With season’s end now just around the corner, here’s a look at five managers who aren’t certain to take charge of their current clubs in the Premier League next campaign.
Full disclosure: this has been quite significantly rewritten since we first had the idea before the Europa League final.
Nuno Espirito Santo (Nottingham Forest)
Obviously and entirely a madness, this one, and perhaps the single most egregious example of a manager becoming the victim of his own success at any non-promoted side. Even Leicester waited until it actually had gone to sh*t to get rid of Claudio Ranieri after he delivered the title.
Yet there is plenty of talk now that should Nottingham Forest end up seventh when the music stops on Sunday afternoon then Nuno’s position could come under threat.
There is absolutely no denying that finishing ‘only’ seventh from where they were a month ago would represent a disappointment and opportunity missed, but even allowing for the inevitable shifting of targets and expectations it seems utterly wild that Nuno could come under any pressure at all after a season that in the round remains a huge overachievement for a team that spent much of the last one in dire relegation trouble.
But the fact it would be batsh*t doesn’t mean it won’t happen. Easy to forget it for much of this season, but Forest are quite batsh*t. Nuno is their eighth permanent manager in the last decade and already the second longest-serving.
Owner Evangelos Marinakis is an emotional and volatile guy, and we’ve already seen him storming the pitch, brandishing his iPhone 7 and wired earphones, to admonish Nuno in the most public fashion possible after an admittedly quite irritating 2-2 draw with Leicester.
Absolutely do not rule this out if Sunday doesn’t go to plan.
Ruben Amorim (Man United)
We had two fairly strong convictions heading into the Europa League final: that Ruben Amorim was safe either way, and that Ange Postecoglou was doomed either way.
We might have been wrong about both of those. Because it’s not just that Spurs won the final, it’s that Postecoglou so thoroughly won the battle of the managers as well, sitting Amorim down emphatically.
The damning thing for Amorim is that when United are bad – and that is alarmingly often, including in the game they had decided many months ago was the one that would define their season – he is guilty of everything Ange stands accused of: stubborn, rigid adherence to a set way of doing things even when it’s demonstrably not working and the players aren’t buying into it.
And while United played all their hits in Bilbao, never remotely looking like a team, defending incompetently, disappearing when the pressure was on, it was Ange and Spurs who showed the willingness to adapt and take the pragmatic approach to the reality in front of them.
Shorn of their own main creative outlets, Spurs adopted a low-block-and-counter approach against United that they had deployed equally effectively to varying degrees when also keeping clean sheets in key knockout games at Eintracht Frankfurt and Bodo/Glimt.
Amorim’s one concession to any deviation from his set plan appears to be ‘Chuck Harry Maguire up front and lump it in the mixer’. Look, we don’t hate it as, say, a Plan J or K and it is undeniably on occasion effective.
But as a sole Plan B it’s, frankly, pish.
Whoever lost the final was going to be in a bleak place after what was one of the highest-stakes games it’s possible to imagine given the extent to which both sides had sacked off everything else for this one night.
There are different ways to lose, though. And United picked the worst possible one: an almost total failure to turn up at all against opposition with obvious, punishable frailties both deep-rooted and superficial, both physical and mental.
Amorim got his selection wrong. Then he got his subs – or rather lack of subs – wrong. Bruno Fernandes had a horrible game and that’s a thing that can happen to any player at any time, fair enough, but did Amorim’s deployment of him in such a deep-lying position against such a deep-set opponent really give his best player his best chance to exert the influence and control of which he is capable?
The indications are that United will continue with Amorim, and that’s to be expected for Sunk Cost FC. There is still a very fair argument that he deserves a summer to at least try and instil his ideas – and as importantly his players – in the squad.
But the fact he so obviously needs a full summer only highlights what a complete pig’s anus United made of the whole thing in failing to act decisively last summer and then bringing in that kind of manager mid-season.
And Amorim’s own decision to ignore his gut and make a mid-season move already looks like one of the worst judgement calls in recent times. Because there are no guarantees this yet represents rock-bottom for a broken football club.
Ange Postecoglou (Tottenham)
Has pulled off one of the great season-long pranks by doing what he said he would from the start and winning Tottenham a trophy in his second season.
But the absolute and total sacrifice of Tottenham’s league form to facilitate that potentially transformative banter-ending win means that doubts about his long-term viability and suitability remain.
We’ve changed our tune and declared that he deserves the chance to prove he’s learned the lessons of this season, that adaptability and pragmatism need not always be dirty words, and see if he can apply those knockout learnings to the more humdrum workaday business of the league.
David Ornstein, though, is a man who knows his onions regarding these matters and he remains of the view that the Spurs board remain of a mind to follow through on their planned change of course this summer.
That’s going to be a harder sell for Daniel Levy to a newly enchanted fanbase than it might have been.
Whatever direction it takes, a genuinely fascinating summer awaits now at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium given the unexpected and vast opportunities that have just presented themselves.
Enzo Maresca (Chelsea)
Feels like more rests on Sunday’s final Premier League day than next Wednesday’s Europa Conference final, at least with regard to Maresca’s own future.
Winning the Conference has long felt close to an inevitability for a Chelsea side absurdly overpowered compared to its opposition. In a year when the 16th and 17th best teams in England have been able to dominate the Europa League, Chelsea had absolutely no wriggle room in the third-tier competition.
What matters surely for Maresca now is returning Chelsea to the Champions League. However slapdash and unfocused their spending may be, it is spending at a level that demands that platform. Really, it demands a title challenge of some kind.
Even when Chelsea appeared capable of delivering such a challenge, Maresca insisted they couldn’t. It always felt vaguely self-interested and also perhaps slightly self-fulfilling. For a manager who came into the job to a chorus of doubts surrounding his total lack of top-flight managerial experience it didn’t exactly inspire confidence that he understood the assignment.
A late pick-up in league form has slightly quietened the noise around Maresca’s future, but the fact remains that he is yet to ensure he even matches Mauricio Pochettino’s sixth-place effort from last season, and a stunning run of form to end the season couldn’t save the Argentinean 12 months ago.
Scott Parker (Burnley)
Much of the arguments here apply equally as clearly if slightly more harshly to Daniel Farke who has delivered the Championship title for Leeds.
The concern with both promoted managers is that we already knew they were very good Championship managers, but equally all the evidence we have points to them being rotten top-flight ones.
Farke, though, having delivered better results in more striking fashion, dodges the final spot on this list in favour of Parker, whose often grim sufferball tactics to steer Burnley to promotion don’t suggest a thrilling bid for Premier League survival is in store.
Just as teams who get promoted playing great free-flowing attacking football – like Burnley’s last promoted team under Vincent Kompany – find the step up unmanageable, we fear that a team that has gone so far the other way will be equally exposed by the step up.
There has to be a middle ground, and we have little confidence Parker can find it at a level that has already proved beyond him before.