It’s an overdue return for the Premier League manager rankings.
We had planned to do them during the international break, but decided to be silly and lean into the at-the-time topical narrative of CRISIS and who was in CRISIS and who wasn’t in CRISIS and for those teams who were in CRISIS just how big of a CRISIS it was.
Now, though, managers are once again the order of the day so in we go. And there are already just far too many of these lads. We know we’re a few weeks later than normal getting this up and running, but there really shouldn’t already be a club with three permanent appointments in the list or one manager whose second job of the season is already in danger.
It all feels like this Premier League season is already just a bit too silly. It’s all a bit too much like that Tintin meme.
‘What a season, eh?’
‘Captain, it’s October.’
Right, enough messing about. Let’s get on with it, because there is quite simply an awful lot to get through already.
23) Ange Postecoglou (Nottingham Forest, Sept-Oct)
Mate. Just…mate. Possibly the worst managerial reign in the entire history of the Premier League, and that is some shout. It’s certainly the shortest.
Look, we sort of get it, we do. We get why he took the job. He probably did need to move fast to get back in the Premier League, try and convince someone to take a punt on him while those memories of Europa League glory were fresh enough in everyone’s minds to stop them thinking too long or too hard about the sheer ridiculousness of taking Spurs to 17th in the league.
It’s asking a huge amount to say Postecoglou should have turned down a job that got him straight back into the European competition where he’d just had such spectacular success.
But…he should have turned down that job. Obviously he should. It went wrong in all the ways everyone knew it would go wrong, except at about five times the pace. There were, even among those truly cataclysmically awful results, flashes of what makes Angeball so beguiling. There were some lovely moves and stunning goals.
Yet for every one of those there were two or three defensive calamities, and injuries, for a team that just didn’t have those things last season.
It was always just so obviously asking too much of both Postecoglou and Forest’s players to make such a seismic shift in approach work without any kind of pre-season to bring in the right players and get everyone to understand the process.
Postecoglou will walk away with a nice pay-off for barely a month’s work, but with his reputation in tatters. It is only five months since he did the unthinkable and delivered a major trophy to Tottenham, yet now, two sackings later, his managerial career at this level of club football is surely over.
There must have been better options with just a bit more patience. But still we’re kind of glad he did it, because Nuno to Ange to Dyche in barely five weeks is something the like of which will never be seen again.
22) Graham Potter (West Ham, Aug-Sept)
Got absolutely none of the help he needed from the club in the summer, which meant all the talk during the late-season struggles last term about not judging Potter until he had his own players and a full pre-season to instil his methods became instantly moot.
But while Potter was not and is not the primary source of West Ham’s travails, let’s also not pretend he is blameless. West Ham didn’t help him, but he didn’t help himself either, and a once-promising career suffered another huge step back.
We’ll admit we didn’t really know how or where the road to recovery might begin for Potter, but will cheerfully admit we didn’t have ‘Simply be almost immediately named manager of Sweden’ high on our list.
That admittedly incredible run of promotions with Ostersund is still evidently highly thought of in a country that has had an absolute catastrof*ck of a World Cup qualifying campaign but one that still has enormous potential for absurd redemption with their Nations League success meaning they’ll still be in the play-offs despite the likelihood now of finishing actual last in their qualifying group.
21) Nuno Espirito Santo (West Ham, Sept onwards)
Already enjoying one of the most spectacular early seasons of any Premier League manager. And remember this is a bloke who rocked up at Tottenham, won his first three Premier League games (including an opening-day win over Manchester City) and still ended up out on his ear by November.
He knows a thing or two about early-season managerial shenanigans.
But surely nothing quite likes this. There are still 10 days of October to go and Nuno stands on the very brink of being sacked for a second time.
During these first two months of the season he has already watched his Nottingham Forest side tear Brentford to shreds, then watch his Nottingham Forest side be torn to shreds by West Ham, and then watch his West Ham side be torn to shreds by Brentford.
It’s not normal, this. Presumably it’ll be Ange in by Christmas for the not-so-happy Hammers.
READ: Nuno sack and West Ham relegation would make double history after ‘f***ing stupid’ decision
20) Vitor Pereira (Wolves)
We worried it would happen right back in May when that brilliant run of six straight wins that secured Premier League survival for Wolves was followed by three defeats and a draw in their four remaining games.
We worried even more it would happen when key players were picked off by the Manchester giants with inadequate replacements coming in.
And now it has happened. Wolves, a club where a ropey finish to one season always seems to bleed effortlessly into a terrible start to the following season have made a terrible start. Not even Dr Tottenham at his most inexplicably hospitable was able to find a complete cure for Wolves’ ills.
We’re not actually worried about Wolves. They’ll be fine in the end. They always are. They’ll be 14th when the music stops in May and the very idea they were in quite serious relegation bother will appear vaguely silly.
But we do worry about Pereira. By that point, he will likely have been out of the picture for a good six months. If Dr Tottenham doesn’t quite do the trick, the only option left is often a managerectomy. Right now he’s the sack race favourite.
19) Nuno Espirito Santo (Nottingham Forest, Aug-Sept)
Fell out with everyone, which given who that ‘everyone’ is at Nottingham Forest is kind of understandable. But f*ck, what a waste. Didn’t get the chance to follow through on the brilliant work he did last season and was the first manager out of a job in the Premier League this season.
Despite that, his volatile, anger-filled few weeks at Forest are still probably his best weeks of the season. Because his punishment for the end of his Forest reign has been severe indeed. Surely not even Mr Marinakis would have wished the West Ham job on his new worst enemy.
18) Daniel Farke (Leeds)
It’s not been disastrous – and that really is something, because Farke’s overall record in this division after storming to promotion absolutely is disastrous – but it’s not been great either and there are significant grounds for concern after defeats either side of the international break.
Losing narrowly to Spurs in a game that could have gone either way was no cause for great alarm, but the abject nature of last weekend’s defeat at Burnley in what was a real chance to plunge them into serious trouble while putting significant distance between themselves and the bottom three was ropey as all hell.
Farke does have legitimate grievances about the big-talking Leeds hierarchy’s utter failure to provide him with the firepower he wanted and clearly needed. And if this season does go wrong for Leeds and Farke it will be the lack of threat in front of goal that will be the main contributing factor.
Only the current bottom three have scored fewer goals than Leeds this season, but it does also need mentioning that they – along with Burnley – are also three of the only four teams to have conceded more.
Farke might not be able to perform alchemy with the attacking players he has available between now and January, but he has to find some way to make the defence more secure.
17) Ruben Amorim (Manchester United)
That statement win at Anfield has clearly changed the landscape for Amorim and Manchester United.
For the first time since the very earliest days of his United reign, back in the far-off dim and distant days of late 2024 where his biggest problem was Ed Sheeran gatecrashing post-match interviews for some reason, Amorim has one precious gift: time.
For the first time all season he is not among the most conspicuously under-pressure managers, and not solely because all the other under-pressure managers have been sacked.
And even the league table now looks so much less appalling. It was easy, and fun, to joke about previous Man United corner-turning victories lifting them all the way to, say, 10th. But while they do remain in mid-table, that mid-table has become incredibly congested thanks to the weekend’s results at Anfield and elsewhere.
Ninth place is still historically bad for Manchester United in the Premier League, but three points behind second place sounds a lot better.
But let’s not lose the run of ourselves. Let’s not pretend all in the garden is suddenly rosy. Even United’s two big wins this season, against Chelsea and now Liverpool, have owed a great deal to their opponents doing some really very daft things indeed.
And, while Liverpool were undeniably worryingly weird and so very rattled against United, on another day that was still a game that even a hyperactive and panicking Liverpool win with something to spare. Cody Gakpo could have won it on his own, having hit the woodwork three times, scored and then headed wide when a second equaliser looked a certainty.
So no, let’s not pretend that finally, after almost a year in the job, Amorim winning two games in a row means something is definitely happening here.
But what it does mean is that Amorim and the rest of us now at least have a much better chance of finding out for sure.
16) Marco Silva (Fulham)
Testament to the work Silva has done over several years now at Fulham that three straight defeats haven’t caused much of a ripple at all. Not quite sure a fourth straight loss at Newcastle will be quite so easily explained away, even if it is yet another in a difficult run, and it might just shift Silva away from the prominent positions he’s started to take in the various next manager markets.
That might be no bad thing, because unless Fulham go completely stupid and sack him – and a new contract still seems like a far more likely outcome than that – it just means a longer stay at Craven Cottage.
And we are increasingly of the view that both Fulham and Silva are better for having each other and that any change in that would go badly for both parties.
15) Arne Slot (Liverpool)
Hmm. Not going well, is it? That’s now four straight defeats for Liverpool in all competitions, and do you know which other Premier League clubs have lost four straight games in all competitions this season? That’s right, none of them. That is awkward.
We’d been pretty glib about the Liverpool Crisis before Sunday. They were no more in crisis after a couple of late defeats than they were cruising to inevitable all-competition glory after some late wins. Neither felt like they were particularly sustainable, neither felt like they could be extrapolated so easily to mean all that much for a season as a whole.
But there really was something about the specific madness of that performance against Manchester United that freaks us right out. The panic. The confusion. The playing the entire second half as if there were 30 seconds remaining.
This was a team and manager that had come under a bit of pressure and a bit of scrutiny and allowed themselves to be rattled into the shadow realm by Harry Maguire.
Slot complaining about Man United’s squad rotation as if it were some kind of nefarious dark art is not the kind of thing you want to be hearing. Certainly not from a manager facing a tiny bit of pressure and unwanted attention for the very first time in Our League.
Couple more defeats and he’ll be calling corners despicable and declaring war on throw-ins. Could he even be in actual danger?
14) Eddie Howe (Newcastle)
An awkward, distracted and disjointed summer has given way to an awkward, distracted and disjointed season. Our favourite little detail about Newcastle’s Premier League season thus far is that they’ve not had the same result two games running, for either good or bad.
The net result, though, is currently quite bad. Closer to the bottom three than the top seven is not the order of the day at all, no matter what injustice the club feels about not being able to just spend all of the money all of the time however they like.
They’ve had a tough set of fixtures, for sure, but they should be doing better than this.
Greater reasons for positivity can be found in the Champions League, mind, where they were only undone in a good game by a couple of moments of Marcus Rashford magic, before making a full mockery of their Premier League inconsistency by being very consistent indeed and winning their next two games in the competition 4-0 and 3-0.
The weekend’s game against Fulham feels really quite hefty for early season perceptions. Whoever wins is safely back among the mid-table peloton. Whoever loses is down among the stragglers and the strugglers.
13) Unai Emery (Aston Villa)
We feared for him, we really did. Villa’s much-discussed fondness for sailing close to the PSR wind and boasting wildly unsustainable wage-to-turnover ratios makes them the very last club that could afford – in sporting and financial senses – to miss out on Champions League football as cruelly as they did at the back end of last season.
It definitely leaked into this campaign, but there is now some pretty solid evidence that they have escaped from the funk, and burgling a first away league win of the season at sleepy Spurs cements it. After five winless games had you wondering whether the quite brilliant Emery revolution at Villa might be coming to a swift and sticky end, they’ve now won five games in a row with that number likely to be six after this week’s Europa League trip to Go Ahead Eagles.
Never underestimate the power of the Europa League to influence the early-season mood of its competitor clubs for both good or ill. The (relative) ease and (relative) lack of pressure on those games can do all sorts of wondrous things to free players and managers up and get a season up and running, and there’s no doubt it has massively helped Villa already.
Or, of course, you can be Nottingham Forest. Which is not the recommended approach.
The Europa League also presents Villa with a wonderful opportunity to end what is now, after last season’s successes for Newcastle and Spurs, comfortably the silliest ongoing trophy drought in English football.
12) Fabian Hurzeler (Brighton)
Flawless mid-table behaviour from Brighton so far. In the space of just eight games this season they’ve already beaten three of last season’s top five in Manchester City, Chelsea and Newcastle.
And where has this got them? Tenth. It’s got them to tenth.
Now sure, it’s a congested mid-table area where they are also only three points behind third, but that only adds to the fun of it, along with the fact those three wins against last season’s top five are in fact Brighton’s only wins this season.
Which also means, in a weird way, that if Manchester United really are back, back, back, then the absolute best way for them to prove it is to lose at home to the Seagulls this weekend.
11) Sean Dyche (Nottingham Forest, Oct onwards)
Could there be a more perfect job at a more perfect time for the great anti-woke firefighter?
There are two perfect scenarios for Dyche to come in to a club and unleash his Brexitball. Either a club that is thoroughly aware of its limitations, or one paying the ultimate price for being entirely unaware of them.
Nottingham Forest and their main-character owner deluded themselves into the deeply dangerous belief that one thoroughly competent season playing rigidly defined and expertly trained counter-attacking football in a season when so many big teams were just awful had elevated them into the elite.
That they were now a club that could dare to dream big and face no consequences should the heat of the Barclays sun prove too much for their new and hastily glued wings.
They have now discovered that was very much not the case.
You only appoint Ange Postecoglou, with his recent Premier League record of just losing almost all of the games all of the time, if you have kidded yourself relegation is not something you have to think about.
And you only appoint Dyche if you’ve realised that relegation is now the only thing you have to think about.
Forest are the most perfect example of the second kind of Dyche club we can possibly imagine. As such, it is actually a very decent appointment. It’s a smaller, quieter, chastened Forest that Dyche enters than the one Nuno left just a few short weeks ago, but one that is therefore more malleable. More open to what must be done.
You will have gruel-and-gravel Brexitball, and you will enjoy it. Or at least accept and appreciate its necessity.
The other thing that’s just great for Dyche is that it should absolutely work a treat too. In the round, Forest have bollocksed this up. Dyche is not as good a manager as Nuno. He is even less subtle in his methods. He is a downgrade from the manager Forest had at the start of the season, but he is of the same school.
And thus a much better fit than his immediate predecessor for the profile of squad he will inherit. Because it really is a very good squad indeed, and one that absolutely need not be in any of the sort of strife in which it finds itself.
The low-block-and-counter might not be quite so effective for Dyche this season as it was for Nuno last, but it should be plenty effective enough to quickly steer Forest away from their current self-inflicted Angeball-delusion relegation fight.
Dyche will get Forest organised and efficient once more. He will prioritise what they are good at, which we already know thoroughly aligns with what he wants his teams to be good at. We saw it work time and again last season, and it will work time and again this.
We are beyond confident that Chris Wood goals in p*ss-boiling xG-spiting draws and wins will once again soon become the norm at the City Ground.
Forest will once again return to being one of the hardest teams to play against instead of the softest and easiest.
This is a club that has taken its medicine and should feel the benefit, but it is Dyche who emerges the clear winner here. He won’t be able to keep the smile off his disc-bearded face.
He has everything he could possibly want. A squad of very good players who are perfectly suited to playing his specific brand of football to an extremely high level, yet at a club where the humblings of recent months mean there will not be any quickly declared desire for anything more.
This is a club that got high on the smell of its own farts and is now choking. They don’t need crisp, crystal-clear filtered air to breathe. They just need something that isn’t their own farts.
10) Enzo Maresca (Chelsea)
Not sure what we make of Chelsea. They have been, at times this season, almost unforgivably stupid and it’s always hard to imagine that kind of thing doesn’t come in some way or another from the manager. The Manchester United game was incredibly stupid.
They were quite stupid against Forest as well, albeit that in the end they couldn’t quite compete with Forest’s stratospheric levels. Few could, which was why Ange Postecoglou had to go just to try and make it fair on other teams who wanted to try and be stupid.
Hats off to Malo Gusto, mind, for never losing belief that Chelsea could still emerge as the most stupid on the day long after that ship had sailed.
Enzo Maresca has been Chelsea boss for over a year now, which is no mean achievement in its own right. He’s taken them to the Champions League, won the Europa Carabao and been crowned quite literal champion of the world at the Trump World Cup.
And yet when we ask ourselves the most simple and straightforward questions – Is Maresca actually good? Are Chelsea? – we still find that we really don’t know. Which we suppose is kind of inevitable when you stop running a football club as a football club.
9) Scott Parker (Burnley)
‘Outside the bottom three after eight games’ is surely a position Parker and Burnley would have taken before a ball was kicked, especially given the nature of those eight games.
In fact, given Parker’s previous record in this competition and the fact those first eight league games have included Tottenham, Man United, Liverpool, Man City and Aston Villa, he’d have probably settled for just still being in a job at this point. As it is, he’s barely even an also-ran in the Sack Race at this point.
Burnley have duly lost all five of those games mentioned above, but only at Spurs on the opening day and City last month have they been conspicuously second best. Both Man United and Liverpool needed late, late penalties to beat them, and Villa were given a late scare at Villa Park.
What Burnley have done so far is secure points against their more direct rivals. They’ve already beaten both their fellow promoted clubs and taken a point off Nottingham Forest that at this time we really don’t know is any good or not.
At some point Parker and his team really will have to work out a way to beat teams that were already in the Premier League before this year, but in fairness he hasn’t had many good chances. Games against Wolves and West Ham before the international break are definitely good chances. Arsenal perhaps not so much.
8) Thomas Frank (Tottenham)
It is still very early days and still too early to tell which way a promising-but-not-flawless start eventually breaks for Frank and Spurs.
He arrived to a club and squad with an awful lot of mess to sort out at history’s funniest ever Champions League qualifiers. He appeared to have already thoroughly De-Anged the lot of them only for them to then turn up against Bournemouth and defend like an Ange team while attacking like a Mourinho one.
You know who else won their first couple of games, including one against Man City, after stepping up to Spurs from a smaller but less daft Premier League club? That’s right. But while the Nuno comparisons are obvious, it doesn’t quite feel like the same situation.
Crucially, there has been no undignified scramble to find a new manager this time. Whatever your thoughts on the timing and manner of Ange Postecoglou’s sacking and the identity of his replacement, it’s also clear Spurs have got the man they wanted in a way they very obviously didn’t when Nuno came in.
But what we do sense at Spurs is a vital and widespread uncertainty. A distinct lack of purpose. We don’t know what the goal is for Spurs this season after finally sorting out the silverware albatross. And we’re not too sure they – or Frank – really know either.
This is a new team and new manager trying to build a relationship with each other and the fans, for whom the last major tie with the ups and downs of the eventful last decade has been severed with the departure of Son Heung-min.
Spurs are a club now in search of new heroes and favourites, on the pitch and in the dugout, and it all just feels a bit directionless. Frank is a good coach, obviously, and there have been enough signs that in the right – and often that appears to be the most theoretically taxing – conditions his Spurs team could also be very good indeed.
But they can also be thoroughly apathetic and entirely maddening. One could thus argue, if one were so inclined, that this is in fact already far more Spurs than has perhaps yet been realised.
7) David Moyes (Everton)
Has got Jack Grealish officially Enjoying His Football Again and we should all be delighted to observe it.
It’s all going well enough right now, but Everton are one of several clubs in the big mid-table hump for whom this still feels very much like a season that could break in either direction as they sit four points away from both third and 17th.
6) Pep Guardiola (Manchester City)
For varied and obvious and entirely understandable reasons, the Premier League manager discourse is currently dominated by a few names. Your Slots, Your Artetas, Your Amorims. The Sean Dyches of this world.
But it occurs to us that there is currently very little being said about Pep Guardiola, and we find that quite interesting.
Because this is a pretty crucial juncture in the Premier League career of one of Our League’s greatest managers. And we think he might just be starting to enjoy himself again.
We’re pretty sure he didn’t really enjoy last season very much. You could see it on his face, sometimes viscerally and literally. A man used to competing for – and very often winning – the very biggest trophies was suddenly not doing that.
Man City’s bids for a fifth straight Premier League crown and a second Champions League title were barely perceptible. The former disappeared in an astonishingly miserable run of form last autumn, one that also caused damage to the latter that proved to be unrecoverable.
We spent a lot of last season wondering whether he might in fact walk away from City altogether, whether he any longer had the energy or desire to keep pushing himself and his players to go again in pursuit of yet more tin.
Having watched his great rival Jurgen Klopp walk away from Liverpool due to possessing sufficient self-awareness and self-knowledge to know he just didn’t have another rebuild in him, would Guardiola be thinking in anything like the same way? We’re certain the thought at least crossed his mind, especially with Klopp clearly very much enjoying his less intensely and demandingly stressful Red Bull role so much.
And despite his new contract, those thoughts resurfaced when City made a stuttering start this season, with consecutive and quite alarmingly tame early defeats to Spurs and Brighton hinting at another season in transition, a season building the foundations for something new rather than competing at the very top level.
Could Guardiola really be arsed with all that? Building a new team to one day go against Arne Slot seemingly finding the Premier League embarrassingly easy, or whatever phase Arteta Arsenal are now in? What about right now?
That’s all shifted a bit, though. City have been very good since the Brighton game and, with Liverpool/Slot losing the entire run of themselves over recent weeks it is once again Guardiola and his side who have emerged from the chaos looking the likelier challengers for a currently dominant Arsenal.
And we know that going up against his old mate Mikel Arteta enlivens and energises Guardiola. It might just do so again. And we also don’t have to worry about just how much of an achievement Guardiola would consider it were City able to come out on top once again in that particular title battle.
This new slightly more direct Haaland-centric, post-De Bruyne City shows tantalising signs of capturing Guardiola’s imagination in a way nothing really did last season.
When you’ve achieved what Guardiola has achieved it must be unbelievably hard to keep coming back and putting yourself through it all again.
This season suddenly looks to be playing out in just the way to get his blood up. The combination of the revitalising change in his own team’s methods and the familiarity of their direct rival might just be ideal.
5) Keith Andrews (Brentford)
Still represents one of the most astonishing gambles a Premier League club has ever taken, the continuity candidate at a club that no longer had any of that, but three wins from the first eight games for a rookie manager suddenly in charge of a team that has lost its inspirational manager, most of his backroom staff, and players of the calibre of Bryan Mbeumo, Yoane Wissa and Christian Norgaard is absolutely fine.
They’re still scoring goals, which was the main worry. If Igor Thiago keeps up his current rate, Brentford will be fine. They’re the leading scorers in the bottom half of the table, and that’s a fair effort when you consider the resources Andrews has available and those he does not.
There are lots of managers doing exceptional things at the Premier League’s smaller clubs, for want of a better word, but if Andrews negotiates this season keeping Brentford as far clear of the trapdoor as is currently the case, it will be as impressive as any of them.
4) Oliver Glasner (Crystal Palace)
Feels like we could be just days away from the backlash. For when you have had your balls tickled and been told how brilliant you are as much and for as long as Glasner has, a backlash there must be.
Very obviously an excellent manager, very obviously taking Palace to heights they really haven’t ever scaled before. But is there now, slightly awkwardly, just the slightest argument to be made they’re not doing quite as well this season as perhaps they ought?
They’ve got the same number of Premier League wins as Brentford. They sit behind Sunderland in the table. We’re being very, very harsh here, but it feels like Glasner has done such things at Palace now that neither he nor they should be truly happy with sitting eighth in the table behind some conspicuously daft teams. They’re even being outperformed by Bournemouth as the division’s standout ‘punching above their weight with elite manager’ club.
3) Mikel Arteta (Arsenal)
Mikel Arteta has now turned Arsenal into just about the least interesting team in the country, and this is almost entirely a compliment.
They are now just exceptionally good at what they do, and it has provided them with a far more plausible, sustainable and coherent route to title success than previous Arteta phases have possessed and, even more importantly, than any of their potential (and largely wilting) rivals can lay claim to this season.
The fact that Arsenal’s set-piece goals boil enough p*ss to solve the energy crisis is just a bonus.
Because it’s Arsenal and because it’s Arteta, we still kind of expect a massive meltdown around January/February, with an FA Cup exit combined with a three-game winless Premier League run plunging them into a headloss crisis in which dark conspiracies are invoked and from which no recovery is possible.
But that’s a triumph of experience over hope. This Arsenal side looks and feels different to Arteta’s previous efforts. Just their last three Premier League games provide compelling evidence of that. They’ve won at Newcastle and Fulham, while easing to a home win over West Ham.
It might not seem too startling, until you consider that Arsenal contrived to collect but a single point from the same three games last season.
They’re not even incurring as much wrath from the celebration police these days. This really should be the season they finally get over the line, at which point it probably will be a smart idea for everyone else to just switch off the internet for a month or so until the World Cup.
READ: Arsenal are ‘boring’ and rely on set-pieces? Nope, they’re just really, really good
2) Regis Le Bris (Sunderland)
Hands up who thought he and his team would be doing this well, with nary a thought of relegation or prominent Sack Race involvement to be seen?
Put them down, you ridiculous liar.
He’s been brilliant, they’ve been brilliant. And what Le Bris and Sunderland have done in these first eight games is in no small part responsible for the absolute panic currently going off at clubs around the league.
The fact none of the promoted teams this year appear willing to meekly accept their designated role as cannon fodder is making several members of the Settled Seventeen nervous in a way they haven’t been in the last two seasons, but Sunderland are the main reason there are so many arses currently twitching so violently at your Wolveses, Forests and West Hams, and why even the Fulhams of this world no longer appear immune.
1) Andoni Iraola (Bournemouth)
He’s not just doing a good job. He’s doing one so good that we genuinely suspect it might actually be witchcraft. How, for instance, does a team of Bournemouth’s resources lose, in the space of one summer, defensive players of the calibre of Ilya Zabarnyi, Dean Huijsen and Milos Kerkez – not to mention their first-choice goalkeeper – and not just carry on regardless but actively improve?
Something’s not right here. If anything for me, Clive, Iraola’s almost managing Bournemouth too well.
We really are no more than two minor Arsenal setbacks away from asking whether Bournemouth can Do A Leicester in what we’re already confident Barclays scholars will come to consider the stupidest season since all the nonsense of 2015/16. Although last season is also right up there, now we think about it. This is the age of nonsense.
But at Bournemouth, it is only the good kind of nonsense.
Tell you what you don’t hear much of these days. People saying it’s an absolute disgrace for Bournemouth to have replaced Gary O’Neil with Iraola. That kind of chatter was all the rage for a while back there.