Ten Hag avoids bottom spot in latest Premier League manager rankings with a newcomer on top
International breaks mean manager rankings, and this feels like a more meaningful manager ranking list than most given the current focus on the ol’ sack race.
There are, essentially, really quite a lot of managers making various shades of a b*llocks of it.
Who will be the first Premier League manager to be sacked? The odds are here but this will give you an idea…
20) Gary O’Neil (Wolves)
Giving a manager with one win in their last 10 league games a shiny new four-year contract is starting to look like it might have been an error from Wolves, to be fair. That record now stands at one win – and six points in total – from the last 17 games with a side shorn of its most compelling attacking component (Pedro Neto) and most reliable defender (Max Kilman) now circling the drain along with the previously high-flying reputation of its manager.
19) Erik Ten Hag (Manchester United)
Should obviously have been sacked in the summer, and should have been sacked after each of Manchester United’s last three games. 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.
They don’t score any goals, and in games when they actively try to do so, they get the sh*t kicked out of them by teams like Liverpool and, worse, Spurs. That really should have been the end. Even ignoring the obvious ‘lol Spurs’ element of that mauling, we have rarely seen any top manager of any top team play so entirely into the hands of a team that is a) so overtly dangerous if allowed to play the way they want yet b) so often easily stymied if you don’t.
In United’s last two games, then, Ten Hag has erred both too far on the side of aggression and defence. There’s a muddle-headed sense to it all that really shows no signs of dissipating. This is not a team with an obvious plan or identity, but one trying to get from one day to the next without calamity. They look like what they are: the product of a manager who is living day to day, match to match, just trying to survive. But while he talks frequently about the long-term plan and the long-term project, there is no evidence.
It’s been entirely subsumed in the hand-to-mouth fight for survival, where that short-term survival becomes the goal in itself. Some still call for him to be given time, but he’s had time and we’ve been here before. This is the third year of this project. If he still just needs four new signings like he did six months ago and a year ago and 18 months ago then you do have to wonder just when he will ever have the squad he needs.
Ten Hag’s United are a paradox: simultaneously supposedly still in the foothills of a long-term plan yet fighting every day for that as yet unidentified plan’s very survival.
Come on, Sir Jim. Just accept you f***ed it in the summer and put him and us out of our misery. If it really does hurt you so much, then why not simply cheer yourself up by taking it out on some menial irrelevant workshy WFH wage slaves again? You know you always enjoy that.
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18) Oliver Glasner (Crystal Palace)
We were not expecting this. At all. Yes, the mitigation is there in the unfixable loss of the irreplaceable Michael Olise, while Eberechi Eze is yet to really emerge from the funk that descended over him during a frustratingly non-impactful summer with England.
Nobody truly expected Glasner to be able to maintain the genuinely absurd levels Palace had found at the back end of last season in taking 19 points from a possible 21 in a run-in that featured wins over Liverpool, Newcastle, Man United and Aston Villa.
But going seven games without a win at all? After a start that’s included home games against Leicester and, worse, Manchester United? Did not see that coming.
After early-summer fears that Glasner might be targeted by Bayern Munich or some other big bastard, the Austrian now finds himself alarmingly prominent in a Sack Race headed by dead-men-walking like Ten Hag and O’Neil.
It’s an alarming turnaround, and while the mitigation is real and sizeable it’s also very clearly not been good enough. The manager cannot be absolved entirely for failing to handle the setbacks thrown Palace’s way – setbacks which are very much part and parcel of Premier League life outside the big boys. Palace are not the only team to lose an irreplaceable player this summer, but most have handled it better.
It’s not yet a full-blown crisis, but if things haven’t improved significantly by the next international break after games against Forest, Tottenham, Wolves and Fulham, then it absolutely will be.
17) Russell Martin (Southampton)
If Kieran McKenna has lived up to his billing as the new Rob Edwards in this season’s simplistic surface-level analysis, then Martin has delivered as the Vincent Kompany. There’s staying true to your principles and then there’s a stubborn refusal to accept that getting promoted and avoiding relegation are different beasts requiring differing methods.
There is, in general, a trend for promoted teams to try to become or remain very expansive very quickly rather than knuckle down and earn that right as, say, Brentford did. Or even Brighton before them.
Southampton appear absolutely doomed under Martin, who appears wildly unlikely to repeat either of the Kompany tricks of a) surviving the current season or b) rocking up at Bayern Munich the next.
Whether they do any better under anyone else remains to be seen, but you only have to look as far as Leicester’s pragmatism under Steve Cooper to see evidence of how an underpowered promoted team can at least show compelling signs of competing, something Southampton currently lack almost entirely.
16) Julen Lopetegui (West Ham)
Not been a good start by any reasonable measure but moving on from Moyesball was never likely to be pain-free. Absolutely must be given time to make West Ham into something more compelling, but the undeniable risk remains that in so doing they p*ss away the time they have left with their current compelling collection of attacking talent before some bigger beasts pick it off.
What this season does represent, which might be more important than the Hammers would ideally like, is a bit of a free hit. There are so many teams that are so very bad at the arse-end of the table that there is literally no danger of things going so wrong for the Hammers that they get sucked into that kind of unpleasantness. It is absolutely worth taking one step back in the hope of following it with two steps forward.
Therefore, we fully expect some proper Serie A stylings and Moyes back in situ for his third stint in the London Stadium big chair by Christmas.
15) Ange Postecoglou (Tottenham)
Just getting a little bit silly now, isn’t it? Leaning far too heavily into the whole ‘that’s who we are, mate’ and proudly declaring he had absolutely no intention of doing anything to try and close an open game down before the clash with Brighton, a game in which his team went 2-0 up before losing 3-2 in truly ludicrous fashion.
Even that was less silly than the post-match nonsense about not believing in the entire concept of substitutions and the ‘false reward’ of getting results you don’t deserve. Insane by any measure, not least its miserably Australian overlooking of the fact undeserved wins are among the very best kind of wins.
And the whole balls-out attacking-at-all-costs schtick would also carry more weight if he wasn’t still determinedly picking the predictable underwhelming output of Timo Werner over the far more exciting and tantalising long-term potential of the 17-year-old Mikey Moore.
Nobody loves a lurching change of direction every other November more than Spurs, and you absolutely could not rule that out. Most importantly, Postecoglou could also have very few complaints. He has had more money lavished upon him than even the elite Jose Mourinho and Antonio Conte who left Daniel Levy so starstruck, and has delivered a team that has produced entertaining but mid-table output for very close to a year now.
We sense that some Spurs fans would be quite happy with that, with going back to being an entertaining enough side that has good days and bad days before ending up somewhere between fifth and 10th. A return to the Martin Jol days, a simpler time, a better time perhaps.
That’s fine, but it does rather look like that is all a combination of the inherent limitations of Angeball and these players and this relentlessly unserious football club can be relied upon to deliver.
14) Andoni Iraola (Bournemouth)
Going into the international break on the back of a defeat at Leicester just puts Iraola and Bournemouth under a smidge of pressure. Nobody’s really noticed yet, of course, because there are two very big clubs clowning around like clowns and lots of the smaller ones in more conspicuous strife than the Cherries, but hopes of kicking on from last season’s mid-table finish have just been slightly tempered by a start in which their only wins thus far have come against Everton (hilariously) and Southampton (unfussily).
Narrow defeat to Chelsea, and draws against both Forest and Newcastle, are perfectly acceptable mid-table fodder, and even a heavier defeat at Anfield can be dismissed as one of those things that will from time to time happen to teams of Bournemouth’s standing.
But the Leicester defeat does feel like a bit of a mood-changer and one that makes it much harder than it should have been for Iraola to remain under the radar in a post-interlull horror run that pits them against Arsenal, Aston Villa and Man City in successive weekends.
Easy to see how that one irritating defeat spirals into a four-game losing run, with the worst part of it all being there might not be much Iraola can do about it other than try and ride it out in the shadows.
We’re not suggesting he’s in any real trouble, but he might just be on a lengthening list of managers relying on the inevitable sackings for more showy clownery at more conspicuous clubs.
13) Thomas Frank (Brentford)
There are currently two Brentfords. There is the home Brentford, who have a record matched only by Arsenal and Man City with three wins and a draw, and there is the away Brentford who have lost three out of three.
Luckily for Frank – and Brentford – there is genuine reason to think the home Brentford is the more instructive. Those three away defeats have come at Liverpool, Man City and Tottenham. Even with Spurs in their current silly state, these are not away defeats to raise undue alarm at any club outside or even for plenty within the big eight.
Far more important is that Frank has done what very few teams outside the elite manage with such little apparent effort – lost an elite goalscorer and simply carried on regardless. The underrated Bryan Mbeumo has taken the strain manfully, while he is far from a one-man attack as the freewheeling win over Wolves at the weekend showed.
Last season was a bit of a blip, but it’s worth remembering that Frank is the man largely responsible where for Brentford a ‘blip’ season is now one where they finish 16th in the Premier League and only 13 points above the relegation zone.
We’re still – probably unfairly – not quite sure he’s the right kind of manager for the big jobs with which he is now frequently linked. It just all seems to be working so well with the current combination of manager and club that it seems a shame to risk all that for the chance to have, say, 18 underwhelming months at Spurs.
Oh, and in case you were still worrying at all about that away record – don’t. They’re off to Old Trafford straight after the break.
12) Sean Dyche (Everton)
Has to be under pressure because Everton have not started well, but there is some evidence of an uptick now after that nightmarishly bleak first four games, games in which Everton somehow contrived to lose 3-0 to Brighton and 4-0 to Spurs and then have things get even worse.
The truly grim prospect of opening their shiny new stadium with a first season outside the top flight in forever has receded a touch and crucially Dyche appears to have found a way to steady the defensive ship in particularly. After conceding 13 goals in the first four games, they’ve conceded just two in the last three. Shutting out Newcastle, even this currently inexplicably goal-shy Newcastle, is a decent marker.
It was also, most obviously, the single change Dyche had to make happen. Beyond the straightforward fact that not conceding three goals every game makes it much easier to actually pick up points, it shores up Dyche’s own otherwise impossibly shaky position. Because there’s no getting away from the fact that if he isn’t making you hard to score against, then it becomes increasingly hard to justify having him there at all.
But yes, things looking up for the disc-bearded, gravel-voiced one. And if Everton can maintain current levels they’ve got quite a kindly-looking run of games between this interlull and the next, with games again Ipswich, Fulham, Southampton and West Ham offering a clear chance to distance themselves from the stragglers.
11) Kieran McKenna (Ipswich)
This season’s Rob Edwards, which is absolutely fine but does make McKenna a man who must take great care to avoid also becoming next season’s Rob Edwards if and when this season reaches its likely conclusion.
10) Steve Cooper (Leicester)
His face grows more hangdog with every game but he kind of always has the look of a man who knows his chips have been pissed on or, if they haven’t, very soon will be.
His Leicester are not a good team, but that is such an understatement that it’s probably reasonable to suggest that steering them to six points from seven games and the dizzy heights of 15th in the table represents a decent passing grade for a manager brought in with a pretty clear remit to make Leicester at least competitive and tough to beat on their return to the top flight with a side far less storied than that which went down.
Another manager and team that have a big opportunity between the international breaks, with Leicester handed a run of games against direct relegation rivals such as Southampton, Ipswich and Manchester United.
9) Pep Guardiola (Manchester City)
Has to be judged by his own absurdly high standards and by that measure he and his team have looked… fallible. Obviously City’s fallible looks very different to anyone else’s and has still delivered five wins and two draws in seven games.
But City are not a team who should have to win 10 points from losing positions. That’s the sort of behaviour we might expect from a Liverpool or a non-sh*t Spurs. We sometimes wonder whether Guardiola deliberately tries to make winning the title a bit harder than it should be just to feel alive. There are summers when he appears actively determined to make his squad weaker just for sh*ts and giggles.
The re-signing of Ilkay Gundogan this summer proves that is not now the case. That was an ultra-practical, supremely pragmatic move for a manager who knows for sure that he now faces another worthy competitor to rival Klopp’s Liverpool at their peak.
The Arsenal game was about as rattled as we’ve seen City outside that weird run when for some inexplicable reason they couldn’t get their heads round Tottenham’s assorted brands of nonsense. Arsenal first weathered a storm and then slowly but determinedly turned the game their way, and the way City went about trying to play against the Gunners’ 10 men was surprisingly painful and, more than that, guileless.
It’s not what you think of when you think of a Guardiola team, and the long-term loss of Rodri adds to the slightly disconcerting sense of City team in danger of becoming ever so slightly unmoored.
Obviously, they’ll still go on a 16-match winning run between December and March that wins them the title. But nevertheless, it’s not been entirely convincing somehow thus far.
8) Eddie Howe (Newcastle)
Still feels like the truce at Newcastle is only a tentative one, and that Newcastle’s decent on-field results reflect neither their current level or performance nor the off-field uncertainty and that it could all become quite unpleasant quite quickly if and when those results do start tracking more closely to performance.
We kind of feel like Howe is more likely to be Spurs manager two years from now than Newcastle’s.
In the more immediate future, the almost total drying-up of goals for the division’s fourth highest scorers last season is the major concern and one that appears to need a more significant answer than waiting for Alexander Isak’s toe to get better.
7) Nuno Espirito Santo (Nottingham Forest)
Doing absolutely all that can be asked of a Nottingham Forest manager in having them currently comfortably clear of all the relegation unpleasantness.
What might become clearer and more important over time is whether the current unusual disparity between Forest’s home form (two points, no wins) and away form (eight points, two wins) is something tangible or mere early-season small-sample quirk. Because if there is something in it, you’d imagine it could get them into trouble over time if they remain entirely reliant on winning games away from home. Because that’s generally considered harder, isn’t it?
6) Marco Silva (Fulham)
Always had a soft spot for Silva since the very early days and that absurd character assassination to which he was subjected by Merse And The Boys on Soccer Saturday for the unforgivable crime of Not Knowing Our League. It’s taken several years, but we are unapologetically delighted that he has finally proved them wrong. Or right, because one thing you do have to acknowledge about Silva’s current success with Fulham is that it comes as a man who without any shadow of a doubt now knows our league.
Under his watch, Fulham have transitioned from yo-yo team to mid-table stalwart, and that’s no mean feat for any manager to achieve. Most yo-yoers ultimately succumb to gravity rather than… whatever force it is that makes yo-yos go up. We’re not scientists here. But Your Norwiches, Your West Broms, even Your Burnleys show how well Fulham and Silva have done to break that cycle the other way.
Current upper mid-table stylings likely to make way for more standard mid-table hovering, but no shame in that. Silva must also receive credit for turning Fulham into the fun kind of mid-table team – the sort that just chucks a 5-0 win in here or there, or pulls down the pants of a bigger boy with great elan.
Has got himself on the radar for bigger jobs in the division now, and deservedly so.
5) Fabian Hurzeler (Brighton)
Lovely start for the unacceptably young newcomer and a manager clearly earmarked and destined for big things. It was obviously and primarily very funny – and almost all the focus fell inevitably on Spurs sh*tting in their own shoes – but we do wonder how important that 3-2 comeback win before the break might prove.
Even when Brighton were trailing, there were mountains of evidence of just how dangerous they can be going forward when Mitoma and Welbeck are on song, but had the comeback not materialised it would have been two weeks to think on a run of five games without a win on the back of last season’s famously fast start and near-total subsequent collapse.
Hurzeler is not the first and won’t be the last manager to find his health restored by a visit from Dr Tottenham, but it also feels like a significant rite of passage for any new manager in our league. Lovely for him to get that ticked off the list so early. Absolutely certain now to get backed in to third favourite to be next Spurs manager at some point over the coming months.
4) Enzo Maresca (Chelsea)
Yeah, fair play. It was easy and fun to dunk on Chelsea for bringing such an inexperienced manager into their swirling vortex of chaos having dispensed with the man who oversaw such dramatic improvement at the back end of last season.
But Maresca has made the impossible job look distinctly possible. Chelsea are not remotely the finished article yet, but that’s not Maresca’s fault and they quite probably never will be the finished article because they will never sit still long enough. There will always be chaos, there will always be six new signings you didn’t want or need.
All a Chelsea manager can really do is try and ride the wave for as long as possible, and Maresca has got a lot more right than wrong. The disappointments along the way are inevitable, but at the moment those disappointments are ‘occasional home draw in game that should have been won’ which… isn’t too bad.
What Maresca is managing to do, against all odds, is achieve decent results while giving the appearance of actually attempting to build some kind of foundations and guiding principles for how he wants them to go about it. You’d kind of expect even success at Chelsea to look chaotic and unplanned, but perhaps the most impressive thing about Maresca’s start is that he hasn’t really given off that air of everything appearing transitory or fleeting at all.
3) Mikel Arteta (Arsenal)
A third genuine title bid is firmly under way, and Arteta’s Arsenal are still a side that appear to be progressing and developing towards their final form. No real sense yet that they’ve plateaued and talk of their mastery of the dark arts should be considered a compliment. You don’t win titles against this City team by playing nice.
Arteta and his team have got inside City’s heads and under their skin in a way only one other Premier League challenger ever has, and that is a genuinely huge accomplishment. And it still remains worth saying that this was all thoroughly unexpected when it began, coming as it did from a starting point of being scared to play Spurs and then bottling fourth place in a manner that suggested Arteta had changed absolutely nothing about the club.
He is now changing everything. Their absolute dominance of set-pieces is really starting to boil people’s piss, which is always a sign you’re doing something right and nobody has yet really countered it. if they could just learn to keep 11 players on the pitch on a more consistent basis they really could do something extraordinary this season.
Although presumably even if Arsenal do win the Premier League title, Man City will release a statement declaring victory for themselves, while Martin Samuel claps along like a great big bearded seal.
2) Unai Emery (Aston Villa)
Have you noticed him even once this season? Of course you haven’t. Nobody ever does. He’s just there in the background, quietly making Aston Villa one of the best teams in the country, turning a ragtag bunch of relegation-haunted stragglers into a team that beats Bayern Munich in the Champions League and just quietly once again sets up camp in the top five.
It does very much appear the chance is there for Emery’s Villa to outperform at least the silliest two of the big six while also having much more about them than Newcastle.
The slightly unfair reputation Emery and his side have for being just an example of what consistent high-level competence can achieve in this league has also been wonderfully shaken up this season by the tremendous emergence of Jhon Duran as the campaign’s clear early breakout disruptor, the most super of supersubs and Emery’s very own cheat code.
1) Arne Slot (Liverpool)
We are increasingly convinced that it’s much, much easier for a new manager to replace a manager who has f***ed everything up than one who has left everything in really quite excellent shape. With the former you have the advantages of both time, because everyone knows the ship needs turning round, and the freedom to fully impose your own ideas and plans from day one.
But coming into a Liverpool set-up Jurgen Klopp had left in surprisingly rude health after an awkward 2023 summer presents a very different set of challenges. It would have been, very obviously, entirely stupid for Slot to rip everything up and start again at Liverpool given the state in which he found them.
Even had he wanted to do so, a frustrating summer of non-activity in the transfer market took away the opportunity. Might prove to have been a blessing, but our suspicion is that Slot was always too clever to fall into the trap of trying to make wholesale changes even if he’d wanted.
What he’s done almost flawlessly is allow Liverpool to evolve but not… revolve. The best bits of Klopp’s heavy metal machine remain, but with some clear Slot touches added into the blend. It’s making for a nice mix at this stage.
The one remaining caveat to Slot’s brilliant start is the fact he could hardly have been handed a kinder start by the fixture computer. For a manager who would come under instant pressure had he failed to match the lofty standards set by his predecessor, it might be a huge factor. Liverpool have yet to face a single member of last season’s top seven, and when they now do face those tests they will do so with Slot having had time to introduce his ideas and with results in the locker to provide some cushion for a setback or two.
It’s not Slot or Liverpool’s fault, of course, that the fixture list leaves this nagging doubt but it will be there until we see this team tested against the best of Our League.
The gut tells you they’ll be fine, that this is a good team making a sustainably good start but that has just not yet had the chance to prove it. That chance comes soon, with Chelsea, Arsenal, Brighton, Bayer Leverkusen and Aston Villa all on the to-do list before the November break.
