The final knockings of the much-loved November international break surely the very ideal time for another update of the all-important Premier League manager rankings. A lot has changed in little more than a month, with Erik Ten Hag’s miserable attempts to cling to the Man United job via a string of turgid goalless draws proving unsuccecssful.
He was replaced in the short term by Ruud van Nistelrooy and long term by Ruben Amorim, which means two new entries in the list. Always exciting. We could go back and check but won’t and are instead just assuming that Amorim’s ranking is the highest on record for any manager yet to even take charge of a Premier League game.
October’s now entirely obsolete and irrelevant rankings are here if you’re interested before getting into this month’s updated yet still also irrelevant numberwang.
22) Erik Ten Hag, Man United August-October (19)
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 last month:
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. He has gone. The mood has already improved and we’re very invested in Ruben Amorim proving to be very good indeed.
21) Oliver Glasner, Crystal Palace (18)
Perhaps the biggest disappointment of the entire season. For all the other managers to impress last season and suffer some kind of reversion towards the mean this season, you could at least predict it. Villa have hardly been terrible, but it was always going to be a challenge to see how they balanced Premier League life with their new-found European commitments. Postecoglou and Spurs had already shown us what they really were long before the end of last season. Arsenal had to suffer for their two agonising title failures.
But Glasner and Palace looked like they had every opportunity to kick on from last season’s fast finish despite the obvious pisser of losing Michael Olise to Bayern Munich. We thought that setback and basic common sense might prevent them continuing to just win every single game like they did at the end of 23/24, but we still thought they’d be quite good.
But they haven’t been quite good. They’ve been mainly really very bad indeed. Sure, they beat Spurs, but that doesn’t count; the only manager to lose at home to Spurs this season has already been sacked and quite right too.
Never in a million years would we have expected to see Glasner prominent in the sack race at this stage of the season. We fully expected Palace’s problem to be trying to keep him out of the clutches of better-resourced clubs casting envious glances at Selhurst Park.
We hate being wrong like this, even though we really should be very used to it by now.
20) Russell Martin, Southampton (17)
One of the most predictable post-promotion struggles from a manager whose principle-sticking runs the risk of looking less like admirable commitment to his belief system and a bit more like not really knowing or accepting any alternative.
On the plus side, the manager who fell into that trap last season is now doing very nicely thank you very much as manager of Bayern Munich, so maybe Martin knows exactly what he’s up to. Clever.
19) Julen Lopetegui, West Ham (16)
Lopetegui’s West Ham appear to have slightly bucked up their ideas after a shabby start. But only slightly. And after spending really quite a lot of money and bringing the former Wolves boss in to replace David Moyes, a man beloved by a Hammer-heavy football press-pack, slight bucking of ideas isn’t going to cut it for long.
Seems unlikely West Ham will do anything as undignified this season as get dragged into an actual relegation scrap – something Moyes did manage, of course – but it’s absolutely not impossible and their next two games take them to Newcastle before hosting Arsenal, so there is obvious potential for things to look pretty bleak again pretty quickly.
Lopetegui is a spiky sort who absolutely isn’t afraid of buggering off if he feels he’s been sold a pup, and this isn’t a club-manager combo that yet convinces us it has any real lasting power.
The Hammers currently find themselves atop the group of clubs immediately below the third-thirteenth morass, and which group they ultimately settle in will perhaps tell us more about where this is all heading. Our gut feeling is that it’s the cruddy one, unleashing a tidal wave of careful-what-you-wish-for opinion pieces.
18) Gary O’Neil, Wolves (20)
On the one hand, things have improved. On the other, they pretty much had to. There wasn’t a lot of room left for things to get worse. But let’s not be facetious. Five points from three games after taking one point from eight is tangible improvement and turning those corners can be so hard.
The other good news for O’Neil and Wolves, of course, is that there are a whole raft of strugglers on broadly similar levels this year, so this mini-recovery has come long before there was any chance of them actually becoming cut adrift at the foot of the table.
And the rest of November and December doesn’t look too unkind for an improving side, either. Everton, West Ham, Ipswich and Leicester are all in there, along with Dr Tottenham and none of the top four.
Still don’t think we’re going to see O’Neil linked with the Man United job again any time soon, mind.
17) Ange Postecoglou, Tottenham (15)
Getting bored of him now, if we’re honest. The thing with Ange’s Spurs is this: they’re just not very good. Not often enough, anyway. They are very occasionally very, very good indeed. But only occasionally. And a lot of the times when they’re not that they’re just too utterly awful for words.
Crystal Palace and Ipswich have won two Premier League matches between them out of 22 this season. Both those wins have come against Spurs, and neither was particularly smashy or grabby. Spurs were utter turd in both those games.
Sure, they’ve won 3-0 at Old Trafford and beaten a normally sensible Aston Villa 4-1 with a thrilling display of attacking verve and vigour. But they’ve lost as many games as Ipswich this season and more than Manchester United.
Their form has been famously mid-table slop ever since that ridiculous – and in hindsight very, very lucky – 10-game run at the start of last season, and the general trend is not up. Spurs have lost 10 and won just seven of their last 18 Premier League games, with just 22 points to show for it.
What Postecoglou’s Spurs are, in essence, is a very expensive 21st-century version of 1990s Tottenham. Which, to be very clear indeed, is not a good thing. They are always watchable if you’re a neutral, but far less so if you’re actually a fan.
They have scored more goals than anyone else in the Premier League this season yet have precious little to show for it. They are Spursier than they have ever been. Dr Tottenham is treating more patients than ever before, and above all they are never more likely to fall over their own feet than immediately after a performance or result that gives you the entirely wrong impression they might have cracked it. Spurs’ last three home games have been wins over Manchester City and Aston Villa and a defeat to Ipswich.
We’d be tempted to say they have completed and perfected Spursiness, but we do not wish to be hostage to that fortune. Save that for a couple of weeks’ time after they’ve won at the Etihad and then lost at home to Fulham.
We will be very surprised if Ange Postecoglou is still Tottenham manager in a year’s time and don’t in truth expect him to survive the season. Once their hopes are dashed in the cup competitions, as history tells us – repeatedly – they soon will be, he is likely to become a dead mate walking.
He will then be replaced by someone far more sensible but also much duller. The Premier League will probably be poorer for his departure, and Spurs no better. So enjoy him while you can, if you still do.
16) Sean Dyche, Everton (12)
We all know what Sean Dyche is about, don’t we? Sean Dyche. Gravel voice. Disc beard. Lard. Sufferball. Dyche. You know what you’re going to get with Dyche.
Which leads us to this slightly curious and counterintuitive revelation. We don’t really know what Everton are about at all. We don’t look at them and see relegation stragglers, but they might very well be that. If you time-travelled back from May and told us Everton end this season with 55 points we wouldn’t question it, but nor would we question it if you came back and said they got 35 points.
That might be because most of our questions were about the whole time-travel thing, and why you’ve chosen to waste this universe-altering discovery and revealing Everton season points tallies. But it would also be because both seem pretty reasonable conclusions for a team that now has 10 points from 11 games without ever really making it clear what they are.
We did enjoy the tantalising early-season prospect of them just being a complete disaster. After four games, all of them lost, they’d conceded 13 goals. Which was very funny but not very Dyche. They’ve conceded only four and lost only once (yet won only twice) in the seven games since that. Which feels much more Dyche.
And maybe the answer lies in there now. We do know what Everton are. They are the team we’ve seen for the last seven games. Not very exciting but hard to beat and reliable accumulators of Premier League points. It’s just still slightly masked by that extreme early-season weirdness.
Which is a shame, because it means they’ll probably end up with about 50 points and not be very interesting. It did look like they might be more interesting. But also much sh*tter.
15) Kieran McKenna, Ipswich (11)
That first win was long overdue, and now the big challenge awaits: winning a game against a club that isn’t utterly ridiculous in every single way. But we’re confident Ipswich can do it. ‘Ten-match winless run’ never did tell the first story of their return to the Premier League given five of those games had ended in draws, another in cruel late-stoppage-time defeat. Throw in the fact they’d also ticked off both Liverpool and Manchester City within the first two games, and it was already a perfectly adequate start for a team absolutely nobody thought would have it easy.
Easy – and fun – to make jokes about the win over Spurs, but the challenge is now genuinely clear: make that first win the launchpad for something meaningful. An early December run of games against Palace, Bournemouth and Wolves does appear to offer something of an opportunity for the highly impressive McKenna and his team.
McKenna has had another notable win since the Spurs game as well, with Ole Gunnar Solskjaer revealing that the then-United coach was the dissenting voice of reason in the room when the club decided to re-sign Cristiano Ronaldo.
14) Pep Guardiola, Man City (9)
Has the fatigue that did for Jurgen Klopp come for Pep Guardiola? Is fatigue even the right word? Ennui, perhaps? He just doesn’t seem as meaningfully engaged as he usually does; even the catastrophic injury to Rodri, the world’s most absurdly vital footballer, has sent Guardiola down a dark road of unhappiness rather than the other path of providing him an energising puzzle to solve.
Seems like he might well sign a one-year contract extension at City. For the first time in, well, ever, we’re not really sure he should. If anything, a one-year contract extension feels like the precise thing he shouldn’t do. It betrays the uncertainty that currently engulfs both him and the club.
Signing a proper new contract would provide certainty. Even announcing a la Klopp that he intends to depart at the end of the season provides its own kind of clarity. “One more year and see how it goes” feels like a fudge, a falling between two stools at a club where suddenly things just appear ever so slightly off-kilter for the first time in five years.
It’ll be fun to look back on this period of genuine doubt in May, when they’ve won the league by 10 points from Ruben Amorim’s resurgent Manchester United, won’t it?
13) Mikel Arteta, Arsenal (3)
Going a bit wrong, isn’t it? There are various ways to look at Arsenal’s undeniable recent stumbles. The glass-half-full approach is that it’s coincided with Man City’s own and thus hasn’t had the terminal impact it might otherwise have done on their hopes of finally landing a Premier League title.
The glass-half-empty approach is that Arsenal have blown the opportunity to create precisely the sort of cushion it has long been established is vital for any team hoping to unseat the four-in-a-row champions. They only get stronger as the season progresses, goes the theory. And it’s not so much theory as the objective proven reality of several seasons.
The concern is that Arteta has forgotten what took Arsenal so very far as he seeks to make that next, final and most difficult step. And in doing so has fallen further away from achieving that goal. We also still keep coming back to the more prosaic theory that going toe-to-toe with Manchester City is literally as well as figuratively maddening. Jurgen Klopp’s peak Liverpool side could not do it for three seasons in a row. And this is Arsenal’s third season. Under a less experienced manager; if there was one thing Klopp knew all about before coming to Liverpool it was taking on a relentlessly successful and overwhelmingly resourced domestic opponent.
12) Andoni Iraola, Bournemouth (14)
Odd team, Bournemouth. Fun, but odd. Iraola often appears to be right on the cusp of doing something truly remarkable with them and then… doesn’t quite do it. Their last give games have been bookended by defeats to Leicester and Brentford; in between, seven points from three games against Arsenal, Aston Villa and Man City.
This is, really, exactly the kind of nonsense we like to see from mid-table clubs and aren’t about to get too critical here at all. But we do get the distinct sense that when Bournemouth took the bold and admirable plunge to swap O’Neil for Iraola they might just have had ideas slightly higher than entertaining mid-table team.
It’s fine for now and absolutely fine for us, but at some stage we do wonder whether Iraola will need to find some consistency. But that definitely feels like nit-picking. Overall, it’s very good Barclays.
11) Thomas Frank, Brentford (13)
Frank, perhaps the Premier League’s most reliably sensible manager, has somehow come to be in charge of its most eccentrically ridiculous team.
Brentford have the best home form in the land, with 16 points from a possible 18. Nobody can match them. They’ve scored at least two more home goals than any other team. It’s all just a brilliant effort.
But there are two weirdnesses. They have also conceded more home goals than anyone bar Wolves. They’ve conceded eight goals in their last three home games, which is clearly a very bad thing to be doing, yet have gone and won all three of those games, which is clearly very good.
The second weirdness is that their away form now reads played five lost five. The leading scorers at home are second bottom by that metric away from home. And those 16 home points and zero away points have come from an identical split of goals conceded – 11 at home, 11 away.
All very silly, and not remotely the sort of thing we’ve come to expect from a manager who doesn’t appear to have any truck with nonsense. So what’s going on? We don’t know, and we truly hope Frank and Brentford don’t work it out for the rest of the season either.
10) Steve Cooper, Leicester (10)
There’s only one thing worse than being talked about, and that’s not being talked about.
So said Oscar Wilde, but what that massive self-satisfied poser didn’t think about when constructing his bon mot – Christ, can you imagine what an insufferable tweeter he’d have been had he lived in the social media age? We are going off topic a bit yes – is managing a team in the lower reaches of the Premier League.
If nobody is talking about you all that much then you are probably doing a very respectably decent job in very trying circumstances while others below you make a more conspicuous and attention-grabbing bollocks of things.
Nobody is currently talking about Steve Cooper.
9) Ruben Amorim, Man United November onwards (NE)
Being appointed Manchester United manager and then almost immediately beating Manchester City 4-1 is such a flex it almost doesn’t matter that Manchester United wasn’t actually the team he led to that wildly impressive victory. The fact he stayed with Sporting until the international break has worked out absolutely perfectly for everyone, and that gets Amorim what is surely the highest-ever ranking for a manager who hasn’t even taken charge of a single game.
He’s just done everything right so far, hasn’t he? He’s respected the club he’s leaving, coped admirably already with the entitled dickery of the mortifying UK media and just generally conducted himself like an impressively decent human being.
Whether that and the fact he’s very obviously a brilliant young coach is enough to make something coherent out of the absolute mess that is Manchester United, only time will tell. But he does feel like perhaps the most compelling person yet to have a stab at dragging United out of the post-Fergie wilderness.
We’re quite big fans, if you hadn’t guessed.
READ: Five things we definitely learned from Ruben Amorim’s first Manchester United training session
8) Eddie Howe, Newcastle (8)
We keep desperately trying to will ‘Howe sack’ into existence as an ongoing Premier League storyline, but every time we do he turns round and wins a couple of big games like a great big prick.
Just as we could see the light of another Howe crisis, there he goes inflicting only second defeats of the season on both Arsenal and Forest back-to-back.
It’s terrible behaviour, it really is. We wait. We will go again. We’re still not remotely convinced he’s the man to lead Newcastle to the promised land. We’re still even more certain that he listens to the High Performance Podcast with a quasi-religious fanatical devotion. We still don’t trust him.
7) Ruud van Nistelrooy, Man United October-November (NE)
Yeah, that’s gone 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 Ten Hag 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.
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 has been 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 has entirely worn off.
So well done everyone. All eyes now on Ruud’s next step.
6) Unai Emery, Aston Villa (2)
Emery continues to garner righteous praise from all quarters for the extraordinary work he has done at Aston Villa, but there is one niggling inconvenient truth: they’ve lost their last four games in a row.
That’s sub-optimal, you have to say. There are, of course, levels to this. Defeat in the Carabao, for instance, is frustrating because it was a viable route to tangible success for this upwardly-mobile team, but it’s not the end of the world. A combination of Villa’s outrageous start and the format itself means a Champions League defeat at Club Brugge is in and of itself of absolutely no consequence at all. And even Premier League defeats away at Tottenham and Liverpool can’t truly be said to be crisis-sparking.
The manner of defeat at Spurs in particular was a worry, though, with Villa carved apart all too easily by a team that would spend the following weekend shambling around pitifully against Ipswich. But that all feels like it says more about Ange and Spurs than Unai and Villa.
It’s not great going into the international break on a losing run, but maybe a chance to regroup was what Villa needed.
Emery is an unflappable sort, but even he would probably acknowledge that three points against Palace when the Barclays returns is pretty much a must with Juventus in the Champions League and Chelsea next in the league. The daftness of others and Villa’s own previous reputation for sensibleness has quite rightly meant little heat coming their way for that four-game losing run, but that can only remain the case for so long before the beam of unwanted attention turns to a manager who wouldn’t really deserve it.
But when has that ever stopped it happening before? There’s a reason ‘victim of his own success’ has a place in the football lexicon.
5) Marco Silva, Fulham (6)
Has been quietly impressive at Fulham for a good long while now. Yo-yo clubs almost always end up becoming mid-table clubs; but nearly always in the lower division. Silva has done something few managers have previously done in stopping the yo-yo at the top rather than bottom of its spin.
Now, inevitably, finds himself linked with the likes of Spurs because doing an impressive job as a Premier League manager is always both blessing and curse. At some point people will expect you to leave the sensible club where things are going well and everyone leaves you alone to try your luck at one of the batsh*t ones where nonsense is king.
We can absolutely see it as well. Eighteen miserable months that leaves everyone worse off than they were before. A horrible slow-motion tale of hubris. But let’s try not to get bogged down and upset by things that – and we cannot stress this enough – haven’t actually happened. Yet.
Silva is right now doing a wonderfully impressive job and does now without question know quite a bit about Our League.
4) Fabian Hurzeler, Brighton (5)
It really does appear that Brighton have done it again, doesn’t it? Somehow, they’ve upgraded again. How do they keep doing this?
The congested nature of the teams currently between third and 13th in the table does mean care has to be taken in being too excitable or critical of a team’s league position, but Brighton’s sixth place with just two defeats has felt like one of the more sustainable of this season’s assorted encouraging starts dotted around the Premier League.
There’s an effervescence to Brighton’s football that makes it even more captivating than the quietly impressive Potterball and the more eye-catching football of De Zerbi. They really might be on to something, even if the manager does lose points for being one of those seemingly intelligent sorts who have been taken in by Elon Musk’s egregious bullsh*t.
3) Enzo Maresca, Chelsea (4)
To his enormous credit, Maresca has been only a bit-part in this season of the great Barclays soap opera. Chelsea as a football club is a swirling ball of nonsense, but Maresca has brought a calmness and serenity to a club that doesn’t really do those things.
The absurdly showy collection of gaudy players accrued over the last few years has suddenly been made to resemble something close to a coherent squad, an achievement somewhere close to witchcraft for a manager with such minimal experience of dealing with such matters. It is increasingly absurd to remember that the 11 Premier League games into which he’s led Chelsea are the only top-flight matches Maresca has ever managed.
2) Nuno Espirito Santo, Nottingham Forest (7)
For a clear summary of how Forest’s season has gone so far, the only real criticism is that they lost the run of themselves for 45 minutes against Newcastle and spaffed away the chance to go third in the table with almost a third of the season played.
If that’s failure…
Impossible not to be pleased for Nuno, who really did look like he might have been Spursed into managerial oblivion via the lucrative but soul-destroying Saudi retirement league.
That would have been a terrible waste of a manager who had shown more than enough at Wolves to suggest he could come again at the right club at the right time. Spurs, very obviously, provided neither of those things.
Remarkably, Forest – a club just as batsh*t in its own way – and taking over from the beloved Steve Cooper in a points-deduction-addled relegation fight might have turned out to be both the right club and the right time. Which is absolutely absurd, really.
1) Arne Slot, Liverpool (1)
We’ll refer back to a couple of bits from October’s rankings, if you’ll indulge.
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.
This, in our view, remains the most straightforward explanation for what Slot has got so right at Liverpool. The second thing from a month ago was this:
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.
That caveat no longer remains. There hasn’t been one setback, never mind two. Games against Chelsea, Arsenal, Brighton and Aston Villa have yielded 10 points to go with Carabao progress and flawless Champions League behaviour.
We are now well beyond the realm of good start. A season that began with a two-horse Premier League title race that didn’t feature Liverpool now has them favourites to win the whole shebang, with the game against Man City at Anfield in a couple of weeks’ time already looking very hefty.
One curiosity we’ve noticed is that Liverpool fans are, to make a sweeping generalisation, keeping pretty level-headed about it all. They clearly like and admire Slot – and why not – but there is, inevitably, not yet the deep and lasting affection in which Jurgen Klopp was held.
Part of the lack of giddiness is definitely expectation management; nobody wants to leave themselves open to accusations of bottling, after all. But there’s definitely something else at play here; it’s not that they don’t want to win the title, obviously, it’s just that there’s a nagging sense that Slot matching Klopp’s Premier League title haul in his very first season will be used to diminish the German’s accomplishments.
It’s a little thing, and perhaps the ultimate first-world problem. But football fandom has never been a rational beast, has it?
