Depending on your point of view, last season was one of the very best or very worst Premier League seasons for the sack race.
So many managers coming and going, it was at times impossible to keep up. And that was just from trying to keep an eye on Nottingham Forest and Spurs.
The absurd Mr Marinakis sacked not one, not two, but three managers last season and has already binned another one off this summer, and in the classiest possible fashion: a full two minutes before the break clause in his contract expired.
It all made Chelsea only getting rid of two managers look positively sedate.
What it all means now, though, is a fascinating opening card for the 26/27 Premier League Sack Race. Three of the So-Called Big Six, which is what you have to call them now, have brand new managers. Five of the So-Called Big Six (see?) have managers appointed only this year.
Roberto De Zerbi took the Spurs job in March and is already the 12th longest-serving current manager among the 20 Premier League clubs. Only six current Premier League clubs haven’t changed their manager in the last two years.
It’s a wild start to a brand new Sack Race. As ever, remember the crucial caveat: we all call it the Sack Race because it’s a fun little name, but it’s not technically correct. It doesn’t have to be a sacking, it’s just the first/next manager to leave their job by any of the various available methods.
You’re just never going to convince us to call it the Mutual Consent And Good Luck With Their Future Endeavours Race.
20. Mikel Arteta (Arsenal)
Now comfortably the longest-serving of the current Premier League managers in the oddly discombobulating post-Pep world we all find ourselves living in, and equally comfortably the safest after the way Arsenal ultimately p*ssed it in what became a pretty tame title race in the end.
Arsenal will start the season as the only real known quantity and thus warm favourites to retain their title. With steady year-on-year improvement in the Champions League also leading inevitably and inexorably to success at last in that competition this year as well, Arteta is in a good place.
And that place is specifically, of course, one yard outside his technical area.
19. David Moyes (Everton)
It says a lot about both the natural fit that is Moyes and Everton and the transient nature of modern Premier League management that it feels like he’s been back with the Toffees for absolutely ages now when it is in fact a mere 18 months. It really was literally only last year they appointed him.
Crazy stuff. Anyway, doesn’t seem like they’re about to go completely mad and abandon ‘cosy mid-table adjacent Premier League survival’ in the forlorn and possibly fatal pursuit of something grander any time soon, so Moyes is also very safe indeed for now.
But we never quite trust Everton not to go gallivanting down an ill-advised road that ends with Ollie Holt writing the same tut-tutting ‘Careful what you wish for’ column 17 times.
18. Unai Emery (Aston Villa)
We still have the standard back-of-our-minds fear that at some point someone bigger and more powerful than Villa will come in and steal Mr Europa League away from them, or that he will eventually tire of constantly having to sprint just to stand still in a competition where the odds are stacked so heavilyagainst him.
Does feel like how the rest of this summer pans out for Villa is going to be important for how naggingly persistent that feeling might get as the big kick-off approaches. The balance between exciting incomings and infuriating departures to larger but stupider clubs is just about okay for now.
And Villa have at least done the first thing they needed to do, which was fairly comfortably survive this summer and its bumper round of new manager appointments from that aforementioned group of larger but stupider clubs without losing their inspirational manager, one who does seem quite likely to be find himself second behind only Arteta in the longest-serving stakes before too long.
17. Fabian Hurzeler (Brighton)
Premier League management remains just about for now a job for 1970s-born Gen Xers (10 of the starting 20 were born in the 70s, with Moyes now flying the flag alone for the 1960s). Yet while the 1980s crop continues to grow, Hurzeler remains a conspicuous 1990s outlier as he starts his third season with Brighton.
He is, ludicrously, one of only four managers about to start his third successive Premier League season with the same club. And a pretty good job he’s doing too.
16. Marco Rose (Bournemouth)
While there may have been eight managerial changes over the off-season, there aren’t actually that many entirely new faces among the new managers. Marco Rose is one such face, but still feels very Barclays-coded having been linked with many Premier League jobs down the years.
Most recently, he was apparently the other main name in the interim frame when Spurs plumped for Igor Tudor earlier this year. A decision Spurs got so dramatically wrong they may in fact have pulled a complete Homer and got it right, given where they’ve somehow ended up at the end of it all.
One thing Rose can expect to get at Bournemouth that would not have been forthcoming at Spurs or most other places he was linked is time. Andoni Iraola made a famously disastrous start to his Bournemouth reign and they stuck with him to good effect.
Slightly different this time with Bournemouth having been forced into this change rather than choosing to do so as they did when replacing Gary O’Neil with Iraola, but it would still be a pretty big shock to see Rose come under any real serious early pressure. Certainly not before at least one of the others above him on this list, at least.
15. Andoni Iraola (Liverpool)
More than with any other fresh appointment, you really do feel with Iraola it’s going to come down to how he starts. We know he started badly at Bournemouth, and we know he’s a manager there who dealt in streaks for both good and bad.
That was fine at Bournemouth where the winless runs could go harmlessly under the radar and the unbeaten streaks stand out. It’s going to be the other way round for him now.
The good news is that he’s currently on an 18-match unbeaten run in the Premier League. The bad news is that this followed an 11-match winless run.
And even that unbeaten run contained a two-month spell between mid-February and mid-April without a Premier League win. Again, just far, far less easy to conceal that kind of stuff when you’re Liverpool rather than Bournemouth manager.
But we do have high hopes for Iraolaball with the better quality of player that Liverpool possess. We’re relatively confident it all falls the good way rather than the bad way. But there is no use pretending the bad way isn’t a very live possibility.
14. Michael Carrick (Manchester United)
Made an unanswerable case in the end over the closing months of last season, but now the real challenge begins. It’s not a criticism but rather a statement of objective fact to note that Carrick really was managing on easy mode last season. At least, as easy a mode as any Man United manager can ever be on.
One because he was following one of the stupidest and most stubborn Premier League managerial reigns ever, leaving him with a couple of very easy and crowd-pleasing early tricks to deploy. It shouldn’t be as easy to stand out from your predecessor as ‘just pick Kobbie Mainoo’ but it was for Carrick, and might yet also be for the next England manager, who knows.
The other and more significant easy mode setting Carrick will not be able to enjoy any longer is playing a mere one game a week. That truly was the best of both worlds for a manager; the lowest workload without bearing a single shred of the blame for why there was only one game a week to play.
It’s back to four fronts rather than a single laser-focused one for United this season, and it’s also thus far been a difficult summer of missing out on some top targets.
It could all still be absolutely fine, but it’s also not exactly hard to see how this could all start to unravel very quickly for a manager whose reputation is still based to a fair extent on spending his playing career looking like exactly the type of player who should be great at management.
13. Regis Le Bris (Sunderland)
Obvious risk of second-season syndrome here, and the nagging fear that all the excitement of a European tour in the Europa League instead becomes a burden.
That’s the glass half-empty way of looking at it anyway. Sunderland fans definitely shouldn’t be looking at things that way right now, but it explains why one of the managers of the year last season sits so relatively high here.
12. Keith Andrews (Brentford)
And again: it’s just pure fear of the second-season syndrome that places him this high, isn’t it? Should be less of a factor if only because less has changed. There’s no European distraction, for one thing, and the seamless way Andrews stepped into Thomas Frank’s shoes just screams business as usual for Brentford.
And business as usual for Brentford will keep Andrews once again well away from the pointy end of any Sack Race discussion.
11. Xabi Alonso (Chelsea)
Definitely the most exciting of the new managers this season, and not least because it feels instinctively like it comes with the widest range of possibilities. Alonso is still really quite an unproven manager, really, with the stunning achievements of that one outrageous and unlikely Leverkusen season set against his struggles with Real Madrid.
Anyone can struggle in that job, of course, and it doesn’t undo anything he achieved in Germany. It does mean, though, that he arrives in a league where he was hugely admired as a player but not with the club anyone expected to see him join and with some questions to answer.
Essentially, it would be absolutely no great shock to see an Alonso-led Chelsea top of the league by six points in January, or to see Alonso sacked in November after a seven-game winless run leaves the Europe-less Blues nevertheless struggling down in 12th, or anything at all in between.
That’s the joy of it, really. It’s the perfect mix of manager and club to create an all-things-are-possible starting point. And for the Sack Race that means: somewhere in the middle, then.
10. Daniel Farke (Leeds)
There’s a sense that there are still two ways Farke can fail at Leeds, harsh as it is after doing excellent work last year to dispel his Scott Parker-adjacent ‘Championship specialist’ faint-praise damnation.
First, he could actually get them into relegation trouble again; no team – certainly not one in only its second season back in the top flight – should ever feel so cocky as to discount that possibility entirely.
But also he could get himself in danger by doing rather better than that. As soon as Leeds start to look like a comfy mid-table Premier League team in a kind of Fulham mould – and long before the midway point of this season they could absolutely look like that – you get a sense that this is a club sufficiently large that it might just start to fidget and agitate for more, for the next step, for a push on to Europe and maybe a higher-profile manager to realise that dream.
And then, in all likelihood, the Ollie Holt ‘Careful what you wish for’ columns and even, if we’re all particularly badly behaved and must be punished further, all manner of nostalgia pieces about the original and still best Doing of a Leeds.
9. Enzo Maresca (Manchester City)
There is plenty of sense in giving The Impossible Job™ of following Pep Guardiola to someone who has already been Chelsea manager in the BlueCo era and thus has some inkling of what an impossible job looks like.
Not the same type of impossible job, sure, but impossible nevertheless.
It also strikes us that giving the job to a very good coach was a smart move. It sounds obvious, but not everyone has taken such a sensible approach to this kind of high-wire succession planning.
But the doubts are easily found and very close to the surface. Maresca is lots of very impressive things, but he just isn’t Guardiola, is he? He certainly doesn’t have the same charisma, which really could matter more than it should.
We would also worry about the way he self-fulfilled Chelsea out of very good title-race-fringes positions towards the midway point of the last two seasons. You’re just not going to get away with trying that kind of tactic at Manchester City, although we can already hear Maresca, post-match after a disappointing draw at Nottingham Forest leaves City seventh in the league that even Pep himself hadn’t really managed a proper title challenge with this City side in the last two years.
Don’t think it’ll fly, but we can certainly imagine him giving it a go.
8. Alvaro Arbeloa (Fulham)
Hugely enjoying how much Alvaro Arbeloa to Fulham feels like a Temu version of Xabi Alonso to Chelsea in every possible way, and with a similar if less dramatic level of uncertainty as to how it might all go.
Mainly, though, it’s just going to be weird to see anyone other than Marco Silva in the Fulham dugout. We’d got very comfortable with that, and Fulham were very comfortable while he was there. What happens now? No idea, to be honest.
7. Roberto De Zerbi (Tottenham)
The really big chaos agent in any pre-season assessment of 26/27. Just what, precisely, do we expect from Roberto De Zerbi and his wild new-look Spurs team? They’ve completely reshaped their entire defence and midfield already this summer at eye-watering cost and done so with firmly established and very Premier League-proven players.
Anyone wondering what, precisely, Spurs promised De Zerbi to convince him to come in and save them from themselves in March now has the answer. Six new players for the first-team squad before July had really got going, including a new £185m midfield pairing, perhaps the two best centre-backs outside the Big Six from last season’s Premier League and the nous and won-it-all knowhow of Andy Robertson.
All of it, for now, servicing a frontline that still includes Richarlison. It could be magnificent. Spurs are certainly going to be better to watch than they were for large parts of last season as Thomas Frank retreated ever further into a version of miseryball that by the end had alienated all but his most ardent of supporter-journalists in the press.
Spurs played a very, very basic iteration of De Zerbi’s football in those desperate needs-must final weeks of a deeply unpleasant season, but even then you could see the difference it made compared to what had gone before.
It does seem entirely reasonable to expect that time to work on his ideas more fully and with that eye-catching new squad should deliver even better results, but there’s also no denying that this is Spurs.
You do still kind of expect this dramatic break from their recent past to just blow up in their faces because Tottenham. And De Zerbi, brilliant as he undoubtedly is, remains among the sport’s more combustible managers.
This is his ninth managerial job, and in only of the previous eight – at Sassuolo between 2018 and 2021 – as made it passed 100 games.
With the money Spurs are spending on new arrivals, and the kind of young players they’re selling to try and at least part-fund that splurge, they are placing an awfully big bet on it working out differently for them.
6. Pierre Sage (Crystal Palace)
Enzo Maresca isn’t the only manager starting this season with the task of replacing a Premier League club’s greatest ever manager. Oliver Glasner delivered not one but two major trophies to a club that had never managed a single one in over a century of trying and will be almost impossible to replace.
But Palace do seem to have given it as good a go as could reasonably be expected with the appointment of a man who has just steered Lens to second place in Ligue 1 and a first Coupe de France victory in his only season with the club.
Finishing second in Ligue 1 with any team other than PSG is obviously pretty much an unimprovable effort, but especially so given the manner of it here. Lens were closer to PSG than anybody else in the league was to Lens, with a six-point gap to the champions but a nine-point cushion over third-placed Lille. They also scored more goals and conceded fewer than anyone other than the best team in the entire continent. Not bad at all.
But it’s all still in France, isn’t it? And not in Our League. And only in Our League can managerial mettle truly be tested.
5. Oliver Glasner (Nottingham Forest)
Given the clubs Glasner was being linked with when it was announced he was leaving Palace, this is something of a coup for Nottingham Forest, even if it did sadly mean Mr Marinakis having to get rid of yet another manager. And we all know how much he hates doing that.
And it does all mean that, while Glasner is obviously a top-tier appointment for a club that did flirt with relegation for the longest time last season, he simply must by definition sit somewhere near the top of this list. Because how could he not? It’s Nottingham Forest, it’s Mr Marinakis: it’s always possible for it to end at any time. You wouldn’t entirely rule out the possibility of it happening before the season even starts.
4. Eddie Howe (Newcastle)
Among the incumbents, only Arteta has been in the same Premier League job longer than Howe, but the pressure for that to change is surely going to grow and quickly if the season doesn’t start as he and Newcastle hope.
It already looks like another harrowing summer of being reminded again and again of their still relatively lowly place in the football food chain despite their Saudi sponsors. They’ve already lost Anthony Gordon and Sandro Tonali this summer, the vultures are circling for Bruno Guimaraes, and the incomings are as yet underwhelming. Established first-team departures are making way for promising youngsters. That rarely ends well.
At least not in the short term. In the end, this chaotic summer might end up looking like the hard reset Newcastle desperately needed. But it’s extremely unlikely Howe could survive to reap the benefits. Newcastle managed only a 12th-place finish last season, which manages now to look both desperately disappointing and yet incredibly difficult to improve upon.
3. Gary O’Neil (Ipswich)
If you’ve been paying attention and made it this far, you’ll have realised already that the top three, in keeping with tradition if not what actually transpires, are the promoted clubs. It’s yer classic Victim Of Their Own Success narrative.
Although, in the specific case of Gary ‘Spoke Well on MNF, I Thought’ O’Neil, victim of Kieran McKenna’s success after he’d managed to be neither a victim of his own success or failure or success again before walking away this summer.
2. Frank Lampard (Coventry)
At least he’s not the favourite! No, but seriously, what a job he’s done over there at Coventry to get them back in the big time, terrific.
1. Sergej Jakirovic (Hull)
So happy and settled at Hull that he’s even talking about a new contract.
“I’m very happy here. I don’t see any problems, this club feels like my home. I have no doubt that we will agree with everything, but we will see.
“I’m waiting Mr. Chairman. We have talked overall how he and I see the situation.”
Gone by October, then.