Liverpool, Arsenal and Man Utd among 10 warnings from history for Jurgen Klopp successor
Jurgen Klopp is the proud owner of the fourth-longest managerial reign of a Premier League club. Which is going to make replacing him in the summer a tricky business.
Let’s look as we therefore must at how Premier League clubs handled the transition from the 10 longest managerial reigns since football was invented just over 30 years ago. The 10 men who had to be replaced below are all the guys who made it past 2000 days in charge of a single Premier League club in a single stint before being replaced. An arbitrary cut-off, but a pleasing one. And let’s face it, no less arbitrary than 10 and we’ve all been doing that for years.
Some ground rules. We’re only interested in the Premier League, so nothing before 1992 counts. We’ve seen footage. It was rubbish anyway. This also means that a relegation resets the managerial clock. We gave some thought to whether that rule should be there and decided it did; our reasoning is that relegation/promotion is a sufficient shock to the system to jolt a club out of any cosiness having one manager for ages might have led to, and the obvious Liverpool focus for this feature existing now also makes specifically top-flight reigns feel most pertinent.
We’ve also, after careful thought, not included Gerard Houllier. He was Liverpool manager for more than the requisite 2000 days, but his health problems meant a large break in the middle and a slightly reduced role on his return. Fight us in the comments if you like.
Who will replace Jurgen Klopp as next Liverpool manager?
Jose Mourinho replaces Mauricio Pochettino (Tottenham)
A strong start and one of the most Careful What You Wish For moments in Premier League manager history.
Pochettino made Tottenham brilliant and fun, but famously allergic to the winning of trophies. Mourinho would not make them fun, but might make them brilliant and would surely win trophies. He did not. It soured fast.
Hindsight tells us this was a disastrous error, but it should be noted that Pochettino’s team had gone stale and results had been in the toilet for really quite some time. The freakish run to the 2019 Champions League final had masked their decline and far more Spurs fans than would now admit were in favour of this at the time.
It very possibly was time for Poch to go – albeit largely because his own warnings about needing to refresh the squad had gone unheeded – but Mourinho? Not so special.
Mike Jackson replaces Sean Dyche (Burnley)
Even with a clock-resetting relegation early on, Dyche still easily makes the top 10 for his and Burnley’s second and far lengthier crack at the top flight together. Which also makes this perhaps the most panicked discarding of vast experience and Knows The Club soft power in Barclays history.
Burnley were in the soup back in April 2022, sure, but they were far from doomed with eight games to overturn a four-point deficit. Was it really more likely that Mike Jackson could caretaker them out of that fight than Dyche could gravel-voice his way out of it while laughing at snow in his shirtsleeves?
Relegation was duly confirmed, but Burnley did at least make an eye-catching direction-shift of a permanent appointment in Vincent Kompany. Getting back to the Premier League was no problem. Staying there currently looking a different matter. Not as easy as Dyche made it look for all those years, is it?
Sammy Lee replaces Sam Allardyce (Bolton)
You can see the appeal of a continuity candidate when replacing a manager who has come to so thoroughly define your club. Allardyce resigned in a fit of pique in April 2007 after turning Bolton into a proper Premier League force having steered them back into the top flight in 2001. It says an enormous amount about both Allardyce and what he’d achieved there that his grievance with the club was their refusal to release more transfer funds to facilitate a push for Champions League football.
When Big Sam left his long-term role at Bolton for a lucrative and broadly successful career in short-term firefighting and pint-of-wining himself out of the England job in record time, he was replaced by his assistant Little Same. He lasted the rest of the season and the first two months of 2007/08 before being binned for taking far too many positives from one win in 11 games.
Iain Dowie replaces Alan Curbishley (Charlton)
The number of managers a club burns through isn’t a completely reliable guide to how things are going, but it’s not a completely useless one either. Charlton fit better than most. By the time of his departure at the end of the 2005/6 season, Curbishley had been in their dugout as either joint or sole manager for 15 years. Three different managers would take his seat before the year was out.
In all, the 18 years since Curbishley’s 15-year reign have seen 18 different permanent managers come and go. And that’s not including all the caretaker spells for your Lee Bowyers and your Johnnie Jacksons. After Curbishley’s 15 years, Dowie managed just 15 games. Which itself seems like a lifetime when you remember his replacement was Les Reed.
Roy Hodgson replaces Rafael Benitez (Liverpool)
Clearly, there are warnings from history all over the place for Liverpool when it comes to replacing a manager who has been around as long as Klopp, but they don’t even need to look outside Anfield for a clear example.
Benitez never delivered the Premier League title Liverpool fans craved above all else, but he did deliver absolutely everything else and was beloved by the fans. Roy Hodgson was not. He never really settled into Anfield life and appeared grumpy throughout his short tenure, admittedly in part because he kept being asked when he was going to be sacked or resign.
It didn’t help that Kenny Dalglish had made a play for the job before Hodgson was confirmed, giving Liverpool fans a tantalising dream of replacing one beloved manager with another. Those dreams would come true in January when Hodgson was put out of his and Liverpool’s misery. Dalglish won a League Cup but lasted only a season-and-a-half himself, departing having steered the club to a now unthinkable eighth-placed finish.
READ: Top ten Premier League managers doomed to fail
Glenn Roeder replaces Harry Redknapp (West Ham)
Another boot-room appointment. West Ham grew weary of Redknapp after seven broadly successful years when he entirely squandered the £18m Rio Ferdinand windfall on absolute dross and then asked for more money. Classic Redknapp.
His assistant, Frank Lampard Sr also left making the already likely sale of Lampard Jr a certainty and thus this an even bigger sliding doors moment for the Barclays in general than might otherwise have been the case. Reserve-team coach Roeder was promoted, initially as caretaker but then confirmed as a permanent appointment before the 2001/2 season began, reportedly because Alan Curbishley and Steve McClaren had turned the Hammers down.
He took the team to seventh in his first season, but the following season was a struggle before Roeder suffered a blocked blood vessel in the brain and had to be temporarily replaced by Trevor Brooking. The Hammers managed seven points from the three remaining games, but were still relegated with a never-to-be-beaten Premier League record of 42 points.
Roeder returned for the start of the following season in the second tier, but didn’t make it past August and an away defeat at Rotherham. Brooking again stepped in as temporary manager until Alan Pardew could be lured from Reading.
Egil Olsen replaces Joe Kinnear (Wimbledon)
What’s funnier? That Joe ‘Which One Is Simon Bird’ Kinnear still owns the sixth longest managerial reign in the Premier League (fourth here, because Klopp and Guardiola cannot be included for obvious reasons) or that he was replaced by a mad Norwegian in wellies?
Of course, it is only in England where Olsen is seen as a figure of fun. Everywhere else he’s an eccentric but brilliant professor type, with interesting and forward-thinking ideas on how football should be played and an almost fanatical obsession with off-the-ball runs. He famously caused a stir back in the mid-90s when, as Norway boss, he used one of his nominations for FIFA’s world player of the year on Norway’s Women’s World Cup Golden Boot winner Hege Riise.
He couldn’t get a tune out of the Crazy Gang, though, and was sacked after less than a year just before Wimbledon’s 16-year top-flight run came to an end.
Roberto Martinez replaces David Moyes (Everton)
Still one of only three men to last over a decade at a single Premier League club, Moyes has famously found himself on both sides of this equation. It’s no great surprise or disgrace that no Everton manager has got close to his 500 games in charge since, but it is quite revealing that Martinez, Moyes’ successor, is the only one to have even made it beyond 100 games in the Goodison hotseat.
For neither the first nor last time, we find ourselves marvelling at the sheer eclectic bonkers majesty of Everton’s wild decade of managerial choices since the decade of Moyesian calm: Martinez, Koeman, Allardyce, Silva, Ancelotti, Benitez, Lampard, Dyche. With assorted chaotic caretaker spells for David Unsworth and Duncan Ferguson too. Wild. Is it too greedy to wish for a similar decade of inexplicable chaos on the other side of Stanley Park now?
David Moyes replaces Sir Alex Ferguson (Man United)
Moyes left his job of 11 years at Everton to take up a role as Sir Alex Ferguson’s anointed successor at Manchester United, proving if nothing else that the most important thing for Liverpool might be to just not listen to anything Klopp says about who the next manager should be.
Ferguson got little wrong as his United side bestrode the first two decades of the Premier League, but this one was a pretty important miss.
In fairness to Moyes, the years that have followed have suggested absolutely nobody was going to be able to do this job. Ferguson again a bit of a culprit here, casting as he does so long a shadow over the club still. But it’s also a bit Ferguson’s fault because having achieved his earlier successes and title at United with a series of truly great sides, for his final trick he set about doing so with a deeply mediocre one.
It confirmed the scale of his genius, but had the unintended consequence of rather salting the earth for whichever poor mortal sod happened to follow him. It’s only really in the last year or so at West Ham that Moyes looks truly to have recovered from it all.
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Unai Emery replaces Arsene Wenger (Arsenal)
This one is perhaps the most troubling one of all from a Liverpool perspective. With Moyes at United – or indeed Hodgson at Liverpool – it’s easier to just look back now and go, ‘Well they simply got that massively wrong. Let’s just not get it massively wrong.’
Slightly different story at Arsenal, who appointed a very good manager, who has subsequently proven again – and even here in the Barclays of all places – that he is still a very good manager. But he couldn’t make it work at Arsenal in the thankless and daunting position of trying to replace an absolute legend.
Of all the managers to have struggled in the Barclays after replacing a boss of long standing, it is Emery’s failure at Arsenal that most clearly points to it just being literally impossible to do.
Arsenal are back on track now under Mikel Arteta, but it took him a good couple of years to turn the ship around and plenty of managers would not have been afforded that time, and it’s a near certainty he wouldn’t have been had it been Wenger rather than Emery as his predecessor.
A fun little thought experiment: would Arsenal be better or worse off now had Arteta and Emery been appointed the other way round? Yeah. Think about that for a bit.
