The longest-serving manager in England’s Premier League suffered several indignities at the weekend. Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool lost 4-1 at Manchester City, the visiting team bus had objects thrown at it on the way home - incidents condemned by City - and Klopp heard home fans chanting that he’d be “sacked in the morning”.
Nobody imagined that would happen. Liverpool’s owners have not built up seven-and-a-half year’s worth of faith in one manager, watched him bring to Anfield a first English league title for three decades and deliver a European Cup, to now turn panicky.
But they are in an environment where most others tend to. The day after City, who have been led by Pep Guardiola since 2016, beat Liverpool, two Premier League clubs fired their head coaches. Once Graham Potter learned his six-month period at Chelsea had been terminated, hours after Brendan Rodgers had been waved goodbye by Leicester City, the total of managerial departures in the most monied domestic league had risen to 13 this season.
Some, like Chelsea and Southampton, have crammed two sackings into the period. Some, like Chelsea and Leicester, give an impression their decision-makers, past and present, have ceased to see a connection between continuity in the manager’s seat and success. These two clubs were the last to win the Premier League before Klopp and Guardiola established a five-year duopoly on the title. Between them, Chelsea and Leicester have said farewell to nine managers since their landmark titles.
Leicester had sacked Claudio Ranieri, who led them to the surprise league triumph of 2016, within nine months of that historic accomplishment. Rodgers masterminded the club’s first-ever FA Cup triumph less than two years ago. He had finished fifth in the Premier League twice.
Chelsea’s record of hire-and-fire is notorious, and, even though they have been under new ownership for less than a year, the rate of turnover echoes that of the previous supremo Roman Abramovich. On his watch, Chelsea won two Champions Leagues. The coach for the first of them Roberto Di Matteo, was gone barely six months after making history; the man who guided Chelsea to the 2021 European Cup, Thomas Tuchel, was replaced by Potter last September.
Tuchel reboarded the merry-go-round at the end of last month, when Bayern Munich, another club where success is no guarantee of managerial fidelity, seized on his availability as a replacement for the sacked Julian Nagelsmann, who is now a leading contender for the Chelsea vacancy and admired by Tottenham Hotspur. Spurs parted company with Antonio Conte – the manager who led Chelsea to their most recent Premier League title, in 2017 – only nine days ago.
In this whirligig, a sacking at one would-be superclub sets off a dismissal at another. Tuchel – who made an excellent start at Bayern, returning them to the top of the Bundesliga with a 4-2 win over Borussia Dortmund at the weekend – can only raise his eyebrows at how expensive the fidgety instincts of his past and present employers have turned out.
Bayern paid a €25m buyout clause to headhunt Nagelsmann from RB Leipzig in the summer of 2021 and gave him a five-year contract. Chelsea paid Brighton almost as much to release Potter six months ago and are now sorting out Potter’s lucrative pay-off, hoping it does not take as long as their drawn-out, costly settlement with Conte did when he left Stamford Bridge in 2018.
The nervousness in boardrooms, the spree of sackings, is mostly about declining status. Chelsea, who have spent close to £600m on new players since last July, are in the bottom half of the Premier League. Leicester dropped into the relegation zone thanks to a last-minute goal conceded at Crystal Palace – whose new manager, Roy Hodgson, was beginning a second spell there – on Saturday.
“It had been our belief continuity and stability would be key to correcting our course,” Leicester chairman Aiyawatt Srivaddhanaprabha explained. “Regrettably, with ten games remaining, the board is compelled to take alternative action to protect our Premier League status.”
Leicester’s bosses see that Premier League’s battle against relegation is ferocious, with nine clubs in real danger. Seven of those nine have changed manager this season.
Further up the club hierarchy, the temptation for a panicking owner to think there is a better coach out there, to be snapped up fast, is real. Mauricio Pochettino, who won the last French league title, with Paris Saint-Germain, is unemployed. As are Conte, who, with Inter Milan won the last-but-one Serie A, and Nagelsmann, winner of last season’s Bundesliga.
So is Luis Enrique, who left the Spain national job in December and had previously guided Barcelona to a Champions League-Liga-Copa del Rey Treble. Biding his time is Zinedine Zidane, the only coach to have won three back-to-back Champions Leagues, as he did with Real Madrid, where he won his second Liga title as coach in 2020.
Also now available are Potter and Rodgers. Both have been successful abroad – in Sweden and Scotland respectively – and both have almost always overachieved with mid-to-low budget clubs in England. It will not be long before they are invited onto the merry-go-round again.
