It really is going to be a very different Premier League next season.
It’s either going to have no West Ham, which will be quite unusual, or no Tottenham, which will feel utterly absurd.
But, for the first time in a decade, it will also have no Pep Guardiola. Unless he rocks up at another Premier League club. Which a) seems very unlikely and b) certainly wouldn’t reduce the weirdness of the overall effect.
But he is of course not the only manager whose departure we know about. Oliver Glasner is definitely leaving Crystal Palace, Andoni Iraola is definitely leaving Bournemouth.
And it doesn’t even stop there because it is alarmingly simple to come up with a list of 10 more Premier League managers it’s very, very easy to see failing to last until summer 2027, with a fairly obvious number one.
Frank Lampard (Coventry)
Listen, fair play, this year’s ‘Too good for the Championship, not good enough for the Prem’ managers both made it to the last rites, with Daniel Farke even managing to prove himself actually good enough for the Premier League, so there is some hope for Lampard here.
But the key will be whether he’s actually improved and developed as a manager in his time away from the spotlight at Coventry. Does he, do they, survive contact with Premier League reality?
Because his record in this league as a manager absolutely hums of dung. Since a passable first season at Chelsea he’s won just 18 Premier League games out of 66 across assorted spells with Chelsea and Everton.
He really might be a lot more Parker than Farke. And remember, the only goal here is ‘out of a job by the end of next season’ and Parker did just about deliver.
Or have we judged him harshly?
Eddie Howe (Newcastle)
Now there are caveats here. First of all, in the great cycle of Newcastle seasons, the pattern tells us that next season is one of the ones where they’re not in Europe and thus do well and qualify for Europe again, thus ruining the following season. So maybe this is actually one for 2027/28, which seems ages away but will be here before we know it if the seas haven’t boiled or the ants haven’t taken over.
Second, there was already plenty of evidence that the Saudis had almost instantly got bored and gone off the idea of making Newcastle the next Man City even before recent geopolitical events saw such sentiment spread further still and even as far as their favourite little sportswashing project of chucking absurd millions of dollars at mediocre g*lfers. So there might not be the will at a board level to do anything other than just let Eddie Howe potter aimlessly on.
Thirdly, there will absolutely never be a concerted media campaign to get Howe out because he is the Great English Hope of the tabloid press. The only reason they will push for Howe’s departure from Newcastle is if they think they can insert him into an even bigger job, which we suppose can’t be entirely ruled out given the wider premise of this whole feature.
But we do wonder just how much longer the Geordie Nation will put up with the High Performance Podcast stylings of a manager who is really getting little more than a bare passing grade at a club that really isn’t yet anywhere near where fans expected them to be when cheerfully selling the entirety of their souls.
At some point, a single Carabao just stops feeling like it was enough, really. There have already been rumblings about it this season and Howe could yet find himself very quickly in a position next season where the Ollie Holts of this world find themselves desperately breaking the glass on the emergency Careful What You Wish For column before the leaves are off the trees.
They’ve lost 27 points from winning positions this season, guys.
Vitor Pereira (Nottingham Forest)
If only there were precedent for Vitor Pereira turning up at a relegation-haunted team and turning them, for six glorious weeks, into prime Barcelona to put such silly fears to bed before a slightly stuttering end to the season is followed by a disastrous start to the next before a long-inevitable sack early in the following campaign.
If only there were precedent for Mr Marinakis having absolutely zero patience with a manager who has worked miracles the previous season and binning him right off in the early stages of the next.
Alas, neither of those things have ever happened before. Don’t try and think of examples, you won’t be able to. So in fairness Pereira might be fine.
Roberto De Zerbi (Tottenham)
Should now survive, although we must express some unease at the way everyone seems to have declared the relegation battle over because it is apparently simply impossible to even conceive of a situation where Tottenham F*cking Hotspur lose two games of football in a row. It just strikes us a dismal failure of imagination when considering the rake-treading capabilities of the country’s, and perhaps the world’s, foremost comedy institution.
But they should survive. They should be fine now. At which point, because De Zerbi, and because Spurs, and because everyone else in the league with now just one exception is also daft or facing real uncertainty of their own, we’d imagine there will be a groundswell of optimism.
Previous examples of relegation-avoiders turned European contenders will be cited. There will be talk of Nottingham Forest in 24/25, of course. There will inevitably, we fear, even be Leicester 2015/16 chat bandied around willy and indeed nilly.
Spurs do stand to benefit from potentially record-breaking levels of Like A New Signing vibes next season if the very De Zerbi stylings of James Maddison can be successfully harnessed and if Dejan Kulusevski turns out to still exist and if Mohammad Kudus stops suffering setbacks and if Luka Vuskovic transfers his Bundesliga breakthrough season into something similar in a real league for grown-ups.
But this is Spurs, and you just know they’ll learn absolutely nothing from this season, just as they learned absolutely nothing from the previous season. They’ll use that Like A New Signing energy to avoid doing sufficient actual signings.
Promises made to De Zerbi in desperation to get him to sign on the dotted line in the heat of a relegation catastrophe will evaporate as swiftly as the post-survival optimistic glow.
De Zerbi is one of the most interesting and capable coaches in football today. But he is not a man blessed with patience or a long fuse. He has reached sod-this-for-a-game-of-soldiers status multiple times now at multiple clubs less confused and confusing than Spurs.
Whether Spurs are making an unlikely Champions League challenge or trying to avoid a repeat of this year’s descent into despair, they will fail to deliver what De Zerbi wants in January leading to an inevitable flouncing and mutual-consenting by, oh, let’s say… the first week of March.
David Moyes (Everton)
It is the cycle of the Moyes. He makes you rock-solid and he makes you feel safe. But it can all take a turn for the dreary and it’s all too easy for that sense of safety and security to become one of complacency.
We did not and do not blame West Ham fans for wanting to move on from the largely unwatchable football he had them playing, from the distinct lack of ambition that greeted what could have been a launchpad Europa Conference success but that instead became just another stepping stone on a road to nowhere, where stretch targets never extended beyond playing solid enough football that there would always be three worse or stupider football teams in the division.
Those fans’ reasons for change were and are sound. But now look at them. The very existence of West Ham’s cautionary tale, and Everton’s own recent experience of unpleasantly close relegation escapes, might make them more resistant to the dangers of Moyes Fatigue.
But we’ve started to hear the first grumblings and rumblings during a limp end to the season that has seen a real chance of pushing for Europe ebb away in a six-match run without a win just at the time everything looked like it was opening up for them.
That’s just uncomfortably Moyes, who has taken what we genuinely thought might be a fun Everton side this season and made them admirably solid but in the end really very boring indeed.
We won’t blame Everton fans either when they start to really loudly demand change just so they can feel something again, even when that change is to bring in Andoni Iraola but somehow end up only with the relegation form bits of his Bournemouth reign.
Marco Silva (Fulham)
We’re not happy about it but at some point it will happen. Silva till tick over the five-year mark at Fulham this summer, and that’s an unthinkable eternity in both modern managerial terms and the context of Silva’s own nomadic managerial career. After a three-year stint at Estoril in his first managerial gig, he’d been a confirmed 12-18 months man before Fulham came along. Between his 116 games at Estoril and his 228-and-counting at Fulham, his longest spell at any other club was 60 games at Everton.
How many more years of being ninth until May and then tailing off to finish 11th have Silva and Fulham got in them, realistically?
At some point surely one or both of them just get bored and make a decision that ends up going terribly badly for all concerned. Especially Silva, but especially Fulham but especially Silva’s replacement Thomas Frank.
Above all else, though, while our position has remained steadfast over the last couple of years that Silva must remain Fulham manager at all costs, we’re really not at all comfortable with a manager with a previous reputation for flakiness becoming the fourth longest-serving current manager in the top four divisions of English football.
Regis Le Bris (Sunderland)
Hear us out. Obviously, the man has done stunning work this season, no doubt. But Sunderland’s underlying metrics have always suggested a team defying gravity. There is no guarantee that will or can continue.
It’s possible, of course. Le Bris really might have stumbled upon something to break the wheel of the number-crunchers and the boffins and the laptop brainiacs. More power to him if so.
But he also might have just managed to bottle lightning in one gloriously messed-up season where a great many teams were very, very weird for extended periods of time.
And he now faces the cruel but inevitable curse of the Shifted Expectations as he embarks on the Difficult Second Season. Plenty of capable managers have run aground on those rocks before.
Michael Carrick (Manchester United)
It was always the risk when they appointed him to the interim role on easy mode. Half a season playing one game a week in a league gone daft and replacing a manager who had so stubbornly backed himself into so many absurd corners he had become less man than Escher painting.
Carrick had easy wins – literal and figurative – everywhere he looked. He took them, rolled that momentum on and, in a league featuring only two halfway sane big clubs, duly made Manchester United quite comfortably the least nutty of the rest.
It’s a fine achievement, and he deserves plenty of credit. We’re not saying he doesn’t. We’re just saying it was always quite doable in the circumstances for anyone sensible. But the real quiz comes with competing on four fronts when you can’t just immediately do obvious new and crowd-pleasing things like ‘pick Maguire and Mainoo’ or ‘Hypnotise Casemiro so he thinks it’s 2021 again’.
And Carrick has precious little top-flight managerial experience to fall back on if it all starts to get too much under the harshest glare any club manager can face in this country.
He might even have to accept the ultimate punishment. We’re calling it here now: he’ll be Spurs manager by the end of March, overseeing either another grim fight against relegation or trying to steer a stuttering promotion push back on course and secure at least a play-off spot in the new-look participation award version the Championship is introducing.
Enzo Maresca (Manchester City)
A hasty but straightforward rewrite here after Monday night’s bolt from the sky blue. Pep Guardiola is leaving, and Enzo Maresca will almost certainly be the man to replace him. Some City fans tried to seek some hope in the fact it was the Daily Mail who broke the story and thus it might just be nonsense, but it was compelling and they knew it even before Ornstein came along to absolutely end all doubt.
This day had to come some time, and Maresca has long been touted as Guardiola’s heir with no hair. But it’s hard to shake the notion that this just positively reeks of Moyes.
Maresca isn’t exactly the same thing as Moyes. He does have some big-club experience after his time at Chelsea, where he absolutely was not the problem despite never particularly making a case for being the solution either.
He’s a fine coach who should have a long and decent career in the game. But like Moyes he’s an inevitably underwhelming choice for the impossible task of following a legend.
We just aren’t quite sure he has the minerals for it. Two seasons in a row he has positioned Chelsea as possible unlikely title contenders despite everything, which is good, two seasons in a row he has self-fulfilling-prophesied his way out of that title contention, which is bad.
As with Moyes at United all those years ago, it’s not that he’s useless or anything like that because he obviously isn’t. He just carries the undeniable whiff of the small-time as he seeks to replace the most big-time manager of the age.
Arne Slot (Liverpool)
Liverpool have tied themselves up in absurd knots here. We’re going to go ahead and assume Xabi Alonso didn’t accept the Chelsea job without getting a pretty clear steer from Liverpool that theirs would not be available this summer.
And that’s just plain nutty. Liverpool have obsessed over not becoming Chelsea and just hiring and firing managers, but there really has been almost nothing about this season that suggests Slot is worth persevering with.
The Dutchman was canny enough with the Jurgen Klopp team he inherited, content to smooth some of the edges of the heavy-metal football but leave the fundamentals of a very specific team built wonkily but magnificently on the lethal threat of the TAA-Salah axis on the right.
Charged with building his own side to do his own thing it’s been sh*tbone awful for an extended period of time. Does feel like Liverpool are one of several teams this season who have got away with an awful lot due to the broader slapstick appeal of more existential catastrophe elsewhere, to the extent that a profoundly mid-table 59 points may well be enough to propel them into the Champions League.
That is an absurd slice of luck that should be used as an unlikely springboard for meaningful change while they retain that Champions League lure, not evidence that all is well and things should carry on under a manager the fans, and seemingly also the players, are no longer remotely convinced about.
‘Don’t Be Chelsea’ really isn’t the worst mantra to live by for any big club and we do get it. Liverpool have an image of themselves and it is not one that is easily squared with binning off a title-winning manager 12 months later.
But rules are there to be broken. Sometimes you can be a little bit Chelsea, as a treat.
