Mikel Arteta mid-table in Premier League manager rankings topped by staggering Slot
We haven’t updated the manager rankings for a bit, so we’re sneaking a quick update – you know, just the 7000 or so words – before doing a full and proper job on it when the season ends.
It is, of course, the most scientific and rigorous of endeavours so if you find yourself disagreeing with anyone’s placing simply know and understand you just aren’t as clever as the supercomputer we pumped full of data to deliver results absolutely none of which are as silly as when we accidentally had Kieran McKenna seventh last time.
You can read that malfunction and the rest of the last update here if you absolutely must, but the TL;DR placings are in the brackets below.
30) Erik Ten Hag, Man United August-October (28)
Should obviously have been sacked in the summer, could very easily have been sacked after either of the two grimmest thrashings – Liverpool and Spurs – and arguably most compellingly of all should have gone after trying to convince himself and the world that a 0-0 draw at Crystal Palace was evidence of anything much at all about his future prospects.
As we said after he was eventually put out of our collective misery last year:
As is very often the case for a flailing manager – especially at the biggest clubs – he is not really the biggest problem but nor does he show any hint of being in any way part of a possible solution.
The football is uninspiring and, much as we hate the phrase, increasingly small time. Ten Hag’s confidence has shrunk to the point that he no longer feels able to take his team to a place like Aston Villa and do anything more than cling grimly to the 0-0 he started with.
There are teams where you can justifiably point to hard-earned, backs-to-the-wall goalless draws at Crystal Palace and Aston Villa as evidence that you know what you are doing and are going to get the job done, but Manchester United surely cannot ever be one of those clubs.
The irony, of course, is that a man who spent a large part of the second half of his United managerial career desperately insisting that results be ignored finally did get the tin-tack after a result that on its own probably could have been ignored.
Given the chances United missed – Diogo Dalot’s in particular was one for the all-time list and probably not really Ten Hag’s fault if we’re being fair about it – and the genuine absurdity of the penalty that eventually settled it, there is a strong case to be made that West Ham 2-1 Man United is the most easily dismissed result in the Premier League since Tottenham 2-1 Liverpool.
It wasn’t quite as abysmal a bit of officiating as that one, but it was arguably worse because a) it came so late in the piece and b) represented VAR actively changing a perfectly fine decision rather than a failure – however ludicrous – to overturn an error that already existed.
But when you have somehow come out the other side of at least four clear sacking windows as Ten Hag so obviously had, the sympathy that exists for getting the boot during an altogether more opaque one can only be very limited indeed. He had to go, and even United’s struggles to adapt to life under Ruben Amorim don’t really offer much vindication for Ten Hag given that so much of that struggle is down to the squad rot – both in personnel and mindset – that was allowed to fester during his time.
29) Ivan Juric, Southampton, December-April (27)
Being both appointed and sacked by two clubs during one season is novel, even for a manager who has now had nine managerial jobs and lasted less than 50 games in seven of them, including all three of his spells as Genoa manager between June 2016 and December 2018.
No wonder he had itchy feet after three whole seasons at Torino, who he left last summer before taking over at Roma in September, being sacked in November, then taking over at Southampton in December before again being sacked in April. Slightly disappointing he hasn’t managed to squeeze in another job in Italy before the season finishes, if we’re being brutally honest.
His Southampton reign was a failure, obviously. But it didn’t have to be quite so hefty a failure, surely. Not managing to save them from themselves is one thing, being really no better than Martin in any significantly measurable way and statistically inferior to Simon Rusk, the caretaker who preceded and followed him, is not a good look.
28) Russell Martin, Southampton, August-November (26)
You can’t blame a guy for trying, can you? Having sat and watched Vincent Kompany brazenly and above all successfully place his own career prospects several levels above Burnley’s survival prospects last season, you can forgive Russell Martin for wanting a slice of that pie having surprised many by steering Southampton back to the top flight.
The problem is that Southampton were even less suited to trying to Pepball their way around the Barclays than Burnley. Burnley had at least cruised through the Championship in dominant fashion; Southampton scraped up through the play-offs after an end to the season in which even a relegation-haunted Huddersfield had scared the living sh*t out of them.
And lo it came to pass that Southampton were not capable of passing Premier League sides to death. There is a wider point here about wanting to do this.
It’s something that now-established teams like Brighton and Brentford didn’t do when they first came up. They showed the Barclays some damn respect. These days everyone wants everything instantly, and these teams and managers think they can just saunter on in here and started passing out from the back from day one.
The utter and total failure of Southampton and Martin, who we fear remains unlikely to be the next manager of Bayern Munich despite his impeccable credentials, should at least serve as a warning to others.
27) Julen Lopetegui, West Ham August-January (25)
Getting rid of David Moyes in the hope of finding something a bit more proactive and enjoyable and then replacing him with the Spanish Moyes was always an interesting choice from a club that deals almost exclusively in interesting choices, but it’s still been striking to watch just how badly it’s gone and in such Moyesian fashion.
The worst of Moyes’ West Ham were so, so similar to the worst of Lopetegui’s: unnecessarily painful to watch given the talent available, but also and more damningly utterly ineffectively painful to watch. The 4-1 defeat at Man City was the ninth league game out of 20 this season in which the Hammers had conceded at least three goals.
It could only ever end one way, and given how bad West Ham have been you do almost have to hand it to the way the people running that club managed to make Lopetegui look like a wounded victim by making such a complete bollocks of his very necessary departure. Sacking managers is part of the game, but you can still do it with some dignity and grace.
Making the poor sod take training on the morning of a day he knows is going to be his last was just deeply weird, deeply unpleasant behaviour. It makes no sense unless viewed as some kind of desperate ploy to enrage Lopetegui to the point that he might jump before they had to push him.
26) Ben Dawson, Leicester, November-December (24)
Left Newcastle in the summer after 15 years in various academy and age-group coaching roles for a job on Steve Cooper’s coaching team at Leicester. Might have been an error. Named caretaker following Cooper’s departure, he oversaw a 4-1 defeat at Brentford before handing the reins to Ruud van Nistelrooy.
25) Gary O’Neil, Wolves, August-December (23)
An apparent recovery on the back of two straight wins and a four-game unbeaten run in October and November crashed and burned spectacularly as Wolves lost three straight games, one of which involved the genuinely weirdly impressive achievement of conceding four goals to Everton.
O’Neil’s job was very much on the line ahead of a home game with Ipswich, one that ended with a late winner for Wolves’ relegation rivals and star man Matheus Cunha getting fisty with stewards. So, on balance, a sub-optimal run of form and antics. It felt like the end. It was the end.
And now we don’t really know what happens next for O’Neil. He’s a man who has now completed two genuinely impressive firefighting jobs from hospital passes (need a police reference here really don’t we, but buggered if we can think of one) at first Bournemouth and then Wolves. But having been replaced to such great effect at Bournemouth by Andoni Iraola and now having made a right bollocks of things at Wolves after his first stab at an actual pre-season of proper preparation he might just be a bit stuck.
To make matters worse, he has now been even more swiftly and conspicuously outperformed by his replacement at Molineux than he was at the Vitality.
There are presumably two kinds of jobs that now exist for O’Neil’s next foray. One, another desperate Premier League club enlists his proven relegation-avoiding credentials but that means waiting until someone like West Ham sh*t themselves with panic in around October.
Two, and perhaps more likely, an upwardly-mobile ambitious Championship club tasks him with doing the ‘getting into the Premier League’ bit before his specialist subject of ‘staying in the Premier League’, which is now so difficult for promoted clubs that it is essentially witchcraft.
What we do know for certain is that O’Neil will get the job on the back of some fine video screen analysis and Speaking Well, I Thought on Monday Night Football.
24) Ruud van Nistelrooy, Leicester, December onwards (21)
A fun little bit from this season has been Ruud van Nistelrooy being at the heart of both the best and worst bits of decision-making all season long.
Manchester United haven’t got much right this year, but appointing a bona-fide club legend as interim manager to chuck in a few mood-boosting results before swiftly and correctly replacing him before it all went horribly sour – as all manner of subsequent evidence suggests it absolutely and entirely would have – suggests that at least someone somewhere at that daft club learned something from the Solskjaer years.
One of the main reasons to doubt the sustainability of Van Nistelrooy’s United bounce was the fact that two of his four games and two of his three wins came against Leicester.
This appears to have been a factor in Leicester’s decision to appoint him manager. Which at first glance appears understandable but only gets more weird the more you think about it. Why appoint a manager based on the fact he has proved he can beat you, when that is the one thing he can never, ever do in the job you’ve just given him?
Although, we guess, actually he kind of did. He oversaw two games in which United beat Leicester while he was United boss, and then did the same again as Leicester boss. We should have expected no different.
Hard to see him staying on for the attempt to get Leicester back into the Premier League next year, but if he does walk away he does so as the proud owner of one of the more compelling examples of The Joke Is Always On Spurs.
Van Nistelrooy’s effort was so long and repetitive that even Stewart Lee might have rejected it, with 15 defeats scattered either side of Leicester’s 2-1 win at Spurs. After the two goals early in the second half of that one they abandoned goalscoring altogether for more than two months.
That 16-match, four-months-in-the-making joke is also bookended by a pair of 2-2 draws with Brighton, which means that, we guess, the joke is also always a tiny bit on Brighton for some reason. Maybe needs some more digging, that one.
READ: Ranking this season’s Premier League managerial changes from Vitor to Ruud
23) Sean Dyche, Everton, August-January (20)
The last manager rankings were compiled just days before Everton gave Dyche the Spanish Archer, and if you’ll indulge us we would like to revel in this rare example of us having got the situation pretty much spot on.
Current Sack Race favourite and you have to say that’s fair enough. There really isn’t any compelling excuse for Everton to be slumming it like this in a grimly miserable relegation scrap again, and if Dyche cannot build a coherent case that he’s the best man to keep them above the relegation waterline, then really what is the point?
The belligerent run of spoiling draws against City, Arsenal and Chelsea is starting to look more and more like a defiant but futile last hurrah for Dyche’s particular brand of misery with Everton increasingly inclined to look elsewhere for a manager who might do more than drag them a point above the relegation zone with such misery-inducing football. Feels like for a club of Everton’s history and stature you might be able to get away with flirting with relegation and you might be able to get away with football that makes the ears bleed, but you can only do both for so long before it just becomes demeaning for all concerned.
Everton finally losing their long and proudly-held top-tier record the precise moment they move into a shiny new stadium is just far too Everton a piece of behaviour to be ruled out, and it does look more and more like it might need a change of direction, a change of mood, and a change of manager to prevent that nightmare scenario becoming horrifyingly real.
What Everton have subsequently achieved under David Moyes – even if the new manager bounce has inevitably lost a bit of air from its glorious early days – damns Dyche further.
He really did have them in a full-blown relegation scrap, in this Premier League season of all Premier League seasons, and wasn’t even going about it in entertaining fashion.
22) Steve Cooper, Leicester August-November (22)
‘Nobody is currently talking about Steve Cooper’ we chirped in November. Turns out we just weren’t listening. He was gone within days, with nobody much happy with the sufferball on offer even though it was keeping Leicester very much afloat in a choppy and complicated relegation fight.
The timing of his dismissal was odd, coming as it did after a narrow defeat to Chelsea straight after the international break that rather indicated he was already done for and a new manager could have been given a bit more time during that break to get his feet under the desk.
All became clearer, mind, when Ruud van Nistelrooy – who only completed his interim duties at Manchester United at said international break – was the man anointed as the saviour of Leicester’s season just after inflicting a couple of sizeable blows upon it with the Foxes’ relegation rivals United.
It went… poorly.
21) Graham Potter, West Ham, January onwards (15)
Feels like a much better post-Moyes fit for the Hammers than Julen Lopetegui ever did, and we retain hope that it will all work out in the end. But uncomfortably and unavoidably true it is not working out currently for a team whose current eight-game run without a win includes the twin embarrassments of home draws against both Southampton and a barely-interested Spurs.
Potter should be better than this. West Ham should be better than this. They are currently just about the only team really giving the incoming promoted sides hope that the story of the last couple of seasons can change.
And that’s a pretty embarrassing state of affairs for both club and manager. The start of a season is obviously always important for all sorts of managers for all sorts of reasons, but those early weeks of next season right now feel more important for Potter than anyone else in this league.
20) Kieran McKenna, Ipswich (7)
Seventh? Ahem. Sorry about that. A giddiness that we are now attributing to a desperate desire for at least one of the promoted trio to give survival a real shot. Even back in January it was clear Ipswich offered the best/only hope of that, but they too have ultimately come up well short.
It does feel like over the season as a whole they have been more consistently more competitive than the other two, and unlike both Leicester and Southampton there is a decent body of evidence to go with a gut feel that they still have the right man in charge to try and earn them another chance back in the top flight next season.
Luton remain the warning from history there, but for now McKenna has just about emerged from this season with reputation intact if not perhaps enhanced in the way he might have hoped or expected.
19) Ange Postecoglou, Tottenham (19)
One of two potential absolute noodle-scratchers when the final rankings are put together a month from now.
But while it is Ruben Amorim who insists winning the Europa League cannot save United’s season, it’s really Postecoglou for whom it feels more of a sticking plaster over a gaping wound.
It’s not to say it wouldn’t be a huge achievement – and Spurs’ recent performances in the latter stages of the competition have been pretty compelling – and it would absolutely be a huge deal for Spurs as a whole.
But could it or should it save Postecoglou? We’re really not sure it should. If the Europa League efforts offer some mitigation for both the poor recent league results and the shoddiness of the returns during their injury crisis, they also damn Postecoglou as well.
Because it should never have got that bad during the injury problems and it should never have remained this bad when the injured players returned, Europa distractions or no Europa distractions.
There’s also the sticky issue of how and why he’s been able to coax such whole-hearted performances out of this squad on Europa League nights but not in the Premier League.
United and Spurs have probably benefited from the presence of each other in the same unexpected area of the league table this season, each serving to normalise the ridiculousness of the other.
But it is Postecoglou who has less excuse for being there. He’s in the second full season of his plan, and the fact a 17th-place finish remains entirely possible is a stain that not even winning the Europa could or should wash away entirely.
Tottenham’s league form has now been absolutely rotten for a strikingly long time; since the heady days of those first 10 games of last season in which Ange’s swashbucklers picked up eight wins and two draws they’ve managed only 78 points from 63 games, very nearly half of which have been lost.
To put that in full perspective; those first 10 games of last season still account for a quarter of all Postecoglou’s Premier League points. Even including that run with its eight wins and no defeats he has still has just as many losses as wins in the Premier League.
Winning the Europa League might still save his job for now, especially with Spurs’ much-discussed record when it comes to such things, but we will be staggered if he starts 2026 as Spurs manager.
18) Ruben Amorim, Manchester United, November onwards (18)
The pure absurdity of the Europa League run is doing a lot of heavy lifting and the fact we’ve now reached the point where United winning it and thus securing a third silverware-winning season in a row despite being increasingly dreadful has just about tipped over from possibility to probability is absolutely wild.
But this remains one of the most clear-cut cautionary tales this division has ever served up. Man United got it wrong last summer and Amorim got it wrong in failing to call United’s bluff when they insisted it was now or never in November. He should have stayed with Sporting like he wanted to, and backed himself to have opportunities at least as good as this one – even very probably this precise one – come the summer.
He could also absolutely have shown at least hints of flexibility in acknowledging the squad was not up to the challenge of what he would be demanding.
It’s not his fault that United’s squad was left technically, physically and mentally weak by previous managers and regimes, but it is still his fault that he didn’t recognise that at the outset or accept the reality of it during the season.
The sheer incompetence of the teams below United has prevented things becoming even worse, but his Premier League record is miserable and it’s going to take one heck of a summer to offer any meaningful resolution. The full rebuild required is going to take at least a couple more windows beyond that.
The Europa League run has been spectacularly entertaining throughout, but the starkest of facts is in that league form. United have won only twice since January, against Ipswich and Leicester. If next season begins anything like the way this one is ending, Amorim will be in big trouble very quickly and that silverware will not save him.
17) Simon Rusk, Southampton, December and April onwards (17)
His two brief interim stints have delivered over 18 per cent of Southampton’s Premier League points this season and 50 per cent of their clean sheets in 13 per cent of their games, thus making Rusk – stopgap between Russell Martin’s egocentric Kompany-lite stylings and whatever it is Ivan Juric was attempting to achieve and now between Juric and whatever comes next – comfortably Southampton’s most impressive manager of the season.
Had Rusk been manager for the whole season it is a clear statistical certainty that they would now have 15 points and left Derby for dust. Undeniable facts.
16) Leighton Baines and Seamus Coleman, Everton, January (NE)
One hundred per cent record after a 2-0 FA Cup third-round win over League One strugglers Peterborough in a sole game in charge before David Moyes’ glorious return, you’ll never sing that.
15) Mikel Arteta, Arsenal (13)
This is going to be a season that contains all manner of awkward questions that will require addressing. Especially when it’s a season that carries still the prospect of Arsenal finishing third (or worse…) in a two-horse race and having to watch all the clubs joining them in the Champions League next season win silverware.
Liverpool have a trophy. Newcastle have a trophy. Chelsea will probably have a trophy. Man City will probably have a trophy. And most humiliatingly of all, either Spurs or Man United will almost certainly have a trophy.
It doesn’t spell the end of Arteta by any stretch, and we’ve talked before about just how hard it is to put together three title-challenging seasons in a row. It might well be that this was always Arsenal’s fallow season and it’s just the inadequacy of others that kept them artificially and deceptively high in the table.
But there has been a clear regression in their league form, with a lack of the clinical ability to get the job done that marked them out as the real deal in the second half of last season. Points have been frittered carelessly and consistently with the injury problems providing at best partial mitigation only.
It all makes next season feel like a decisive one for Arteta and his – still worth remembering, this – enormously ambitious plan to restore Arsenal to the summit of English football after a couple of decades away.
It is not easy, this season has provided more questions than answers and exposed some familiar failings.
READ: Five Premier League tables that expose Arsenal and a failed title challenge
14) Ruud van Nistelrooy, Man United, October-November (10)
Yeah, that genuinely went brilliantly well. Credit to everyone here. If we were going to have a four-match reign as Manchester United manager, what we’d do is to make sure that all four of those matches were at home and, ideally, two of them against Leicester and another against PAOK in the Europa League. Get some lovely fat wins under the belt.
But let’s not pretend United would have won those three games as straightforwardly under Erik Ten Hag (or, it must now be conceded, Ruben Amorim) as they did under Ruud. It’s not really Ten Hag’s fault, but everything had become extremely stressful by that point. Absolutely nothing was coming easily, and maybe one of those three games might have been straightforward. But at least one would have been harrowing.
And perhaps the most impressive result of Van Nistelrooy’s reign was the one game he didn’t win, with a 1-1 draw against Chelsea giving us far more information than some easy wins over dreck.
Essentially, though, it was the perfect interim stint. It’s had all the positives of the initial Ole caretaker spell, with the instant mood-lifting morale boost of seeing a bona fide club legend in the hotseat, without any of the unpleasantness of mistakenly leaving him there for another two years after that initial buzz had entirely worn off.
13) Oliver Glasner, Crystal Palace (14)
A curious Premier League season in which Glasner’s side won none of their first eight games and now none of their most recent five means that they might somehow still fall short of that apparently impenetrable 50-point mark despite a run of 34 points in 17 games between December and early April. They now need a ticklish four points from games against Tottenham, Wolves and Liverpool if they are to raise their bat.
But none of that will matter at all if Glasner can become the first Crystal Palace manager to win a major honour in the FA Cup final against a Man City side who despite recent improvements remain distinctly vulnerable.
12) Fabian Hurzeler, Brighton (11)
Look, this is probably still more of a Brighton thing than a Hurzeler thing but at some point they are simply going to have to decide whether they are any good or not. Until they make up their minds about this, how on earth are any of the rest of us supposed to do so?
11) Pep Guardiola, Man City (16)
Extremely plausible that this season now ends with a second-place league finish and a trophy. Which would be one heck of an outcome for a season that flirted for a serious amount of time with genuine disaster.
At their lowest pre-Christmas ebb, City and Guardiola both appeared broken in a way that was dizzyingly unfixable. We’re still not truly convinced he’s fully recovered despite the improvement of results trending back towards something approaching City normality over recent months.
We still feel like this is a season that has pushed him closer to the City exit door rather than convinced him he should hang around to build a new team to go again against Liverpool and Arsenal and whoever else can manage to put together more than a half-season’s worth of results.
The impending departure of Kevin De Bruyne means the loss of another key stabilising, familiar reference point in Guardiola’s City adventure, and for so many reasons next season feels like one that holds more uncertainty for City than just about any other during his outrageously successful reign.
10) David Moyes, Everton, January onwards (NE)
Pretty mad that we haven’t actually done an update since Moyes’ glorious homecoming to Everton, but it’s been one of the division’s more compelling good-news stories this year.
The new-manager bounce is a real and unignorable phenomenon, but rarely have its effects been more pronounced than during that five-game, 13-point run just after Moyes’ came back to Goodison after 10 often difficult years away.
The whole mood of the club was utterly transformed as the dread fear of relegation and losing that cherished and tightly held top-flight status just before moving into their stunning new ground gripped Everton fans.
At the very least it appeared certain they faced another agonising end to the season in which relegation if it was to be averted would only be dismissed as a prospect late in the season.
Instead it was pretty much off the table by mid-February with Everton instead allowed to spend the last few months giving their grand old ground the proper farewell it deserves without any of those intrusive thoughts about the worst-case scenario.
Even if the highs of those early weeks have faded slightly among a flurry of draws – it’s now six and a solitary win in Everton’s last 10 games – the key work for this season at least had been done.
Now, of course, for the next step. There is no plausible Everton manager more deserving, more worthy of taking them into their new life at their new ground. No manager who could more fully understand everything it means.
But there remain few guarantees about how it will all pan out.
9) Thomas Frank, Brentford (9)
Frank is going to remain a top-10 staple for just about any next manager market worth the trouble but we remain entirely wedded to the idea that this is a club and manager in perfect harmony and the idea of either party risking their serendipitous relationship on something flashier is fraught with danger.
It’s probably inevitable at some point, but it’s not something we like to think too hard about. In keeping with the other teams currently jockeying for positions 8 to 11 in the final table, it feels like theirs has been a season that doesn’t really deserve a bottom-half finish even though the cruel reality of maths demand that be somebody’s fate when the music stops.
8) Enzo Maresca, Chelsea (5)
It’s not perhaps a satisfactory conclusion, but the one we find ourselves drawing is that Chelsea is simply a place where stuff happens and these days the manager is as much a passenger or bystander as anyone else.
It doesn’t quite seem fair to heap either praise or derision on the fella trying to steer a course through the season at a club that spends so lavishly yet haphazardly.
Maresca has made many mistakes, as a man with his lack of top-level experience was always likely to, but he’s got a lot right as well.
And the fact that when the Champions League spot they had pretty much held all season came under pressure they have responded with a run of 20 points in nine games while remaining on track in the Conference isn’t to be sniffed at.
In summary: Maresca is neither as good as his best nor as bad as his worst. Nothing means anything. It’s all just a bunch of stuff that happened.
7) Marco Silva, Fulham (8)
His side just seem to have run out of puff a bit since the international break, and that’s a shame because until then Fulham appeared to have a very plausible chance to do something extraordinary.
They have even in a weary phase that has delivered a crushing FA Cup defeat and four losses in six Premier League games still managed a thrilling win over Liverpool when that was still at least theoretically meaningful to all concerned.
But it does now look like another mid-table finish for a club and manager that have finished 10th and 13th in the last two years. Again, there’s nothing wrong with that and none of the teams promoted since Fulham were joined by Bournemouth and Nottingham Forest two years has managed anything like it, but finishing 11th would now represent something of a disappointment given where they were and what seemed possible not that long ago.
6) Unai Emery, Aston Villa (6)
A tricky one now. Has that PSR-baiting January window been justified by what’s followed? This has been a season that has delivered memories for a lifetime, with Villa’s run to the Champions League quarter-finals an eye-catching one that remained thrilling to the very last moment.
Villa fans have seen things they could surely never have expected to see at Villa Park with Marco Asensio and Marcus Rashford combining to give the club a hefty nudge into the second half of the season.
But the likelihood now is that they will finish the season outside even the expanded Champions League places, without the silverware that other similarly equipped clubs will have to show for the campaign and with a sense that what they’ve built this season has been done ever so slightly on sand.
That thumping defeat in the FA Cup semi-final is a really bruising one for Villa. And the way their season ends, with games against Tottenham and Man United, feels strangely apt too. Both clubs will offer a reminder that things could be so much worse, but one will also awkwardly show how things could also have ended up so much better.
5) Andoni Iraola, Bournemouth (4)
We are acutely aware that there is little more annoying to fans of ‘smaller’ clubs than constant media narratives about anyone doing well with them heading off to one of the ‘bigger’ clubs. You only have to look at how upset Liverpool fans are about Trent Alexander-Arnold right now to see that.
We take no joy in prodding at that sore spot and therefore apologise in advance here, but… of all the managers currently overperforming as manager of one of the Premier League’s burgeoning ‘middle-class’ clubs Iraola is the one we’d most like to see take the step up soon.
Because we’re pretty sure he’s the most interesting. We’re pretty sure he’s the one with the greatest variety of possible outcomes.
Placed in charge of one of the bigger beasts might bring the best or worst elements of his work to the surface. Or they might just continue to co-exist as they do now, only with attention shifting inevitably and inexorably to the dodgier parts.
He’s been Bournemouth manager for two years now, and across that time they have almost always resembled either a team that could and should challenge for Europe or one that could and should be battling relegation. There is very little middle-ground.
This is a team that completed a league double over Arsenal yet lost at home to Ipswich. A team that beat Newcastle and Nottingham Forest in successive weeks by an aggregate score of 9-1 to stretch their unbeaten run to 11 Premier League games and yet two months later found themselves on a run of one win (against Southampton…) in their next eight.
In the last month alone they have suffered such embarrassments as failing to beat either West Ham or Man United, yet gone to the Emirates and prevailed.
Their last three matches are against Aston Villa, Man City and Leicester and absolutely any result feels as likely as any other in any of those matches.
And all of that is broadly fine at Bournemouth but brings a fascinating and chaotic dynamic to any club higher up the food chain.
Essentially our point with Iraola is this: the exact season he’s produced for Bournemouth to great acclaim this season would be considered among the Spursiest things ever recorded if he were to repeat it at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium next season.
For his own sanity and career he should not take that job, but we can’t help wondering what goes off if he does.
4) Vitor Pereira, Wolves, December onwards (12)
Has triggered an astonishing transformation in Wolves’ fortunes given the mess he inherited from Gary O’Neil.
That start – nine points from the first 16 games of the season – ensured Wolves would be the last team to successfully extract themselves from the biggest non-event in Premier League relegation fight history, but when it happened it happened with absurd speed.
Wolves sit seventh in a Premier League table since Pereira’s appointment, ahead of Palace, Chelsea, Bournemouth, Brighton and so many more. They have 15 more points from their last 19 games than Man United, and 17 more than Spurs. They have only five fewer than Arsenal and Man City. Across half a season!
It’s entirely true that Wolves’ squad is not one that should have been in the mess that it was, but nor was it one that could have been expected to so adroitly streak not just clear of the relegation zone but beyond the lower-mid-table stragglers like United, Spurs, Everton and West Ham into comfy mid-table.
And as we’ve noted before: imagine the coverage both Pereira and O’Neil would be getting now had their stories this season been reversed.
3) Eddie Howe, Newcastle (3)
In terms of neatly and effectively meeting a pre-season brief, there’s a strong argument that nobody can match Howe’s achievements this season with Newcastle. Sure, others have more obviously obliterated pre-season targets in thoroughly dramatic fashion, but we’re not sure anyone has taken the two obvious top objectives for a team this season and delivered in the manner of Newcastle.
Back in the Champions League and ending English football’s most ridiculous trophy drought is special, special stuff. Sure, the wider media reaction to Newcastle winning the Carabao might have been too saccharine for most tastes, at times giving the impression that Newcastle had invented winning a trophy after not doing so for ages, at others journalists who have apparently never met a single real-life actual football fan expressing bafflement that all supporters of all clubs weren’t all overjoyed and thrilled about it.
This generally took the form of ‘you just don’t understand what it means’ when the truth was ‘we all understand exactly what it means, we just don’t care as much as Newcastle fans do about it’. This really should be straightforward. Should, say, Tottenham win the Europa League there will be no equivalent media outpouring, no suggestion that if you aren’t as thrilled as Tottenham fans about it all that you simply don’t understand.
So, to be clear: nobody is unclear about the scale and significance of that achievement for Eddie Howe and his team. Not least because even the standard ‘only a Carabao’ barbs struggle to land even more when you consider Newcastle’s run to that trophy.
They took down four of the current top seven en route to glory, thoroughly outclassing Arsenal over two legs in the semi-final and then schooling Liverpool in the final.
One can argue that those clubs had larger primary targets but neither was exactly phoning it in by that stage of the tournament either. And Newcastle beat them up.
The final in particular was a spectacular performance and a huge personal triumph for Howe, who set his team up perfectly to nullify Liverpool’s huge threat at one end without ever curtailing their own attacking capabilities.
The players delivered wonderfully, but this did feel like the manager’s success every bit as much. And for a manager with obvious talent but so little experience of such major finals, that was doubly impressive.
Throw in the now very likely success of goal two – getting back in the Champions League – and you’ve got a manager who in any normal season would be a worthy favourite for manager of the year but in this one finds himself scrapping just to stay on the podium.
2) Nuno Espirito Santo, Nottingham Forest (1)
There’s a risk that they might be running out of steam at just the wrong time, that a seemingly rock-solid grip on Champions League football might be lost on the run-in.
Forest have won only twice since March in a run that has seen them slip to sixth in the league and go out of the FA Cup at the semi-final stage.
And those two wins have been against Manchester United and Tottenham, and at this stage those barely count.
But while we remain keen advocates of the idea that goals change across a season and relative failure can and should often still just be considered failure given the scale of the opportunity being passed up, sometimes you do have to step back and accept that ‘Nottingham Forest only finishing sixth’ would have been a simply batshit sentence to utter in August.
And even more so when Nuno, his reputation in this country in tatters after The Tottenham Unpleasantness, took over a club mired in points deductions and facing relegation.
Two wins at the back end of last season, against the even more stricken Sheffield United and Burnley, were enough to keep Forest up and they have taken that and run with it in remarkable fashion.
Sure, there’s no doubt they’ve been assisted by an unusually high number of big clubs having absolute daftnesses, but they’ve still been hugely impressive.
Forest are not a complicated team to understand, but that’s praiseworthy in itself. They know what they are, what their strengths are and how to get the absolute most out of that more often than not.
Smart recruitment and canny coaching has produced a team more than the sum of its parts, and that’s really all anyone can reasonably ask any manager to produce in what is still less only a season and a half in charge.
1) Arne Slot, Liverpool (2)
It’s very unfair but also true: it has ultimately proved quite hard not to end up using the sheer ease with which Slot has cracked the Premier League puzzle at the first attempt as a counter-intuitive caveat against his achievements this season.
If anything, Clive, he’s almost won his first Premier League title too well.
We’re guilty of it. We still don’t see Slot becoming the next great legacy manager, the next man to put together an era of dominance containing a string of league title a la Ferguson or Guardiola.
We still can’t entirely shake the notion that this has all in some way been a last hurrah for Jurgen Klopp and his team rather than the start of something magical.
And there’s every chance that is going to be made to look like utter foolishness.
Nevertheless, a big part of why Slot’s impact and success might not be quite as hailed as it ought to be is that it’s been so obviously coming for so long that the failure to add any burnishing additional silverware feels vaguely disappointing because human brains are daft things that operate daftly.
What he’s achieved has been staggering, and the easiest and fairest way to measure that is not to simply look just how far clear Liverpool have ended the season – because that really can end up working against them – but where everyone had them finishing when the season began.
They fell away from the title race just as it really got going last season, and few were backing them to match even that under a new manager working largely with the squad he inherited.
It’s been repeatedly and correctly pointed out that Klopp left a very decent squad – albeit one with a few huge contractual roadblocks in the very near distance – but still nobody outside stopped-clock ‘our year’ Liverpool fans really saw this coming.
Just the simple fact the machinations around the Contract Three have never had any dread impact on the field is impressive. And, yes, getting Virgil van Dijk and Mo Salah to be really good is a little bit ‘I told him to do that’ but there have been plenty of new managers before who have come into a settled and successful dressing room and not achieved the level of buy-in from those players to new methods and new ways of doing things.
Still, though, it remains the remodelled midfield that stands as Slot’s greatest achievement. He has elevated Alexis Mac Allister, Ryan Gravenberch and Dominik Szoboszlai to new levels. Each of them had obvious class before this season, but none had shown such a high level for such a sustained period in this league.
It’s not hard to picture plenty of other higher profile managers coming in and finding those the available resources and spending six months whinging about it.
Slot was having none of that, and really has felt like the absolutely ideal kind of coach to come in and take what was already there and provide the small tweaks here and adjustments there to make something even better.
He has, in short, proved the ideal man to finish a necessary rebuild about which Klopp correctly deduced two things. One, that it had to happen but two, that he himself no longer retained the requisite energy to deliver it.
Saying farewell to Klopp was hard, but he knew precisely what he was doing and Liverpool have already reaped the benefits of that.
