Postecoglou to Dyche makes little sense but, as the below graphic shows, the former Everton and Burnley manager’s football is rather more like that of Nuno, so perhaps this is an admission from Marinakis that he made a mistake with his managerial change last month.
Postecoglou vs Dyche vs Nuno playing styles
Jonathan Manuel / Data Analyst
Hindsight or no hindsight, it is logical to believe that it’s best for Forest’s players to stick to what they know and get back to the kind of direct football that Nuno played. In Dyche, they should get that.
Dyche’s Everton had just 39.5% possession in Premier League games, while under Nuno, Forest averaged 41.4%. They attacked up the pitch at similar speeds (Everton: 1.95 metres per second; Forest: 2.0 m/s) and pressed similarly little (14.3 passes allowed per defensive action (PPDA) for Dyche’s Everton vs 15.5 for Nuno’s Forest).
But while they have their commonalities, Dyche and Nuno aren’t identical. Their direct football differs in that Nuno is all about counter-attacks, and Dyche’s game is more of an old-school brand of long-ball football and battling for second balls.
Forest had 1.2 shots from fast breaks per 90 in Premier League games under Nuno and played 13.8% of their passes long; Dyche’s Everton had fewer fast-break shots (0.7 per 90) and played more of their passes long (17.5%).
Dyche also focuses more on set-pieces, something that has become far more fashionable across the Premier League this season than in previous years. During his time at Everton, they scored 44% of their Premier League goals from set-pieces, while just 26% of Forest’s came via that method under Nuno.
This might well be an area in which Forest are primed for an improvement this season. Their squad is stacked with giants and they have technical players with good dead-ball delivery, too. In Jair Cunha, Nikola Milenkovic, Morato, Nicolò Savona, Chris Wood and Ibrahim Sangaré, they have six players over 6-foot-2, all of whom carry a threat at set-pieces, and Elliot Anderson is an adept set-piece taker.
Only six teams have scored fewer goals from set-pieces this season than Forest (two), while they rank second-bottom for expected goals from set-pieces, with just 1.8 xG in eight games.
Nottingham Forest xG from set-pieces 2025-26
There are bigger problems at the other end of the pitch, too. Forest conceded 11 goals from set-pieces in all competitions during Postecoglou’s reign, which is at least twice as many as any other Premier League team in that time. One of Dyche’s first jobs will be fixing that leak.
Dyche was at pains at Everton to point out that his football had developed from his Burnley days; with better players at his disposal, he didn’t want to play as basic a brand of football. There was more playing out from the back than his Burnley team bothered with (some, rather than none), and his Everton would play through the thirds from time to time, even if they did so less than most other Premier League teams.
But what did remain was his preference for a 4-4-2 shape and the primary focus of shutting the opposition out by “protecting the V” – the dangerous, V-shaped area in front of your own goal – as he explained in an interview with the Coaches’ Voice in 2022.
Given Forest have played almost exclusively – and had so much success – with a back three over the last few years, it will be interesting to see whether Dyche compromises on that front or if he makes a significant immediate switch to a back four.
After the disaster of the Postecoglou era (can a 39-day stint be called an ‘era’?), Dyche may well be tempted to stick with Forest’s back three. He may be considering getting Forest back to what they were doing under Nuno.
But in Wood, he has the perfect centre-forward for his football, and one who played – and shone – playing under him for five seasons at Burnley. Anderson, Morgan Gibbs-White and Dan Ndoye should be well-suited to winning battles for second balls. There’s plenty of reason to believe this squad could thrive under Dyche.
What it all means for Marinakis’ hopes that Forest would develop into a more possession-focused team, that they would become more proactive in their football, remains to be seen. There’s little chance that Dyche will attempt to continue what Postecoglou was doing.
Meanwhile, their chances of Europa League glory have dropped to 3.4% according to the Opta supercomputer. Dyche has never won a major trophy as a player or manager, so if the intangible of “knowing what it takes” to win was something that Marinakis valued in Postecoglou, he now has none of that to lean on in Dyche.
But Dyche is proven at this level. He makes his teams difficult to beat and has enjoyed a lot of success in doing so. He did an excellent job at Burnley and however things ended up at Everton, there’s no questioning how well he did to steer them to 15th in 2023-24 despite an eight-point penalty for breaching financial rules.
Only Arsenal, Liverpool and Manchester City conceded fewer goals than Everton that season (51). Making Forest difficult to beat again has to be the priority, with relegation a real possibility given they now find themselves 18th in the table.
Dyche is accustomed to dealing with adverse conditions, and that’s certainly what he finds himself in working for Marinakis and with Forest in the relegation zone. His appointment makes a lot of sense, so there’s plenty of reason for Forest to be optimistic about the future.
Premier League Stats Opta
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