Erik Ten Hag has become the first managerial casualty of the Premier League season, something which absolutely everyone not employed by Manchester United could see coming from the moment he escaped being the last casualty of the previous season.
But the Sack Race never stops, it just shifts targets. And now the glare lands on the relegation-haunted stylings of the managers at Southampton and Wolves, as well as the feast-or-famine antics of West Ham. Here’s the latest order of things according to Oddschecker.
1) Julen Lopetegui
Stormed out of Wolves days before the season began a year ago and West Ham is a club that could test the patience of a saint. Really does have some of the very best attacking players outside the Big Six to work with, which hopefully reduces the potential for huffing off at the first sign of trouble.
Which is just as well, because the first sign of trouble duly arrived. It’s all a bit feast-or-famine for the Hammers at the moment, with their last four Premier League results including a 4-1 thrashing of Ipswich and a very, very funny Ten Hag-dooming win over Manchester United but also absolute paddlings from Tottenham and Surprise Package Nottingham Forest. It’s the sort of maddening run that could easily fray a character like Lopetegui.
The fact a sacking or huffing are equally acceptable in this market does make this feel like it could be a goer, given Lopetegui’s reputation. David Moyes back by Christmas? A third stint for the great man would be some magnificently mid-table Serie A behaviour from the Hammers and one we would not currently entirely rule out.
2) Russell Martin
We feared it might all go a bit Vincent Kompany for Russell Martin, and four defeats from the first four was definitely a bit Burnley, as was conceding a late equaliser against Ipswich and indeed going down pretty convincingly at Bournemouth and then losing from 2-0 at home to Leicester of all teams. But he’s got a win under his belt now at least, and Burnley stuck with Kompany, didn’t they? Right up until he buggered off.
Russell Martin is the next manager of Bayern Munich, is what we’re saying here.
3) Gary O’Neil
Eight points from a possible 60 for the Wolves manager since being (really quite ludicrously, to be fair) linked with the Man United job. A sign of just how far the tentacles of doom can stretch from that accursed football club. After signing that shiny new four-year contract in the summer O’Neil needs a win very fast with Wolves sat bottom of the table.
Still, the performance against Man City was enormously encouraging, and if you’re of a glass-half-full disposition they’re on a two-match unbeaten run since that late sickener against the champions.
4) Oliver Glasner
God bless Dr Tottenham.
5) Kieran McKenna
Ipswich spent a good chunk of the start of the summer fending off interest in their manager and a difficult start to the season on their long-awaited return to the Premier League is surely baked in. Glib and simplistic it may be, but the comparisons between Luton and Ipswich and thus Rob Edwards and McKenna are easily made. And Luton never once looked like getting rid of Edwards last season.
Ipswich may still await their first win but there’s been nothing about them to suggest they’re going to spend the season being horribly outclassed every week either. Probably helps them that others down at the bottom of the table are finding wins equally hard to come by and with less by way of mitigation.
6) Steve Cooper
He has what is technically known as a team that is ‘sh*t’ and is clearly hoping to survive by trying to stay in games for as long as possible and see what can be pilfered. Not every team they play is going to be as naively stupid as Spurs, sure, but a lot of them are still quite stupid and most importantly it does look very much like Leicester’s best/least bad route.
Cooper might not keep them up, but he is new in the job and it’s also hard to see how anyone else they might get would improve their chances. So it probably does have to get very bad indeed before he’s in serious trouble.
A point at Arsenal would have been both incredible and incredibly surprising but it was not meant to be. The Gunners’ pressure finally took its toll in stoppage time to earn a deserved win. The win at Southampton from 2-0 down could be huge and let’s be entirely real here: no manager should be under any pressure whatsoever for having this Leicester squad in 15th place and five points clear of the bottom three.
7) Marco Silva
Fulham have spent the last couple of seasons in near invisibility in mid-table, which is very much a good thing. Rode out the loss of Alexander Mitrovic really well last season and once again be set for a year of bobbing about harmlessly enough in mid-table.
But it’s getting to a tricky point for Silva, in a way. He’s doing a perfectly adequate job, but almost if anything too adequate for me, Clive. He’s in danger of finding that unwanted zone where he’s invisible to bigger clubs who might be on the lookout for a new manager while by far the most likely way he does get noticed is if things start going very badly rather than very well. The good news is that things are currently going very well, with Silva himself duly going all but entirely unnoticed.
8) Ange Postecoglou
Just an endlessly fascinating manager of a wild football team. There is a growing sense that while it’s all quite fun he might actually be building – at, it should be noted, huge expense – the most ‘Lads, it’s Tottenham’ Tottenham team yet.
Postecoglou’s Spurs have won eight of their last 10 since being outwitted by Arsenal in the NLD, and yet the two defeats are unbelievably stupid: from 2-0 up at Brighton, and at a Palace team that hadn’t won a league game in their first eight attempts.
But you can’t ignore those eight wins, especially as so many of them have been hugely impressive. There’s definitely something about the contrasting nature of Spurs’ wins and losses. They’ve won five Premier League games and lost four, and yet they have a goal difference of +11, which is better than everyone other than table-topping Liverpool. They’ve scored more league goals than anyone, and boast a defence officially as good as City’s and Arsenal’s and yet it amounts to nothing. Their defeats are all by the odd goal, while only one of their wins has been by less than three goals and that was by two.
The pattern is clear: when they are good, Postecolgou’s Spurs blow teams away. Even objectively excellent teams like Aston Villa. But when they are bad they get nothing.
Really does feel like if Spurs are happy to go back to the good old pre-Big Six days of being an entertaining but ultimately irrelevant team who’ll have some good days and some terrible days while finishing somewhere between fifth and 10th, then Big Ange is absolutely fine. But increasingly hard to see how playing what at times amounts to wilfully stupid football stupidly ever amounts to more than that.
9=) Sean Dyche
Encouraging signs abound now for Everton after that harrowing start. Dyche, for his part, appears so resolutely determined to stay and fight back whatever tides of despair are currently crashing into Goodison Park’s walls that if you didn’t know better you’d think he was positively revelling in all the adversity.
Go ahead, take more points off him. It only makes him win 1-0 more.
We couldn’t see Dyche as the first manager to leave at all when he first achieved favouritism here, but we also couldn’t see them losing 3-2 when cruising along at 2-0 up with five minutes to go against Bournemouth. And enjoying the experience so much that they would then immediately blew another two-goal lead against Villa. Dropping another couple of points from a winning position in a six-pointer against Leicester meant that even getting off the mark feels like a setback.
Everton flipped the script against Crystal Palace, going 1-0 down and winning. A point against Newcastle is solid enough, especially with Anthony Gordon failing from the penalty spot, while victory at Ipswich was their first away from home since December or some such equally ludicrous thing. Snatched a late point against Fulham and Everton remain outside the immediate danger zone even after a first defeat in six against previously winless Southampton. It’s certainly something after the way those first four games went. Which was very badly indeed.
9=) Eddie Howe
Could absolutely go tits skyward at any moment and there are clearly key figures at Newcastle not quite seeing eye to eye, and it would be fair to say Newcastle’s performances in their first four games weren’t really performances you’d expect to yield a hugely impressive 10 points. That run of fortune came to an end at Fulham in quite emphatic style but the performance against Man City was their best of the season. Should really have beaten Everton and probably Brighton but a team that appeared to be reverting to the mean – and not in a good way – then turned Arsenal over good and proper.
Howe had looked a likely contender for next manager in crisis, but that Arsenal win certainly scuppers all that chat for now. We may have to accept, for a short while, that no big club currently has a manager under the cosh. Which is very annoying and entirely unacceptable.
9) Thomas Frank
Sits quietly in the top 10 contenders for quite a lot of other jobs and but the resolution to the United manager situation means Brentford fans can all rest a touch easier for a while.
Brentford did flirt with serious trouble for uncomfortably long periods last season, but there was never any really serious chat about binning the manager who has done so very much for them and it would need to be going really, really badly for that to change this time around, you’d think. Have started this season perfectly well, with the apparent disparity between home form (excellent) and away form (execrable) still in ‘red herring’ territory given the surely related disparity of teams involved. Their excellent home results have come against Palace, Southampton, West Ham, Wolves and Ipswich; the superficially worrying away results at Liverpool, Man City, Tottenham and Man United.
12) Enzo Maresca
Results are awkwardly not reallymatching the narrative around Chelsea, who avoided complete catastrophe against City on the opening day and have been tidy enough on the pitch since despite the neverending swirl of chaos off it. Big away wins at Wolves, West Ham, and the home dismantling of Brighton have hinted at rich potential for Maresca’s side among all the nonsense, while even in defeat at Liverpool there were encouraging signs to be seen and more still in a Cole Palmer-inspired win over Newcastle.
13=) Unai Emery
Obviously not going anywhere, despite the minor sting of not managing to land another blow on his former club in between tidy away wins to indicate Villa also have no plans on disappearing. Going 2-0 down to Everton before beating them 3-2 was just cruel, and points to a sinister and unpleasant side to the man we didn’t expect. Not cool. Has developed a curious habit of conceding four second-half goals in games against Tottenham, which to be honest is something we’d look to stop doing if we were him.
13=) Andoni Iraola
What’s he up to here, then? Bournemouth had eight points from their first seven games, which isn’t exactly a crisis but wasn’t a brilliant start either. Since that point, his side have taken seven points from games against Arsenal, Villa and Man City. It’s an extreme example, but does all tie in with the overriding feeling from last season that Iraola isn’t far away from doing something quite special if he can it all to come together at Bournemouth over a sustained period of time.
13=) Nuno Espirito Santo
Forest are quite mad so rule nothing out but they are now third in the league, halfway to a survival-securing points haul and have lost the same number of games as Liverpool and City and fewer than literally everyone else. It would be quite something for Nuno to be next manager out from that position, wouldn’t it? At any other club it would be inconceivable.
16=) Pep Guardiola
It would be no great surprise if this is his last season at Manchester City, but it would be a huge one if he leaves for any reason before its conclusion.
16=) Fabian Hurzeler
Another intriguing new face in Our League, tasked with getting Brighton back to where they were a year ago before things just took a turn for the dreary in Roberto De Zerbi’s first and final full season in charge.
They almost completely forgot how to win games in the second half of the season, which isn’t ideal, but the new manager made a quite literally perfect start in ironing out that particular wrinkle and a point at the Emirates is almost never a bad way to drop your first points of the season. Subsequent draws with Ipswich and Forest slightly more niggling, but no real drama. And getting battered by Chelsea is not as humiliating as we thought it would have been two months ago.
Hurzeler has now also made a vital step that all managers who hope to make their way in the Barclays must: inflict hilarious embarrassment on Tottenham.
18=) Arne Slot
Liverpool’s home defeat to Forest stands as comfortably the most jarringly unexpected of the season to date, bringing to a shuddering halt a perfect start to the season that had got a lot of people quite understandably quite excited. The Reds have bounced back well, beating Bournemouth and Wolves and most significantly Chelsea in their first major test of the season before taking a 2-2 draw from an entertaining trip to the Emirates. A come-from-behind win over Brighton on a weekend when Arsenal, City and Villa all lost while Chelsea also dropped points is, you would have to say, handy.
18=) Mikel Arteta
Even we are not about to start ‘Arteta sack?’ talk despite our obvious desperation to place some poor sod of a manager or other under the microscope, but this is an undeniably tricky period for a manager who has endured precious few of those in the last two seasons.
We have been keen to note that not even Klopp’s peak Liverpool could cope with the harsh demands of taking City on for three years in a row, and it’s starting to look like there might be something in that. That trip to Chelsea before the international break looks pretty massive, suddenly.
