Arne Slot and Michael Carrick among 10 PL managers lucky to be in job
In one of our increasingly frequent laments at the state of Premier League management, it occurred to us that half the current Premier League managers are lucky to have the jobs they have.
There are all manner of different categories here. Some of these managers are sh*t, some are over-promoted, some are clearly still in what is for now nominally a Premier League job in the hope they’ll do a good job in the Championship next season, some just happened to be in the right place at the right time when the job was being dished out.
And some of them are Thomas Frank, who is almost all of the above but don’t tell the UK press boys that because he is like Bambi to those lads for some reason.
To be entirely clear from the outset: while some of these managers are absolutely here for being sh*t, many of these managers are very good managers doing very good jobs. They just find themselves in positions their CVs from a year ago couldn’t possibly justify.
Rob Edwards (Wolves)
He’s had quite the managerial career already at 43. Took Luton into the Premier League, which was crazy, then took them back out of it, which was fair enough, then had them well on their way to League One (crazy again) before being removed.
You kind of felt he was always coming back to the Premier League one way or another, but it did probably need more than being quite good for a few months with Middlesbrough.
He got himself the cushiest Premier League gig imaginable; taking over a team already doomed to relegation that won’t get pinned on you, and a situation where you are almost guaranteed to improve things.
This he has duly done by collecting six points in 14 games. Obviously appointed with next season in mind, which is fair enough but history does suggest that while it’s fair to assume he will get Wolves out of the Championship, which direction is a 50-50 chance.
Scott Parker (Burnley)
A slightly harsher version of the ‘only here for next season’ trope, because Parker did at least earn his way into the Premier League with Burnley. And he has a proven Championship track record now.
But does appear to have spent this season focusing on doing just enough to keep himself in position for another crack at his specialist subject rather than bypassing the need for another promotion attempt altogether.
We all know that players exist who are too good for the Championship but nowhere near it in the Premier League, so it stands to reason it should apply to managers as well. Which could make for an interesting career, permanently either becoming a victim of your own success or rewarded for your own failure.
Thomas Frank (Tottenham)
It’s probably fair enough that consistent punching above weight at a smaller club should eventually earn a manager a crack at a big job.
But it’s also fair enough that when, after just a few months, it’s clear that a) the job has overwhelmed you and you are drowning in your own nonsense and that b) the smaller club have carried on punching quite merrily without you, it’s time to agree that, sure, it was worth finding out, but find out we have and let’s bring an end to the whole thing.
When it’s been eight months and that manager is actively propelling the big club towards relegation, then it is definitely time.
Look we all know Daniel Levy had his faults, but he wouldn’t have stood for this nonsense like the bumbling suits who have replaced him. He wouldn’t have learned any lessons from it either, sure, but he would have P45ed this small-timing, out-of-his-depth, anti-football-enjoying fraud into the shadow realm months ago and Spurs would now be becalmed and miserable but safe in 11th under the club-understanding interim eye of Ryan Mason.
Eddie Howe (Newcastle)
Anyone fumbling a big job at the moment has a bullsh*t-chatting canary down the mine in Thomas Frank, but that shouldn’t keep the attention off your Slots and Howes entirely.
Howe’s big problem is that Newcastle can and do have more money than God but just don’t have the pull – or, irritating as this point always is – the location of the established big clubs. Even without pesky rules also thwarting plans for world domination, it would still be a struggle. So it’s desperately hard for him to achieve what Newcastle want to achieve.
Howe’s bigger problem is that if all those other things just disappeared and it was possible to achieve world domination, he would no longer be the manager anyway.
His humdrum day-to-day problem is that he has proved thoroughly incapable of knitting together two good seasons in a row.
Howe’s Newcastle can qualify for the Champions League, or Howe’s Newcastle can be in the Champions League. But never the twain shall meet.
READ: Six tables to highlight why Eddie Howe is facing Newcastle sack
Arne Slot (Liverpool)
Not really fair, is it? To say that someone who won the league title just nine months ago doesn’t deserve to be in his job? Of course it’s not fair. Doesn’t mean it’s not true, though, and Slot has entirely f*cked it this season.
You can’t go around winning the league and having an entire fanbase and punditocracy declaring the dawn of a glorious new era of Liverpool dominance, drop half a billion quid on transfers only some of which you needed, and then spend the next season looking like you might not even qualify for the Champions League while pretending not being as cartoonishly dreadful as Spurs is enough.
Slot’s tactics have been questionable, and he’s found it far harder to incorporate his own signings into the squad than he did simply working with what he was left by Jurgen Klopp.
It was always the key question after last season. Was it, as Liverpool and their media supporters hoped and believed, the start of something new or merely the last hurrah of the Klopp era but just with a baldman at the helm.
Fabian Hurzeler (Brighton)
As Thomas Frank has discovered, the big difference between big-club and small-club management is not the expectation or the pressure or the standards. It’s the attention. There is no escape and no hiding place.
If you go around winning just two of 16 games as Brentford boss and talk about ‘improved performances’ after losing to teams who haven’t won in months and saying things like ‘if you keep the ball out of the net then you have a better chance of winning’ nobody gives a flying f*ck.
Do it at Spurs and, well, in his case you still kind of get away with it because for some reason he is like Bambi to the stout gentlemen of the fourth estate. But people notice is the point.
Until Brighton served up an absolute turd of a Super Sunday appetiser ahead of Liverpool-City at the weekend, nobody up to and including Fabian Hurzeler himself appeared to have realised Brighton hadn’t won a Premier League game other than a 2-0 home win over Burnley since November.
This is not the season one wants to find oneself drifting aimlessly towards the very real fight to avoid the third and final relegation spot. Which makes it weird that so many teams seem to want to do precisely that.
Sean Dyche (Nottingham Forest)
The places you can end up as a football club when you have a lunatic for an owner and accidentally put Ange Postecoglou in charge of the most ill-suited squad imaginable for six weeks.
Dyche has done a perfectly serviceable job at Forest, resuscitating both Premier and Europa League campaigns to which Postecoglou was doing terminal damage.
It will very rarely be pretty but he will probably keep Forest up. Fair enough. But it is nevertheless mad that another club managed to get itself in a sufficient pickle in the year of someone’s lord 2025 to hand the great man another chance at tweaking some Barclays noses and issuing gravel-throated proclamations about utter woke nonsense.
Michael Carrick (Manchester United)
Doing brilliant work once you’re in the job doesn’t mean you weren’t still lucky to get it. Carrick is the ultimate DNA appointment, whose undoubted effectiveness comes in large part due to his predecessor having whatever the opposite of club DNA is.
Much of Carrick’s success has been built on righting the obvious wrongs Ruben Amorim was too stubborn to notice or correct. That’s not to knock the (for now) interim manager, but it’s increasingly clear with every passing moment that refusing to pick Kobbie Mainoo for reasons that were small and twatty should have been enough alone to have Amorim sacked and probably deemed in breach of contract for gross negligence.
Carrick has done brilliantly, even if the real quiz comes if/when he’s handed the permanent job, but none of that alters the fact that United would not have looked at the former Middlesbrough manager twice were it not for his storied Old Trafford playing career.
Indeed, we’re not sure any Premier League team outside his other crisis-addled former clubs West Ham and Spurs would have done so.
Keith Andrews (Brentford)
Finds himself competing with Mikel Arteta and Regis Le Bris for manager of the year honours having lifted a relegation-tipped Brentford team that appeared to have lost everything in the summer to the European battle, sitting a single goal behind champions Liverpool after 25 games and a full 10 points clear of their former manager’s new squeeze.
Andrews, clearly, has the right stuff and is doing a wonderful job. But the credentials with which he got that job remain staggeringly slight. Brentford deserve huge credit for the lemonade they have made from life’s lemons, but it really was a monumental gamble to entrust their Premier League survival to a man who had never managed a single game of senior football and had only even been a Premier League coach for a single season, working as Thomas Frank’s set-piece coach.
Watching Tottenham play what is still we suppose technically association football this season, it occurs to us that set-piece coach might actually be Frank’s true calling. Maybe Andrews can give him a gig next year.
Liam Rosenior (Chelsea)
Right-place-at-the-right-timing your way into the Brentford job is one thing, but parachuting yourself into the Chelsea job that way is quite another.
Especially when, in the most modern football way imaginable, the right place to be to get fast-tracked into an elite Premier League job is in fact on the banks of the Rhine on the France-Germany border.
We have reached a tipping point here, haven’t we? Club DNA was one thing. Knowing The Club was one thing. We’re now firmly in the territory of Multi-Club Football Group DNA, of nodding and going, ‘See, this guy just gets this Multi-Club Football Group’ despite your only permanent managerial gig before joining that shadowy organisation being the six months you spent not quite getting Hull City into the play-offs.
But when you’re as accomplished an ager of men as Rosenior, these are the things that happen for you.
