The Sack Race has become pure chaos, which we guess is to be expected when the Premier League table itself is just absolute nonsense wherever you care to look.
But we do once again find ourselves with a pretty clear favourite to become the fifth manager out on his ear this season, with Thomas Frank in big, big trouble after Tottenham’s latest abysmal showing in a 3-0 defeat at Nottingham Forest.
Arne Slot has had a couple of wins to get him out of immediate Mo Salah-instigated danger, while Scott Parker and Daniel Farke still remain in both relegation and sack race trouble.
Meanwhile, here are possible replacement managers currently between jobs.
20) Mikel Arteta (Arsenal)
An earlier version of this oft-updated piece speculated on what might happen to Mikel Arteta should Arsenal suffer from their Nightmare Start. What if they lost a few early games? What then? We concluded this:
It’s far likelier that Arsenal emerge blinking into the autumn sunshine broadly unscathed from their nightmare horrors. No denying that this season does represent one in which Arteta might completely lose the plot and go entirely off the rails. Or the one where he wins the league by 10 points. Feels like we’re odds-on to get one or the other.
Arsenal emerged duly unscathed, and have already cashed in on the shift to easier fixtures of their own alongside much tougher ones for Liverpool to take top spot in the Premier League.
Only question that remains, therefore, is what Arsenal do from here. We are absolutely certain that it either involves p*ssing the league by 10 points or a complete and total meltdown. Nothing in between is acceptable or even conceivable. Both options now appear gloriously possible.
READ: Who will be the next manager of Arsenal if Mikel Arteta is sacked?
19) Regis Le Bris (Sunderland)
Doing so well that even suffering the ultimate embarrassment of defeat at Old Trafford hasn’t dampened spirits for the most impressive promoted club in quite some time.
Six wins in the bag already and comfortably more points than Southampton managed in the entirety of 24/25. Widespread expectation that tougher games would bring Sunderland back down with a bump have thus far proved wide of the mark; there won’t be many teams unhappy at taking four points from two games against Chelsea and Arsenal this season. The comeback victory over Bournemouth was evidence, if indeed it was still required, that Sunderland are proper.
Victory over Newcastle on derby day has us firmly into ‘manager of the year’ territory for one of the big pre-season Sack Race favourites.
17=) Unai Emery (Aston Villa)
Extraordinary season for Emery already. Began the campaign right at the outside of this market with your Artetas and – unlikely as it now sounds – Slots. Then jumped right up to third favourite when Villa’s rankling disappointment at how last season ended leaked into a six-match winless start to this campaign.
But then along came four Premier League wins in a row to thoroughly lift the mood at a club where a few short weeks earlier it really did feel like they’d come to the end of something special without ever getting the definitive moment of success it deserved.
That run is now 10 wins in 11 Premier League games and has lifted Villa right through the mid-table slop, then into the top four, and now genuine title contention. Four wins in five games have a distinctly winnable Europa League campaign bubbling along nicely, too. An astonishing shift from what felt like an inexorable downward spiral not that long ago.
We could all learn something from that, but we won’t.
17=) Pep Guardiola (Man City)
A sacking remains out of the question despite last season’s (relative) struggles. There hasn’t been a Premier League manager since Fergie in his pomp with more credit in the bank than Pep.
But is there still a distinct chance Guardiola decides he’s had enough and simply walks away? We reckon there is, and it’s always worth remembering that we’re talking Next Premier League Manager To Leave here, and that the traditional ‘Sack Race’ shorthand is a bit misleading.
Still, though. Almost no chance at this point that any of that could happen swiftly enough for nobody else to have been canned first. Especially as they now somehow find themselves within two points of Arsenal despite not really playing convincingly well for quite some time now.
13=) Oliver Glasner (Crystal Palace)
Won’t be sacked, obviously, because Palace are absolutely punching with an elite-level manager who is quietly delivering astonishing results in trying circumstances.
But with reports he was willing and ready to walk out if Marc Guehi was sold without a replacement point to new strains on a relationship that is bound to be tested in the weeks and months ahead.
Nailed it in the Community Shield, but as ever for clubs on Palace’s level there’s a positive-and-negative scale to be balanced by your manager catching the eye so conspicuously. Glasner absolutely could be poached with bigger beasts surely paying attention to the work he’s done at Selhurst Park.
And if that poaching comes from outside the Premier League, then it comes with the possibility of making Glasner the next Premier League managerial casualty. But still very unlikely.
We’d imagine the significant lowering of the threat level for a Ruben Amorim Sack at United eased some nerves at Selhurst Park, but the significant raising of the threat level for an Arne Slot Sack at Liverpool or even Thomas Frank Sack at Spurs has them looking a bit nervous once more. For more than one reason, it’s vital Palace don’t lose Glasner to someone as ropey as Spurs.
13=) Keith Andrews (Brentford)
The continuity candidate in the summer, and looked to have received the ultimate hospital pass. How much continuity could there be at Brentford given they’d sold Bryan Mbeumo, Yoane Wissa and Christian Norgaard, while Thomas Frank took most of the remaining coaching staff with him to Tottenham? It was a very Brentford move to promote from within and we’ll hold our hands up and admit we thought it would go far, far worse than it has.
With Newcastle added to Liverpool and Manchester United on the list of Gtech victims this season, it’s an undeniably impressive start in trying circumstances.
13=) Fabian Hurzeler (Brighton)
Fine end to 24/25 put a different complexion on Brighton’s season than at one time appeared likely. Ending up a clear best of the rest outside the quickly established top seven represented at least a passing grade and they’d have to make a truly awful start to the season to get in any kind of managerial-change bother.
The win over Newcastle to go with victory at Chelsea to go with a win over City reaffirms Brighton’s big-boy-bothering calibre, but does also make some of their other results – draws with Fulham and Wolves and West Ham, for instance – a bit annoying.
13=) David Moyes (Everton)
Sounds preposterous, but there really is a non-zero chance Moyes gets punished for easing Everton’s immediate relegation fears and they seek some more enterprising football from a squad that is, in fairness, capable of that as climbing into the top six demonstrates. Does feel like a very familiar Everton story, though, and one that ends with them 16th, chastened, and bringing in another firefighter.
We are treating the Brendan Rodgers links with mountains of salt.
12) Sean Dyche (Nottingham Forest)
Has done more than could ever have been expected given the chaos he walked into. That epic pants-pulling at Anfield surely leaves Dyche as safe as any manager ever can be in Mr Marinakis’ lair. Were oddly rubbish against Brighton and easily beaten by Everton, though, but spangling Tottenham will have gone down enormously well with his boss for sure.
11) Andoni Iraola (Bournemouth)
Still among the least sackable managers in the top flight despite Bournemouth now being in the depths of one of the familiar lows that have always existed alongside the highs under Iraola.
A streaky manager of a streaky team, but he must still be in credit overall given the prognostications of doom when he had to sell pretty much his entire defence in the summer. It’s hurting him and Bournemouth now but they still – for now – remain outside the real relegation scrap and that’s impressive enough on the back of such a challenging summer.
But could really, really do with starting another of the ‘Champions League form’ runs quite soon.
10) Nuno Espirito Santo (West Ham)
Seven points from three games against Newcastle, Burnley and Bournemouth left things looking far comfier than might have been expected for a manager who, when the Magpies took an early lead at the London Stadium, looked to be heading for a second sack of the season long before the Christmas decorations went up.
But quite why Nuno had to be so very Nuno in the way he, on the back of 3-1 and 3-2 wins and a 2-2 draw, decided to approach a home game against a Liverpool team that had just suffered three consecutive three-goal defeats, is puzzling, irritating and, above all, a reminder that he is here as a firefighter and that the marriage to a fanbase with limited patience for drab and functional let’s-not-get-relegated football is merely one of convenience.
Especially as we still await truly compelling evidence that this football won’t, in fact, get them relegated. They are still in the bottom three and the increasing signs of life at Nottingham Forest and Leeds have to be a concern.
Are there three worse teams than West Ham in the Premier League this season? It’s an extremely fair question.
9) Enzo Maresca (Chelsea)
One of the key early-season imponderables for 25/26 was just how big and what kind of impact the Club World Cup might have on the way Chelsea and Man City start the season. Would they hit the ground running, or would they be a bit tired and out of sorts? For both, it’s been a little from column A, a little from column B.
Maresca definitely still has some hearts and minds to win at Chelsea despite the fine finish to the season that saw them tick off Champions League qualification while completing their collection of UEFA pots and pans and then winning the actual Club World Cup.
A home draw with Crystal Palace wasn’t ideal, but the paddling dished out to West Ham has what really should at least be some kind of halfway credible title bid up and running at least. And we strongly suspect Fulham won’t be the last team left scratching their head after losing to Maresca.
There was some talk of ‘Maresca out’ after a draw with Brentford but that was surely only a minority view. After losing to Manchester United in shambolic fashion, there were more on the bandwagon.
That win over Liverpool was big, though, and a particularly good one for Maresca himself. The second half thumping of Forest was handy, too, albeit inevitably saying far more of their opponents than it did of Chelsea. Home defeat to Sunderland saw awkward questions resurfacing, but three wins from three before going toe-to-toe against champions elect Arsenal despite playing most of the game down to 10 men appeared to have rubber-stamped Chelsea’s bona fides.
And then they lost to Leeds United. Which was largely Maresca’s fault. And then continued their self-fulfilling 2024-redux tumble out of the title race with a draw against Bournemouth. Sigh.
Then even a welcome victory has put Maresca under even more pressure after he decided to be very, very weird about everything immediately afterwards.
8) Eddie Howe (Newcastle)
A 4-1 thumping of Everton followed a simply huge and wildly unexpected win over Manchester City. Had Newcastle lost that, as all pre-interlull indications suggested they would, then the spotlight would have been harsh indeed on Howe and his team. They would at that point find themselves slap bang in the muck of a relegation scrap; instead they have lifted themselves back into the mid-table morass where – luckily for them – absolutely nobody is any good at all and the chance of re-establishing themselves in there and even emerging out the top is very real indeed.
There are multiple reasons for Newcastle making such a sticky start to the season and very few of them are directly the fault of a man who did deliver the club’s first trophy in bloody ages last season. That one seismic result against City had vast implications for the title race but was so big for Newcastle and their manager themselves.
But derby defeat at Sunderland will inevitably sting, and the reality is that Howe and Newcastle remain for now behind Tottenham in the league, and that is not the place any self-respecting club should currently find themselves, all things considered.
7) Marco Silva (Fulham)
Backed in to a hot favourite as the whispers began before the international break. But just when we thought it might be time to accept something is fundamentally broken here as a relegation fight bubbled up, an impressive win over Sunderland and a restorative visit to Dr Tottenham have sorted things out.
Victory at Burnley has made it three wins from four, lifted Fulham away from the relegation battle and towards the mid-table strivers, and significantly lessened the real risk that he or Fulham might do something they live to regret.
6) Ruben Amorim (Manchester United)
Time to stop trying to work out if Man United are good or rubbish. They’re just meh. Arguably that’s even worse, really, when This Is Manchester United Football Club We’re Talking About. But trying to look for clues in the tea-leaves of their results is completely futile when they do things like win three games in a row and then come unstuck at Nottingham Forest or fail even to win at Tottenham like literally everyone else even vaguely competent is able to do at the moment.
Losing at home to 10-man Everton and then winning from a goal down at Crystal Palace just highlights the pointlessness of trying to read anything into what Manchester United are doing. It’s just a bunch of stuff that happens.
What does that mean for Ruben Amorim? That he’s probably fine. They’re slightly less bad than they once were, and he wasn’t sacked then. So probably won’t be now.
4=) Arne Slot (Liverpool)
Impossible to avoid the conclusion that Slot’s reaction to Liverpool’s mini-crisis becoming actual-crisis was poor. He went Full Klopp with his salty loser behaviour when Manchester United committed the crime of altering their tactics to give themselves the best chance of success against Liverpool, and the headloss continued after another chaotic and unstructured performance led to a 3-2 defeat at Brentford.
Having ticked ‘opposition doing tactics wrong’ off his rattled manager bingo card, he can now add ‘losing his mind over entirely uncontroversial refereeing decisions’ with his response to both the Cody Gakpo non-penalty and Virgil van Dijk penalty at the Gtech.
It has to be a worry for Liverpool that Slot has for the first time in his Anfield career found himself under any kind of pressure after a chastening run of defeats, and has suffered severe and instant headloss as a result.
Funny to think of a manager who’s just beaten Real Madrid in the Champions League being under threat, but defeat at the Etihad was miserable before Nottingham Forest came along and achieved the amusing feat of being the first team to shut Liverpool out in the Premier League at Anfield since Nottingham Forest.
And then there was a new nadir against PSV. That really was very, very bad. West Ham were wonderfully welcoming hosts on Sunday, but to such an inexplicable extent that it’s hard to know just how much to read into Liverpool’s 2-0 win at the London Stadium against opponents who were barely there. Predictably, they were poor in a 1-1 against proper team Sunderland and showed no backbone in the collapse at Leeds United, which was then followed by a distinctly unwelcome MO SALAH BOMBSHELL that does leave things looking distinctly like either he or the manager will have to go.
A pair of subsequent wins cool the immediate temperatures but it does all feel extremely precarious.
4=) Scott Parker (Burnley)
Decision time for Burnley. There are two options that prompt inevitable questions.
Option one: Burnley decide to really try and beat relegation, and must decide whether they think Parker is the best man for that job.
Option two: Burnley accept their overwhelmingly likely fate, and must decide whether Parker the best man to get them back up again.
Parker’s job prospects likely rest on the decision. Because if it is indeed option two, he has a compelling case. Option one? He’s f*cked.
3) Rob Edwards (Wolves)
So doomed now they might as well stick with Edwards for a bit. He’s only just got here. And they really did play well at Arsenal, despite the late heartbreak.
2) Daniel Farke (Leeds)
The hard-nosed yet valid argument persists that Leeds could and perhaps should have taken drastic action in the summer even after their very good week. It would have made Spurs’ decision to sack Europa League-winning Ange Postecoglou look positively kind, Leeds – and Burnley for that matter – might now be better off had they thanked the managers who secured 100 Championship points and got them back into the big time and then sent them on their way.
Farke had a dreadful Premier League record of only six wins and 26 points from his 49 games in charge of Norwich, a team he twice led to promotion from the Championship with 94 and 97 points.
As well as fighting his own record in this competition, Farke faced the added burden of expectation levels very different to those at just about any other club that could possibly find itself promoted into the Premier League in this current era where that represents the most bittersweet of successes.
Defeat at Burnley was honking, but bouncing back to win another six-pointer against West Ham eased the stress significantly before a paddling at Brighton and events elsewhere – including West Ham themselves – left Farke desperately short of immediate cover before a desperately poor show in a six-pointer at Nottingham Forest.
Another painful defeat having gone in front, against Villa this time, saw Leeds drop into the bottom three ahead of a brutal run of games, but that run has gone surprisingly well. The narrow loss to Man City preceded a rare home win against Chelsea and comeback draw against Liverpool.
The question now is whether Leeds and Farke have really hit on something sustainable, or this is merely delaying the inevitable. We don’t know, but we’d certainly contend he’s unlucky to be second favourite at this time on current form.
1) Thomas Frank (Tottenham)
There have been good days and bad, and our whole pondering of Frank’s situation at Spurs has been about determining which of the two would eventually win out. The harrowing NLD-PSG-Fulham week was the first time he really did look f*cked.
Spurs were timid and abysmal in the North London Derby, the second big London derby in a row which Frank had approached more in the manner of a League One manager attempting to avoid a paddling in the FA Cup third round than a legitimate rival facing a familiar foe.
There was some encouragement in a 5-3 Champions League defeat at PSG, but even the very fact it’s possible to write the words ‘some encouragement in a 5-3 Champions League defeat’ is in its own way damning.
But at least those two defeats came against what genuinely might be the two best teams in Europe at this time. With all due respect to Fulham and the sterling work of Marco Silva in recent years, they are not one of the two best teams in Europe at this time, and they were still much better than Spurs who torpedoed themselves inside the opening seven minutes to extend their extraordinarily – and in fairness largely pre-Frank – awful home record in the Premier League to three wins in 21 games since an increasingly odd-looking 4-1 win over Aston Villa in November last year.
Frank’s response to the booing of Guglielmo Vicario after his hideous blunder was firmly in the ‘That’s true, but he shouldn’t say it’ category. And the way he went about it was all wrong.
There should have been some acknowledgement that the booing of Vicario, unsavoury and unhelpful as it may have been, did not burst forth from a clear blue sky but instead a bubbling frustration from fans who pay among the highest ticket prices in the country to watch what is now among the worst and least effective football in the country.
To instead label those supporters – and the boos did not come from a tiny minority inside the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium – not real Spurs fans was another gaffe that pushes the manager further towards the exit.
Until that point we’d felt the obvious comparisons between Thomas Frank and Nuno Espirito Santo didn’t quite fit.
But it’s certainly starting to look uncomfortably similar in familiar ways; the small-time approach to big games has not been well received and the fear grows that he just doesn’t understand what this job requires. The fact almost no manager in Premier League history has managed to understand what this job requires is cold comfort at this time.
However, from there Spurs went to Newcastle and got a draw (albeit a ludicrous one) before they had a dominant 2-0 win against Frank’s old club Brentford at the weekend, which everyone at Spurs sorely needed. It was easily their most convincing Premier League performance since the win at City on matchday two and a result that could have been even more convincing.
They then pretty much secured a Champions League play-off round spot at the very least with a fine 3-0 win over Slavia Prague.
But Spurs are Spurs, so they followed that with the worst performance yet of Frank’s reign in a truly inept and miserable 3-0 defeat at Nottingham Forest.
Bringing Joao Palhinha and Ben Davies on to try and hold on to a 2-0 defeat and not even managing that feels uncomfortably like the infamous Nuno Moment against Manchester United.
READ: Ten reasons why it’s going wrong for Thomas Frank’s Spurs – and it’s going to get worse