Ranking this season’s Premier League managerial changes from Vitor to Ruud
The last few weeks of the season are upon us and the big Premier League things – your titles, your relegations – have been settled. It’s a good chance, then, to have a look at the six permanent managerial appointments that have been made during the season to judge which worked and which were Ruud van Nistelrooy to Leicester.
Ruben Amorim finding himself in the top half is genuinely wild, but while United being top half is not something the actual Premier League can deliver this season, the fact this table contains an obvious clear winner and two desperate failures at the bottom does at least tally.
6) Ruud van Nistelrooy for Steve Cooper (Leicester)
Has to take last place purely for containing every single hallmark of a panicked mid-season managerial change, plus a few new ones.
Even if there were internal issues between the club and Steve Cooper, it’s pretty much undeniable that he was a manager better suited to and more likely to succeed at the unlikely task of keeping an underpowered Leicester squad’s heads above water on their return to the top flight.
Given how entirely doomed they and their fellow promoted-relegated stragglers have been for months, it is absolutely wild to consider the fact they were actually 16th when they sacked Cooper. Being 16th hasn’t been enough for Tottenham to change manager for f*ck’s sake.
Leicester were by no definition flying under Cooper, but they had 10 points from 12 games. They were competitive and had they managed to carry on scrambling points at that rate we would at least still mathematically have a relegation battle of some sort on our hands now.
Instead, Leicester under Van Nistelrooy have done this:
It’s a classic starry-eyed story of a club being enraptured by the idea of appointing as manager someone who would never have been attainable for them as a player.
And then, perhaps worst of all, the idea that one of the key things that got RVN the job in the first place was a pair of victories against Leicester during his interim stint with Man United. It’s incredibly short-sighted decision-making, and also illogical: what’s the point of picking a manager on the basis of the one specific thing he will never, ever be able to do as your manager?
Ruud and Leicester have now managed one win and five points in total in their last 20 league games. All of those points have come against Spurs and Brighton, which is a semi-interesting quirk at least. Their one win in over half a season being at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium is undeniably superb ‘joke is always on Spurs’ action, but we’re really not sure what to make of team that could barely score in another half-season’s worth of games also picking up a pair of 2-2 draws against Brighton along the way.
Anyway. Leicester are now stuck with the other problem of a star-struck mid-season appointment: a manager who we suspect has neither the inclination nor aptitude to try and get them back out of the Championship next season.
5) Ivan Juric for Russell Martin (Southampton)
It obviously didn’t go in any measurable way well, but Southampton do at least have some mitigation that there really was absolutely nothing anybody could have done to save them.
Does feel like only managing the same number of points as Russell Martin’s wilfully destructive and transparent willingness to put his own career development ahead of Southampton’s survival chances is pretty bad, though.
If they weren’t going to actually get any better under a new manager, then really they might as well have stuck with Martin’s nonsense, which was at least entertaining for everyone else.
And talking of sticking with a manager whose nonsense is at least entertaining for everyone else, it says something about everyone involved that the final straw for both Martin and Juric’s ill-fated attempts to stop Southampton embarrassing themselves was defeat against Tottenham. Even with potentially the worst Premier League team of all time, there is only so much that can be tolerated.
4) Graham Potter for Julen Lopetegui (West Ham)
Too early to judge, really, but that’s just as well for Graham Potter whose West Ham have been awkwardly and conspicuously bad for weeks now, and are fortunate for a couple of higher-profile catastrophes hogging all the attention.
It’s a tricky one for a manager, in some ways, coming into a job over halfway through the season but with no real peril.
But Hammers fans would have been entitled to expect to at least see something tangible from Potter in these last few months to engender reasonable grounds for optimism that next season might be better.
Potter looks a much better fit for West Ham than Lopetegui ever did. He was entirely the wrong post-Moyes appointment when it was so obvious that was a change that called for a clear shift in direction and approach rather than a lot more of it but with a different accent and much less Barclays knowhow.
The prospect of things getting better next season remains, but it’s largely hypothetical. We have more hope West Ham will eventually be good under Potter than they ever could under Lopetegui and that flimsy guesswork is enough to lift this change into mid-table, which is something West Ham would love to happen next season.
Bald facts are, though, that when you sack a manager in an unacceptable 14th place and the new one carries you to 17th it definitely hasn’t gone in any way to immediate plan.
3) Ruben Amorim for Erik Ten Hag (Man United)
Still enormous potential for this to go down as one of the single greatest bungled managerial appointments of all time, and thus entirely hilarious that it actually sits in the top half of this season’s permanent manager changes. Which does rather suggest that mid-season managerial changes are pretty hard – although as the next two names on the list confirm not in any way impossible – to get right.
Clearly what elevates Amorim here – beyond the sheer abject and consistent sh*tness of the names below him – is the increasingly ridiculous name-on-the-cup stylings in the Europa League. Had they gone out to Lyon as all logic insists they should, then there would be a case for Amorim being bottom of the pile for sheer This Is Manchester United Football Club We’re Talking About-ness.
Amorim has been too stubborn and wedded to his way with a squad that is ill-suited to it. He is one of several managers at several clubs enormously lucky the bottom three are what they are and thus the unthinkable idea of actual relegation has largely remained exactly that.
But United have been relegation-fight bad for a long time now. Having contrived to somehow neither back nor sack Erik Ten Hag after his FA Cup win, forcing him to survive a mortifying job-review process that came to the wrong conclusion and then giving him another couple of hundred million to spend on players he wanted by way of apology, United lose more points here for this being a managerial change that happened in mid-season at all.
If Amorim was their man in November after United’s entirely predictable choppy start to the season, there is absolutely no reason at all why he couldn’t have been their man in the summer.
Amorim himself, knowing the sort of manager he is and how wedded to his system he is and seeing the squad United possessed, should also have called United’s now-or-never bluff. For such a seemingly assured and charismatic character, it betrayed a surprising lack of confidence; that this United job at this time was a job opportunity he couldn’t turn down lest it be the last such offer he received.
It was never, ever going to be that when he had Sporting playing the kind of eye-catching football that well-drilled and well-suited group of players were producing.
READ: Slot to Leeds, Amorim to Liverpool, Howe to Celtic: Premier League manager near-misses
2) David Moyes for Sean Dyche (Everton)
And now, at last, we get to changes that have absolutely been good ones. Sometimes a manager and club just fit. Sometimes a manager and club just understand each other perfectly and it’s all just… right. Moyes and Everton are one such combo. He knows them, they know him.
And while Moyesball may never have been quite aesthetically pleasing enough for West Ham tastes, it is never quite as performatively, defiantly drab-at-all-costs as Dyche’s when things aren’t going well.
And things were not going well. By the time Dyche was sacked in early January, Everton had won just four matches in all competitions all season long. Moyes managed that in his first joyous, mood-transforming month at the club he served so well for so long in his first spell.
In that giddy spell between mid-January and mid-February, Everton did this:
That springiest of new-manager bounces has dissipated slightly in a flurry of draws and now back-to-back defeats to Man City and Chelsea but it doesn’t really matter.
Moyes’ first job had been done. Lift the sombre mood, give Everton fans a precious half-season of relaxed certainty about the club’s Premier League status and above all the chance to give Goodison Park a celebratory farewell that didn’t involve eight games of chewing fingernails to the quick before staying up on the final day.
Bigger challenges await with the move to that spectacular looking new stadium next season, but those challenges can now be met with positivity and hope, two things Everton have lacked for the longest time.
1) Vitor Pereira for Gary O’Neil (Wolves)
Even Martin Samuel must surely now accept that although Vitor Pereira is a foreign and thus to be viewed with suspicion he has delivered more than a ‘small improvement’ on PFM Gary O’Neil’s effort in leading this Wolves squad to 19th place and five points from safety in the first half of the season.
For a hint at the scale of Pereira’s achievement, it’s worth considering that O’Neil and Martin were both sacked on the same day with Wolves and Southampton the bottom two and separated by four points.
Here’s what the table looked like then.
Here’s what it looks like now, with Wolves 30 points clear of the stricken Saints.
O’Neil managed nine points from his 16 games; Pereira has 32 from his 18. For what it’s worth, that’s a point-per-game of a tick under 1.8 and would be enough to have Wolves second by an admittedly impossible half a point had it been replicated across the season as a whole.
Only Liverpool, Newcastle, Arsenal and Man City have more points than Wolves since Pereira got involved and they are currently the in-form team not just in the Premier League but across the continent’s major divisions. It’s entirely fair to say theirs was a squad that should never have been in the mess O’Neil got them into, but the way in which Pereira has got them out of it is nevertheless astounding.
We have spent much of the last few weeks idly wondering what the media coverage of this might have looked like had O’Neil and Pereira’s roles been reversed.
READ: Five brilliant Premier League managers have contracts expiring next summer