It's easier to just name the Premier League managers who still have jobs: Jurgen Klopp, Pep Guardiola, Thomas Frank, Mikel Arteta, David Moyes, Marco Silva, Steve Cooper, Eddie Howe, Erik ten Hag and Gary O'Neil.
It's early April, and Chelsea's decision to fire Graham Potter after just seven months on the job makes it 13 Premier League managerial changes so far this season -- the most ever in a single campaign, by a margin of three. O'Neil, who didn't become Bournemouth's permanent manager until Nov. 27, is an old head; he has been around longer than half the managers in the league.
It's not just the Premier League, either. Bayern Munich, shockingly, cut ties with Julian Nagelsmann a week before this past weekend's title tilt against Borussia Dortmund. Real Madrid's Carlo Ancelotti could leave the club after the season to coach Brazil. Christophe Galtier's debut at Paris Saint-Germain has been mostly disastrous; he could be gone after the season. Diego Simeone has been toying with an exit from Atletico Madrid for a few years now. RB Leipzig changed coaches earlier in the season, as did Ajax. And who knows what the future holds for both AC Milan and Inter Milan.
The managerial merry-go-round is spinning faster than ever before. It launched Scott Parker from the south coast of England to the Champions League round of 16 with Club Brugge and back to his living room, all in a matter of months. With the coaching churn unlikely to stop anytime soon, I've put together a guide for all the top clubs currently looking -- or soon to be looking -- for a manager.
Looking for ...
... dressing room harmony and your best players making it onto the field?
Then may I interest you in one of the most beautiful men in world football: Zinedine Zidane?
There are perhaps two ways to be successful at the biggest clubs in the world. The first is a method perfected by only one man over the long run: a hyper-demanding tactical overhaul. Guardiola has installed a distinct and unique style at all three clubs he has coached. At Barcelona it was tiki-taka, paired with a ferocious high press and the best player in the history of the sport in Lionel Messi. At Bayern, he built a more physical side that made use of two of the best non-Messi wingers of their generation, Arjen Robben and Franck Ribery, along with the innovation of inverted full-backs who dipped into the midfield to control the ball. And at City, it has been a slo-mo pace of play that prioritizes controlling the ball more than anything else.
Guardiola has required a ton of specific talent at every club he has coached, but he has also proved himself to be better at wringing collective output from 99th-percentile resources than any other coach in the 21st century.
The other approach that has succeeded at the biggest clubs in the world: just kinda, I don't know, vibing out. This is unfair to Zidane -- especially regarding his second stint at Real Madrid, when he became more ambitious tactically -- but the broad story of Zidane as manager at the Bernabeu, both times, is that the players listened to him and that allowed him to put his best lineup on the field without much pushback.
Talent, overwhelmingly, wins games, so the job of a manager at a club with the resources to secure top talent is to figure out how to get all of them on the field together in a coherent fashion. Sometimes this means dropping an older star who can't quite cut it anymore, sometimes it's sacrificing a third or fourth attacker in exchange for a less-fancy midfielder who provides the team with some balance. Making those moves is easier said than done -- not only because of the locker room, but because club management wants the latest big-name signing to be on the field and sell jerseys.
Although we have no real idea how Zidane would perform outside of Madrid, we know he's capable of bringing managerial stability to organizations that tend toward complete chaos.
Potential fits: Paris Saint-Germain
Gab Marcotti and Julien Laurens discuss Antonio Conte's time at Tottenham after the Italian left the club by mutual consent.
... someone to push boundaries and get the most out of mismatched pieces?
If there's one sentence that sums up Nagelsmann's coaching career, it's this: RB Leipzig finished second in the Bundesliga in 2020-21 without a single player scoring more than six non-penalty goals.
Instead, they had eight different players chip in with at least four. And for long stretches of that season, the team's attack was seemingly built around ... Angelino, the Spanish full-back who wore No. 69 for New York City FC and is currently on loan at 15th-place Hoffenheim. After the departure of striker Timo Werner, one of the best field-stretching outlets in the Bundesliga, Nagelsmann saw something in Angelino and used him to replace Werner's off-ball skills. The Spaniard received 35 more progressive passes than anyone on the team, and he generated more Expected Goals (xG) and assists (xA) than anyone outside of Dani Olmo and Christopher Nkunku.
At Bayern, there was at least an argument that a team with as much talent as they have didn't need someone trying to reinvent the wheel. Hansi Flick played a pretty straightforward 4-2-3-1, which is also what Thomas Tuchel opted for against Dortmund over the weekend. But Nagelsmann's ideas do mostly seem to be pointing in the right direction, toward a widespread inefficiency among coaches in every sport: they're too conservative. At times with Bayern, he'd roll out what looked like a back three with wing-backs on paper -- only for the back three to include a single recognized centre-back and two true wingers playing at full-back. In the midfield, he'd sometimes have Joshua Kimmich ... and that's it.
Now, I think Germany is a really strange tactical environment that is somewhat divorced from what's happening in the rest of Europe. What works there frequently doesn't work elsewhere or doesn't translate to success in the Champions League. But at only 35 -- he's just like me! -- Nagelsmann seems like the current coach most capable of having a Guardiola-esque career in which he actually gets more out of the already-elite talent of Europe's top teams.
Potential fits: Chelsea, Tottenham, Real Madrid, Liverpool (if they lose every game from now until mid-May by multiple goals.) Pretty Much Everywhere Other Than Bayern.
... immediate results, no matter the long-term consequences?
The main reason Tottenham haven't been good this season: Son Heung-Min, Dejan Kulusevski and Richarlison have not been good this season. The first two were legit stars last season and Richarlison was supposed to provide solid, flexible depth for them and main man Harry Kane. Son and Kulusevski have barely been average Premier League attackers this season, while Richarlison has as many Premier League goals as my dog, who just tries to eat the ball when you pass it to him despite the fact that his mouth can barely fit a tennis ball inside of it.
In other words, I don't really see this season as a total failure for Antonio Conte. What? He just, uh, forgot what Spurs did last season that made Kulusevski and Son so good? Given what we saw last season, when they both were flying and Tottenham were nearly as good as City and Liverpool after Conte took over, it doesn't seem like the Italian boss deserves much blame for their significantly reduced performance. I mean, he handled it terribly, but that's how it always goes.
You know what you're getting: he's going to yell at everyone -- from the ball boys to the owner. He's going to install his patterns. He's going to ask for better players. He's going to get them. He's going to ask for even better players than those other players he just got. And then it's all going to end in tears. But before then? He'll make your team better immediately and probably challenge for a couple of trophies. He did it at Inter, Chelsea, Italy and Juventus.
Potential fits: Atletico Madrid, Paris Saint-Germain, Juventus.
... a guy who has won everything and isn't afraid of annoying your fans?
Halfway through his first season in charge of Barcelona in 2014, some fans wanted Luis Enrique gone. Part of the issue is that they weren't playing tiki-taka anymore. Positions weren't interchanging and not everyone was contributing both with and without the ball. Instead, Messi, Luis Suarez and Neymar were frequently separated from the rest of the starting XI. In order to stabilize a previously struggling defense, Enrique essentially held more bodies back and trusted his three superstars to break down the opposition.
Fast-forward a few months, and Barcelona won LaLiga, the Champions League and the Copa del Rey. They followed that with the UEFA Super Cup and the Club World Cup. In no small part because Enrique went against Barca's previous identity, his team put together one of the greatest club seasons of all time.
Strangely, the opposite seemed to happen when he took over Spain in 2018. They were fantastic in Euro 2020, outplaying eventual winners Italy in the semifinals before losing on penalties.
But at the 2022 World Cup, they seemingly embraced all of the worst aspects of the Barcelona stereotype: an obsession with possession over all else -- over controlling territory, over creating chances, over scoring goals. In Qatar, Spain completed 3,415 passes, 2,754 of which were either square or backward, and they went out meekly on penalties after a scoreless draw against Morocco in the round of 16. Beyond the tactics, Enrique frequently made puzzling decisions with his lineups -- Rodri, maybe the best midfielder in the world, played centre-back -- and his overall team selection: stars such as Sergio Ramos and Thiago didn't make the roster.
So, Enrique hits the market as someone who oversaw one of the best teams ever, but also someone who ultimately underachieved in an environment where the competition is far less than what he'll be facing whenever he returns to the club game.
Potential fits: Both Milan clubs, Spurs, Chelsea, Paris Saint-Germain
... someone to gradually push us up the table?
Chelsea co-owner Todd Boehly continues his Roman Abramovich impersonation. Not only is he signing every player in sight, he's also now firing managers for fun. Depending on how quickly they move to find a replacement for Potter, the new ownership group could have three different full-time managers in their first season with the club. It's a complete mess.
Given the surrounding mess, I'm not sure how much you can even judge Potter's tenure with Chelsea. He has been given approximately 400 different players with no real coherent identity or skillsets connecting any of them. He also came in midseason, and was let go right as the team seemed like it might be starting to put things together. Ignoring the results of the past four matches, Chelsea created more chances than Dortmund, Everton and Aston Villa -- but only won one of those games. Overall, there was little to no difference between Tuchel and Potter at Chelsea this season, and the past few performances showed some underlying promise.
At the same time, Brighton have remained quite good after Potter left, which should at least slightly downgrade your impression of the impact he had on their performances. However, if we're willing to credit Brighton with an especially savvy ability to identify players, then shouldn't we do the same with coaches? Perhaps they just replaced Potter with another level-raising manager in Roberto De Zerbi. Also, Potter deserves a chunk of credit for creating the foundations of the team that allowed RDZ to come in and hit the ground running.
There's no Potter-at-Brighton success story without the team's brilliant player ID-ing process, but he oversaw the rise from bottom-of-the-table, defense-first relegation fighters to a safely mid-table-if-not-better squad who played a possession-dominant style that made its players attractive to bigger clubs. Any club looking to make a steady climb or build long-term should be looking Potter's way.
Potential fits: Spurs, any other club outside of the Deloitte Money League's 10 richest teams, England
... high pressure?
Ralf Rangnick, Jesse Marsch, Ralph Hasenhuttl, Pochettino and Marcelo Bielsa are all out there. While the former doesn't seem too interested in managing at this point, both Marsch and Hasenhuttl did much better jobs than their departures suggested. The former purposefully played a high-variance style at Leeds, and the board seemingly got sick of the bounces not going their way. Javi Gracia came in, stopped pressing, slowed things down and produced mostly terrible performances so far. Their xG differential in his five games in charge: minus-5.97. In Marsch's 20: minus-3.14. To me, Marsch looks like a potentially above-average manager with experience across a variety of competitions, including the Champions League. For a team willing to run, he's worth a look.
As for Hasenhuttl, every team he has managed -- Ingolstadt, RB Leipzig and Southampton -- improved while he was there. Southampton's current roster is really unimpressive. Most of their low-cost bets on young players haven't hit. I wouldn't pin too much of it on him; or, at least, I wouldn't overweight it compared with the rest of his impressive managerial track record. His pressing style has so far been a bit more adaptable and strategic than Marsch's, so he might have more theoretical suitors, too.
With Pochettino, his reputation feels like it's settled into kind of a strange place. He followed a poor final partial season at Spurs with a first season at PSG that ended with the club finishing in second place behind Lille in Ligue 1. And then, last season, they reclaimed the league but flamed out in the Champions League. However, PSG were a lot better last season than this season; he did a much better job figuring out how to juggle the 'defense, who me?' front three of Neymar, Messi and Kylian Mbappe, and their loss to Real Madrid was more of a freak collapse than the utter domination they suffered against Bayern Munich this season.
I have a friend who thinks that most of Pochettino's success at Tottenham came down to the fantastic generation of players he inherited, and ultimately every manager's success comes down to their players more than anything. But Poch is sort of the higher-level Potter in some ways; the guy who saw a team jump from above average into the elite. It's more of a freak thing that Spurs didn't win any trophies while he was there, given how good they were on the whole. I'd still give him a serious look if I were a Champions League club.
And then there's Bielsa, whose coaching job at Leeds is one of the more impressive managerial runs of the past 15 or 20 years. It always ends up in flames, but for the right club with the right fans and a strong front office, Bielsa could still create some memories.
Potential fits: The entire Bundesliga, the Villarreal/Sevilla tier of LaLiga, anyone in the Premier League who convinces themselves they're "comfortably mid-table," any big club in the world who can prevent Pochettino from having a major say in player recruitment.
... a possibly great coach hiding in plain sight?
I'm not sure teams think of coaches in the same way as players -- individuals with varying bands of potential outcomes, some with high floors and low ceilings, others whose possibilities don't vary too much. But maybe they should.
So if you want a coach who could stink but who could also be a hit: for nearly a decade, Marcelo Gallardo has been widely considered the best manager outside of Europe. He won the Copa Libertadores twice with River Plate in 2015 and 2018. His teams played a style generally favored by most of the top clubs in Europe: pressing high, trying to create man advantages with quick side-to-side movement and then exploit them with fast combinations. And he also constantly adapted his approach to his players and the changing environment around him.
The big question mark, of course, comes from the fact that he hasn't coached in Europe. Another smaller question mark: he didn't have a ton of success in league play, and league performance is much more indicative of future success than cup wins. Gallardo might have the widest range of potential outcomes from any coach out there; he could be excellent, or he could quickly flame out.
Potential fits: All but one of Ligue 1, nearly all of LaLiga, most of Serie A.