Nottingham Forest have sacked Sean Dyche, who some might argue is exactly the manager they need to get them out of the position that they're in right now.
After the game, Sean Dyche appeared resigned to his fate. A goalless draw against Wolves in a match that had been trailed as being “must-win” meant that the sound of a sharpening guillotine blade could be heard increasingly loudly in the distance after the final whistle at The City Ground. A couple of hours after the final whistle sounded, it fell.
Nottingham Forest are, therefore, now looking for their fourth manager of the season, and there is an argument for saying that the football hasn’t been particularly enjoyable to watch, while the team is still deep in the middle of a fight to preserve their Premier League status. Ever was it thus on both counts, with this particular manager.
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But the questions remain the same as they do anywhere, when a decision of this nature is made. Who comes next, and is there really a sufficiently substantial marginal gain to be taken from taking another spin on this particular roulette wheel?
Nuno Espirito Santo, Ange Postecoglou and Sean Dyche have now been chewed up and spat out by The City Ground Mincing Machine in the last seven months or so, but are Nottingham Forest in a better position now than they would have been had they just stuck with Nuno, who took them to European football in the first place?
The only correct answer to this question can be given by Evangelos Marinakis, and this is perhaps the biggest issue that any autocracy faces. Nottingham Forest had an exceptional 2024-25 season. At the start of this season, Marinakis’ objective for 2025-26 may well have been to build on that and try and push a little higher.
But that has clearly not been on the menu for pretty much the whole of this season. Forest haven’t been above 15th in the table since the middle of September. It’s been very evident since the dog days of last summer that last season had been an exception rather than the new rule for Nottingham Forest.
Ange Postecoglou was a terrible fit for the club in just about every way, and by the time his 39 days were up everybody had seen the extent to which this was the case. The very appointment of Dyche seemed to be an admission on the part of Marinakis that 17th place needed to be the club’s target for this season, and that Premier League survival mattered above everything else.
Three months on, the case for saying that Sean Dyche was unsuccessful enough to deserve the sack is patchy. If survival was the key target upon his appointment, then he’s been a partial success. Forest were 19th when they appointed him and they’re 17th now. They’re in better shape than they were when Ange left, though this should be tempered by remembering just how low a bar that was.
Defeat to Wrexham on penalties after coming from three goals down to level the game in the FA Cup was too weird to read too much into, but they are still in the Europa League. Strange as it may sound, Nottingham Forest could yet be playing Champions League football next season, and it’s impossible to call that a pipe dream when the team who won the Europa League last season were in exactly the same League position then that Forest occupy now.
But when a club has rattled through three managers in a season, attention has to fall upon the guy who’s doing the hiring and firing. Nuno’s sacking was superficially eyebrow-raising. He’d galvanised the club after a spell during which it had started to feel as though they’d lost a not-insubstantial amount of the identity that had got them into the Premier League in the first place, and he’s since turned around a malfunctioning team at a deeply unhappy club, at West Ham.
Much as it may sound derisory to say as much, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Marinakis may have hired Ange Postecoglou primarily because Ange is a heavy-set Greek bloke, because there really isn’t a much stronger reason to argue that he was in any way a good fit for that club at that time, and under that particular owner.
But of course when we talk of Evangelos Marinakis being an autocrat, we should remember that there is a broader cast of characters at play. The role of Forest’s “Global Head of Football”, Edu Gaspar, cannot be overlooked. It was, after all, a breakdown in his relationship with Nuno Espirito Santo that led to the departure of the most successful head coach they’ve had since they returned to the Premier League in 2023.
Edu is highly thought of at his previous club Arsenal, where the spine of the team that is currently leading the Premier League was built on his watch. But things seem to have become a little chaotic since he arrived at Forest. Arsenal is a very different type of football club to Nottingham Forest, and the skill-set required at The Emirates isn’t necessarily universally transferable.
It’s increasingly clear that Forest aren’t quite a complete autocracy. If anything, they’ve become a bit of a mess of voices talking over and past each other. Edu fell out with Nuno. Postecoglou, it’s understood, was a Marinakis appointment, while Sean Dyche was reportedly pushed by another character in this soap opera, the club’s technical director George Syrianos, while Edu was pushing for Roberto Mancini.
This muddle-headedness has also been reflected in their transfer market dealings. A lot of money was spent in the summer, not much of it particularly well. Loan signings have either not performed or been injured. The upshot of this has been a team that isn’t as good as the one they had last season. And while we all know who’s ultimately in overall control, there doesn’t appear to be a strategy than “do better than this” about much of what’s been going on.
Forest are still in the Europa League, but they’re in the round of death, and their two-legged tie against Fenerbahce won’t be easy. They’re in 17th place in the Premier League, but it’s an increasingly precarious-looking 17th place. Had Benjamin Sesko not scored that very late goal for Manchester United on Tuesday night, the gap between them and West Ham would only be a single point.
If the current head coach has improved the team’s league position, what is the benefit in sacking him at this precise point in the season, especially when he’s just the sort of manager that a team in a relegation dog-fight needs? Sean Dyche was presumably brought in for that reason, wasn’t he? He was - with strong caveats - mildly succeeding,wasn’t he?
It’s true to say that the more times you spin a roulette wheel, the more times you win. But you lose just as many, if not more. Maybe they’ll offer it to Thomas Frank until the end of the season. Maybe, in a plot twist worthy of this absolute soap opera of a League, Frank and Nuno, two of the last three managers that Spurs have sacked, could turn things around enough to relegate them.
They reportedly want Vitor Pareira and are set to enter talks, which tracks, though not necessarily in a way that is complimentary towards the owner. So tell me, Mr Marinakis, what was it about the guy who took the team of a dysfunctional club under terrible ownership who looked like near-certainties to get relegated and hauled them to Premier League safety?
Every time something like this happens, the likes of Marinakis and Edu get pushed into the spotlight again. And while it seems reasonable to surmise that they both like being in the limelight to some extent or another, in football it’s far from always a good thing to be so.
As journalist Duncan Alexanderso wisely said in 2020: Each day in the Premier League there is one main crisis club. The goal is to never be it. For today, Evangelos Marinakis has failed that goal. The question now is whether it’ll all be worth it at the end of the season.
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