We're only five days into 2026, but already two of the Premier League's big-hitters and a massive Scottish club have dispensed with their managers. Slow down please, everybody.
The term has felt increasingly redundant over the last few years, but the news that two of the Premier League’s “Big Six” and one of the Glasgow giants all have sacked their managers since the start of 2026 has felt, when combined with other news stories, like the beginning of a year throughout which there could betoo much news.
The irony of both the sacking of Enzo Maresca at Chelsea and Ruben Amorim at Manchester United is that neither club are performing that far below where pre-season expectations might have put them. Chelsea are in fifth place in the Premier League despite a slump that has been ongoing since the end of November. Manchester United are sixth, which represents a substantial improvement on the 15th-placed finish they managed last season.
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And the striking similarity between these two departures is that they both seem to have come about as a result of a huge falling-out between the -reasonably recently arrived - senior management of the clubs and the manager over how their teams should be run.
Maresca was reportedly especially infuriated by Chelsea’s medical staff being given the final say on who should be deemed fit enough to play for them, and for how long. Amorim’s departure appears at least partially influenced by his failure to offer anything beyond the 3-4-3 formation to which he is especially wedded.
Not for the first time in the history of football, high-falutin’ talk of projects and philosophies has run head-first into the 21st century megaclub diktat that you simply have to keep winning all the time, come what may, mixed with arguments concerning where responsibilities began and ended.
At Chelsea, there is at least the possibility that they have made the right choice in replacing Maresca by reaching immediately for Liam Rosenior. Of course, it helps considerably that RC Strasbourg, Rosenior’s current club, are owned by Chelsea’s owners, but it’s also the case that this is an extremely promising young coach who has consistently impressed throughout his brief managerial career so far. Expect them to use him up and spit him out over the next 18 months, tops.
At Manchester United, though, it’s almost impossible to detach the departure of yet another manager from the muddled, dysfunctional way in which the club has been run for the last few years. Amorim was supposed to be a project. Jim Ratcliffe himself saidless than three months ago said that it would take three years for the club’s first ever head coach to build the team into what he wanted it to be.
But Amorim’s post-Leeds meltdown seems to have set the seal on his departure from the club after 14 months, instead. He’d previously said that he wanted to be the “manager” of Manchester United rather than the “head coach”, and sporting director Jason Wilcox’s comments on how successful Amorim’s 3-4-3 might be at Old Trafford -not very - indicate that this is one of the ruptures that end up costing him his job.
A clear sign of just how muddled this all comes across can be seen in the list of favourites to replace Amorim. Obviously, I’m not going to link to a gambling website on these hallowed pages, but the top six to replace him currently runs as follows, in order: Oliver Glasner, Darren Fletcher (!), Enzo Maresca (!!!), Gareth Southgate, Andoni Iraola, Michael Carrick and Kieran McKenna. Nothing says “we’ve really not got that much of a plan” like such a broad distribution of potential replacements.
Celtic joined the party later in the afternoon, deciding to jettison Wilfried Nancy after just a month in charge of the club. A 3-1 home defeat to Rangers, a match in which they absolutelycapitulated during the second half, proved to be their tipping point, though there is also a point to be made - based onthe xG stats versus final scores figures for him - about him perhaps having been one of theunluckiest managers in the history of the club.
Of course, in truth, both Celtic and Rangers have had an air of shambles about them this season, with top of the table Hearts - at the time of writing six points clear - having been this season’s real winners in Scotland so far this season.
At least if these stories have done something, they’ve pushed a story into the spotlight which I’ve felt hasn’t been commented upon nearly enough over the last few years. None of the above three were “managers.” All three were “head coaches.” And that’s an important factor that has flown under the radar in recent years.
It has long felt as though our understanding is that “managers” are what they were thirty or forty years ago, when in reality the job of the “head coach” is very different to that of the “manager.” That particular position has evolved since the start of the game. In the first place, what evolved into the “manager” was frequently called the “secretary-manager.” Coaches would coach the team - though tactics remained rudimentary - but team selection would often be made by the directors of the club.
This started to change in the early 1920s with Herbert Chapman, first at Huddersfield Town and then at Arsenal. Chapman insisted on control, and put himself centre-stage, as the figurehead of the club. The ‘picking by committee’ thing finally died in 1962, when Alf Ramsey told the FA he wouldn’t take the England job unless he picked the team.
But the cult of the manager started to grow quickly after Chapman, and it remained the dominant figure in this position in this country until into this century. It made sense for them to be in front of the media, when that became a requirement.
But things have changed. Time has brought continuous evolution away from that, with sporting directors and head coaches. Yet the phrases “manager” and “head coach” are used interchangeably even now. The “manager” is seldom all-powerful any more. The operations have grown too big.
The “head coach” has become something like a hybrid role. They are the public face of the organisation, they do pick the team though, as per Enzo Maresca’s experience over Chelsea’s medical staff, they’re expected to be heads of a backroom team and take the advice of that team on board.
There do remain managers of the old school, but their numbers are diminishing. And the fact that three huge clubs have all sacked their head coaches within the first week of 2026 indicates that they are simply more disposable than the managers that preceded them.
But from a journalistic perspective, and from that of an audience that deserves to know, shouldn’t there be greater attention pushed upon sporting directors? Certainly in Germany, where the sporting director/head coach style is more embedded, the sporting directors do face the public, and frequently. In England, they seldom do.
The unkind way of explaining the difference in these exposure levels would be to say that the state of affairs over here, in which head coaches act as human shields for greater institutional shortcomings (and can even get sacked for pointing this out), suits those with greater control down to the ground.
The kind of way of explaining it would be to say that these islands have been late converts to this way of deciding who picks the team that starts for your lot on a Saturday afternoon.
The one thing that Chelsea, Manchester United and Celtic have in common in that they are not well-run clubs. Chelsea are badly run. They have vast amounts of capital behind them, but they are not a well-run club. Manchester United and Celtic both seem to be suffering from some form of institutional dry rot. At Manchester United, it’s been going on for years, while Celtic have really failed to hold onto the huge competitive advantage granted to them by the financial implosion on their other side of their city.
Sir Jim Ratcliffe has arrived at Manchester United, but the club doesn’t seem any happier a place as a result of this. There were drawings of a new stadium, then there weren’t, then there were again, but Old Trafford remains in the meantime largely untouched and a lot of people have been laid off.
They’re not doing shambolically badly this season, not the same as they were they were last season, although they did continue their complete Manchester Unitedness by losing on penalties to Grimsby Town in the Carabao Cup, a classic example of something thatshouldn’t have mattered becoming something that very much did, and by their own hand.
But then, that’s not the point, is it? Not in England, at least. Results didn’t help either, but we already know that the departures of both Enzo Maresca and Ruben Amorim came about because of disagreements with the owners of the club pertaining to the extent of their responsibilities.
Head coaches, it would appear, are not immune a degree of confusion over this themselves. And perhaps we all need to recalibrate our idea of who the head coach actually is, and start focusing our attention on where the real responsibility over teams affairs rests. Over to you, Mr Sporting Director.
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