Conte to Man Utd, Simeone to Arsenal, Frank to Fulham: Every Premier League club’s next manager revealed

Despite at least one full-blooded El Sackico, a load of teams doing really badly and a whole bunch of new managers who don’t really appear to be up to it, we still await the first managerial casualty of the new Premier League season.

Guys, what’s going on? Even Mr Marinakis has been caught napping, letting Oliver Glasner off with a one-win-in-six start that surely should have seen him sacked at least twice by now.

But it does mean we’ve had a bit more time than might have been expected to fully consider who the next manager in line at each of the 20 Premier League clubs currently is.

And the answer is that it’s these lads.

Who will be Arsenal’s next manager?
It really has been a long old time since Arsenal were on the lookout for a new manager. Arteta is now the longest-serving current manager not just in the Premier League but across the top four divisions of English football. And he’s well up the list for Europe.

So who could possibly replace him? That’s one question, but the other factor we have to consider here is when might that happen. Because clearly that’s going to heavily impact the kind of names.

If he sees out the new contract he signed this season he’ll emulate his mentor Pep Guardiola do a decade in a single job. Who knows who might be in contention by then.

What is clear is that Arsenal love a dynasty. In modern management terms, Arteta’s near-seven-year reign is already an eternity, and it comes shortly after Arsene Wenger threatened to simply squat in the job for ever and ever. They’ve now only had three permanent managers in the last 30 years. That’s ludicrous behaviour.

Even the doomed-to-failure Emery, drummed out of the club in double-quick time, lasted a year and a half. That’d be considered a good run at certain other clubs; naming no names, but Chelsea and Tottenham are two of them.

So, what then do we know of Arsenal? They like a manager who stays with one club for a very long time, and also that it turns out they were only pretending to enjoy Wenger’s pretty-pretty pastaball and instead prefer to be massive great sh*thousing bastards.

We’re all for that personally, and are very excited to welcome to the Premier League at last Mr Diego Simeone, the man who ticks both those boxes a thousand times over.

Who will be Aston Villa’s next manager?
Whenever it happens, and despite all these pesky Utter Woke Nonsense rules that mean Aston Villa can’t just cheat like others before them, it does seem safe to assume Unai Emery will leave Aston Villa a far more enticing prospect than the forlorn, Steven Gerrarded relegation battlers he inherited back in 2022.

Since then there has been European adventure, Champions League campaigns (plural), and even a real-life proper trophy for a team that did sit rather awkwardly after watching Newcastle and Spurs collect pots in 2025.

Fair to say neither of those two foolish clubs have particularly kicked on for the long overdue experience, but Villa will hope they can keep Emery in place at least for a little while longer yet to help keep this good thing going.

Given that other recent Villa managers have included Gerrard, Tim Sherwood, Steve Bruce and Roberto Di Matteo, you’d imagine that, when the time does eventually come, Villa’s plan will be to find an Emery-like replacement rather than the more traditional managerial change route of an alarming lurch in direction.

So we’re looking for a manager hugely respected outside this relentlessly inward-looking island for his many good works on the continent but currently deemed an irredeemable clown on these shores due to one failure with a daft Big Six club. That’ll be Ruben Amorim, then.

Who will be Bournemouth’s next manager?
Andoni Iraola came from La Liga. Marco Rose came from the Bundesliga. Why not an up-and-coming manager who’s already done a little bit of both?

Step forward, Martin Demichelis. Sure, Mallorca were relegated on his watch last season but we takes no meaningful share of the blame having picked up 18 points from his 12 games in charge to reach 42 points in total only for that still to be insufficient.

And he’s made a tidy enough start at Rose’s old RB Leipzig stomping ground after taking over from Ole Werner.

Who will be Brentford’s next manager?
With some of these were going to go into great detail and do deep-dive research and even, lord help us, sometimes do something approaching some actual work. Some we’ll do banter that’s of interest and amusement only to ourselves.

And with some, we must accept it’s best for multiple reasons, our own sanity among them, to just accept the obvious low-hanging fruit on offer.

Brentford’s next manager, when some desperately flagging Big Six fool comes knocking for Keith Andrews, will of course be current set-piece coach Stephen Rice. Nothing else needs to be said.

Who will be Brighton’s next manager?
Carlos Cuesta is the youngest manager across Europe’s top five leagues having taken the Parma job at 29. He is still only 31.

That should be all the information you need, frankly, but having five years on Mikel Arteta’s coaching staff at Arsenal doesn’t do any harm.

Fabian Hurzeler has done a fine job at Brighton, but time waits for no man. He’s 33 now, for crying out loud. Yesterday’s news. Practically a timelord. Time to move on. Enjoy your retirement. Spend time with the grandkids. Just promise us you definitely won’t take the Spurs or Man United jobs (he will totally take the Spurs or Man United job).

Who will be Chelsea’s next manager?
In the absence of a better answer, we’ll just go for the easy one. Current Strasbourg manager Hugo Oliveira. Any fears about the Portuguese’s understanding of Our League are easily batted away. You don’t spend as much time as he did as Marco Silva’s goalkeeping coach at Hull, Watford, Everton and Fulham without developing a keen understanding of the Barclays.

Be nice as well to have another Portuguese manager at Chelsea. Just feels right. And it also fits your standard ‘over-reaction to the previous appointment’ style with Rosenior-Alonso-Oliveira a neat Company Man-Superstar-Company Man series of appointments.

Who will be Coventry’s next manager?
We’d really like it to be Steven Gerrard for reasons of narrative. And, because this is our feature and we can do what we want, it therefore is.

Who will be Crystal Palace’s next manager?
We’re not having that ridiculous 3-1 victory over Nottingham Forest as convincing evidence of anything at all. Palace’s defence looked as shonky as ever during a 40-minute battering that football’s top boffins could spend several lifetimes studying without ever coming up with a satisfactory answer as to how it yielded but a single goal. An acceptable answer beyond “Liam Delap is a big guileless lump” anyway.

We don’t think they’ve Turned A Corner, we still Fear For Them, and we think they’re in very real relegation trouble this season.

With Gary O’Neil currently unavailable, Palace will have to look to the next best thing to fight that fire. And the next best thing based on recent Premier League evidence, whether you like it or not, is Vitor Pereira. He got Wolves an extra year of Premier League football, which was sufficiently impressive that we need not dwell on what he and they did with that extra year. He kept Nottingham Forest up with plenty to spare last season before getting Marinakised in the summer. He’ll do the same for Palace, we’re sure of it.

Who will be Everton’s next manager?
History tells us that the answer here is already known. It’s Roberto Martinez some time in 2036 after a trophyless but mechanically impressive decade of Moyesball stability for the Toffees.

And who are we to argue with history? Nobody, that’s who, which is just as well, because otherwise we’d have to note that history at this point would also be handing David Moyes the Manchester United job and we’re really not sure about that at all to be honest.

Who will be Fulham’s next manager?
We’ll let you in on a little secret. We don’t actually believe a lot of these answers ourselves. For some of these we’re messing about a bit. I know, it’s hard to take in. We don’t actually, for instance, think Roberto Martinez is going to be the next Everton manager. We’re not sure anybody actually wants that.

But for some of them, there is a sensible answer so obvious, so clearly staring us in the face to the extent that you can already far too easily picture him in a Fulham coat looking vaguely puzzled on the touchline while sipping from his favourite Arsenal cup.

It’s just obviously Thomas Frank, isn’t it? Match of the Day’s loss will be Fulham’s, well, loss.

Not only is it all too easy to conjure in the mind’s eye an image of Thomas Frank as Fulham manager, it’s actually far easier than conjuring an image of Alvaro Arbeloa as Fulham manager, and he actually is the Fulham manager.

But not for long. So obvious is this one that we’ll throw in some extra detail for free, like when it will happen, and what will happen next.

It will be in the November international break, obviously. He will win only two of his 10 Premier League games in charge before being sacked. Those wins will both, thanks to a mischievous fixture list that places the games barely a month apart either side of the new year, be against Spurs.

Who will be Hull City’s next manager?
Look, when you hit upon a winning formula you don’t deviate from it. For Hull, that means they need to find themselves another Eastern European manager plucked from the Turkish Super Lig.

Right now, that means Besnik Hasi who currently has his Amedspor right in amongst it with Turkish football’s traditional powerhouses, sitting third in the league a point or two behind Galatasaray and Besiktas and ahead of Fenerbahce.

Who will be Ipswich Town’s next manager?
Gary O’Neil is clearly going to keep them up this season, but at that point Gary O’Neil’s work will be done. Ipswich can’t expect to hold on to him when there will be another team in need of his emergency Premier League Survival talents.

He’s obviously a PFM, but he’s so much more than that. He’s the Last of the Firefighters. He’s like one of those youngsters they have on the TikToks and such who’ve gone into stonemasonry or some such thing. O’Neil is single-handedly keeping the flame burning for a dying art, a lost skill.

So we can say with absolute certainty that by the time next season rolls around, he will have left Portman Road. He will rest awhile and then he will watch and he will wait and he will speak well, I thought, on Monday Night Football until the next team comes along that requires his particular set of skills.

But where does that leave Ipswich? They have a fascinating managerial history, really. They didn’t even have a manager until 1936, when Irishman Mick O’Brien took the job as the club left its amateur (literally and figuratively) selection-by-committee days behind.

And the startling thing about Ipswich is that this remains the most exotic managerial appointment they’ve ever had. They’ve matched it with a Roy Keane, but never have they ventured further afield than that. Every other Ipswich manager has been from one part of the United Kingdom or other.

And two of the English managers they’ve had are among the most venerated English managers of all time. You can’t grumble at a managerial history that contains two of the three English knights of the realm to ever lead the England men’s side to the final four of a World Cup, can you?

But that gives us our answer, doesn’t it? Why stop at Sir Alf Ramsey and Sir Bobby Robson? Why not add Sir Gareth Southgate to the collection? We can think of not one single reason, unless you count all that stuff where he says he probably won’t go back to day-to-day football management.

Who will be Leeds United’s next manager?
We’ve had it for a while now, and it’s a feeling that only grows stronger. It might just be a side-effect of too much cheese, but out gut is telling us that at some point in the not-too-distant future Leeds will, emboldened by their clear and undeniable progress but also while dangerously high on the smell of their own farts, try and do something unbelievably flash and big-clubbish in a bid to Kick On To The Next Level.

We’re all for it, because it will either work spectacularly or fail spectacularly and both those things will be spectacularly watchable.

That means Leeds’ next move, when it comes, will be to appoint someone from the top 10 available coaches list at that time.

For some reason that we simply can’t properly process (again, could just be the cheese) the name that currently leaps from that page is Julian Nagelsmann. It feels just about right. It’s an appointment with sufficient stardust to grab one by the bollards, but comes at a time when Nagelsmann – after failing with Bayern and failing with the German national team – might have to step back down in prestige and heft.

But you don’t want to step down too far. Outside the traditional elite, but with sufficient resources to do some attention-grabbing punching up. Leeds would now fit that bill.

We’ve talked ourselves into believing this is basically nailed on. Which, again, might well be down to the cheese. Might need to cut down on the cheese.

Who will be Liverpool’s next manager?
Andoni Iraola is fine. Andoni Iraola will be fine. But we still can’t quite believe just how badly Liverpool cocked up the transition from Arne Slot in order to allow Xabi Alonso to fall into the warm embrace of Chelsea’s Football Player Factory.

It seemed like the most obvious thing in the world for Liverpool to simply get their much-loved former midfielder in to oversee a new revolution after the Slot one turned out to be a one-and-done kind of effort.

The worry now, of course, is that they’ll panic at the thought of making the same mistake again and somehow – we’ve not thrashed out all of the details here, but we’ll get there in time – end up binning Iraola and appointing Steven Gerrard because they’ve got the daft idea in their heads from somewhere ridiculous that Coventry might be sniffing around him.

Who will be Manchester City’s next manager?
Now there’s a question. At least with everyone else here it’s possible to consider fairly easily identifiable best-case, worst-case and mid-range situations in which said club might find themselves in need of a new manager and work from there.

How do we do that with City? What even is the worst-case? Do we need to be looking at the up-and-coming managers in the Conference North?

Or are we looking for someone to come in a decade from now after City escape with a slap on the wrist and Enzo Maresca goes on to smash all of Pep’s records?

Or, and hear us out here, is it actually in fact neither of those things but an entirely impossible to anticipate section of the vast middle-ground that exists between those two unlikely scenarios?

And even if City are punished for the small matter of 900 million quid’s worth of cheating, we still don’t really know when that might happen or what it might mean.

So what we’re looking for here is a manager who could take over a club that’s anywhere from reigning Premier League champion to begging to be allowed into the Conference, and also that this manager might be needed in three months or 10 years. It’s impossible.

But also, it’s Kyle Walker. We already know he’s Doing His Badges at Burnley, and let’s be honest there isn’t going to be much he doesn’t know about football management having worked under two of the greats.

As he himself put it earlier this year:

“From Pep to Neil Warnock, let’s say, two completely different managers. But two that are very good in their own right.

“Neil was unbelievable with player management, unbelievable. He got the best out of the players and made you feel like you were a million dollars walking onto the pitch.

“Whereas Pep was very detailed in his preparation and what he wanted to do and made sure we took it upon ourselves to make sure that we executed it as best as possible.”

That’s the full gamut of football management right there. Walker is uniquely placed in a Knows The Club position as well as being a plausible option in pretty much any of the assorted divisions in which City may find themselves when next on the hunt for a manager.

Who will be Manchester United’s next manager?
We can do you one better. Or, more accurately, five better. No point coming up with our own answers here when we can cheerfully and shamefully copy Watson’s homework.

Not least because we are in fact enormously in favour of Antonio Conte being the next Manchester United manager. They need someone to come in and scorch the earth and deliver a few home truths that will entirely reflect the precise opinions of 91 per cent of Man United fans but also be deemed unsayable and disrespectful coming from Conte’s furious mouth.

The best thing about this whole plan is that it’s so easy to see precisely how it would go for Conte at Old Trafford. Essentially, exactly the way it went at Spurs.

The improvement this season – and, let’s be honest, while saying who the next manager of United might be does involve some guessing we’re on safe ground saying it’s going to be happening this season – will be swift and vast.

The collapse next season will be dramatic and furious, with Conte pulling his expensively regrown hair out in all clumps as a two-goal lead is surrendered somewhere nondescript like Southampton.

The one thing we would say here is that, ridiculous and small-time as it would be, we absolutely would not rule out Jim Ratcliffe and co being conservative (big C and little c) enough to defy all standard football managerial succession planning and follow one Knows The Club appointment with another Knows The Club appointment. In which case: congratulations, Kieran McKenna.

Who will be Newcastle United’s next manager?
We’re still kicking ourselves for not getting Matthias Jaissle the last time we did this feature. We’ve fully Ronny Rosenthaled an open goal there. Just so obvious it would be him.

Having racked our brains for the longest time trying to decide where Newcastle might go next when this odds-stacked-against arrangement with Jaissle comes to an end sometime around January, it suddenly dawned on us that the answer is in fact very obvious.

It’ll just be Eddie Howe again. We’re not missing another open goal. It wouldn’t even be the first time Howe’s gone back to a previous club in double-quick time.

It would also represent a significant step towards realising our biggest dream for the Premier League: that it’s managerial merry-go-round becomes much more like Italy’s, where managers routinely turn up for third, fourth or fifth eight-month stint at some desperate relegation battler or other.

We’d love that for the Barclays.

Who will be Nottingham Forest’s next manager?
Mr Marinakis has sacked four managers in the last 13 months, which puts Oliver Glasner firmly in the danger zone having now been in the job for three months and one week.

Nottingham Forest managers now have a shorter shelf life than UK Prime Ministers or lettuces. We’re already due another new one.

The difficulty here is that Mr Marinakis doesn’t really have a type. It’s impossible to say what he likes in a football manager beyond his ability to sack them. What possible pattern can one locate in a run – a run whose span barely covers a year, remember – that goes Postecoglou, Dyche, Pereira, Glasner?

That really is just a list of Some Premier League Managers, the only other thing to compellingly link them the fact they’ve either been sacked by Mr Marinakis, or soon will be.

So we have to latch on to that previous Premier League experience of some kind or another before taking the Forest job. That means we can probably rule out a Barclays novice. Beyond that not-especially-helpful criterion? Could be anyone.

So let’s just run with that. In the end the next Nottingham Forest manager after Oliver Glasner will be, oh, let’s say… Julen Lopetegui.

Who will be Sunderland’s next manager?
Fair to say Regis Le Bris was an out-of-character and wildly successful punt for Sunderland, who had spent the previous decade subsisting on a meat-and-potatoes diet of British PFM managers after having their fingers burned by your Dick Advocaats and your Gus Poyets and the Paolo Di Canios of this world.

From Advocaat’s departure in 2015, their list of permanent managers reads: Sam Allardyce, David Moyes, Simon Grayson, Chris Coleman, Jack Ross, Phil Parkinson, Lee Johnson, Alex Neil, Tony Mowbray, Michael Beale… Regis Le Bris?!

That’s a sensational collection of names. Bonus points, of course, for pulling off the Allardyce-Moyes double back-to-back.

But it makes the next move incredibly hard to decipher. What happens next will, one suspects, depend largely on how Le Bris’ time at Sunderland ends.

And there’s now just about enough evidence to suggest it could be end in a swirl of self-fulfilling second-season syndrome.

In which case the desperate, panicky answer is obvious. It’s Welcome, Sean Dyche and back to the more familiar world of pie-and-peas Sunderland go.

Who will be Tottenham’s next manager?
Oh Christ, it’s just definitely going to be Fabian Hurzeler, isn’t it? And it’s just definitely going to work out terribly for absolutely everyone involved, isn’t it? It’ll be enough to make his new hair fall out.

But it’s probably a very slightly less bad option for club and manager than Manchester United would be, so it could be worse. A bit.