The Premier League club with the fourth-longest managerial tenure belongs to Jurgen Klopp. This will make it difficult to replace him in the summer.
As a result, let’s examine how Premier League teams managed the changeover from the ten longest managerial tenures since the invention of football, which occurred a little over 30 years ago. The ten individuals listed below who were replaced are all those who managed a Premier League team for more than 2000 days in a single tenure before losing their jobs. A subjective threshold, although a reasonable one. And let’s be honest—we’ve all been acting in this arbitrary way for years—no less than ten.
Some guidelines. Since the Premier League is all that interests us, everything before 1992 is irrelevant. We’ve seen the video. In any case, it was garbage. This implies that the management clock is reset by a relegation. Our reasoning is that relegation or promotion is a sufficient shock to the system to jolt a club out of any cosiness having one manager for ages might have led to, and the obvious Liverpool focus on this feature existing now also makes specifically top-flight reigns feel most pertinent. We debated whether or not that rule should exist and ultimately decided that it did.
Additionally, Gerard Houllier has not been added after much consideration. He managed Liverpool for longer than the required two thousand days, but his health issues forced him to take a significant hiatus in the middle and return to a somewhat smaller capacity. If you want, battle us in the comments.
Tottenham’s Jose Mourinho takes over for Mauricio Pochettino.
One of the most Careful What You Wish For moments in Premier League manager history and a solid start.
Pochettino, who is renowned for being averse to trophy-winning, made Tottenham spectacular and enjoyable. Although Mourinho may make them outstanding and ensure they win trophies, he would not make them entertaining. No, he didn’t. It quickly became sour.
Although this was a terrible mistake in retrospect, it should be highlighted that Pochettino’s team had become bland and the results had been stagnant for a very long period. Their incredible run to the 2019 Champions League final had concealed their downfall, and at the time, a much larger number of Spurs supporters than they would now confess were supportive of this.
Though mostly because his own concerns about the necessity to rotate the team had gone unanswered, it was perhaps time for Poch to go, but Mourinho? Not really noteworthy.
Sean Dyche is replaced by Mike Jackson (Burnley)
Dyche comfortably reaches the top 10 for his and Burnley’s second, longer shot at the top flight together, despite an early clock-resetting demotion. This may possibly be the most frantic disposal of extensive expertise and soft power from Know The Club in Barclays’ history.
While Burnley was certainly in trouble in April 2022, they still had eight games left to win in order to overcome a four-point disadvantage. Did Dyche really have a better chance of laughing at snow in his shirtsleeves and gravel-voice his way out of the conflict than Mike Jackson had of taking care of them?
Although Burnley’s relegation was officially confirmed, they did make a notable change in leadership when they hired Vincent Kompany on a permanent basis. Returning to the Premier League presented no difficulties. I’m staying there and looking at something else right now. Not quite as simple as Dyche made it seem for all those years.
Sam Allardyce is replaced by Sammy Lee (Bolton)
You can see the allure of a continuity candidate to succeed a manager who has come to represent your team in such a profound way. After leading Bolton back into the top flight in 2001 and transforming the team into a legitimate Premier League power, Allardyce quit in a fit of pique in April 2007. The fact that Allardyce’s complaint against the club was their unwillingness to release further transfer cash in order to support a drive for Champions League football speaks much about both him and his accomplishments there.
Little Same took over for Big Sam when he quit his long-term position at Bolton to pursue a profitable and widely successful career in short-term firefighting and pint-of-win his way out of the England job in record time. He was benched for the remainder of the season and the first two months of 2007–08 after drawing far too many conclusions from a single victory in 11 games.
Alan Curbishley is replaced by Iain Dowie (Charlton)
A club’s manager turnover rate isn’t a perfect indicator of how things are going, but it’s also not a totally worthless one. More than most, Charlton fits. Curbishley had spent 15 years in the dugout, serving as either the solo manager or a joint manager, before he left at the conclusion of the 2005–06 season. Before the year ended, three other managers would assume his position.
Over the course of the 18 years that have passed since Curbishley’s 15-year tenure, 18 permanent managers have come and gone. Not to mention all the carer charms for your Johnnie Jacksons and Lee Bowyers. Dowie only managed 15 games after Curbishley’s 15 years, which, when you consider that Les Reed was his successor, feels like a lifetime in and of itself.
Roy Hodgson has taken over as Rafael Benitez’s replacement at Liverpool.
There are obviously many historical cautions for Liverpool when it comes to replacing a manager with as much experience as Klopp, but they don’t even need to go far from Anfield to find a glaring example.
Although Liverpool supporters yearned for a Premier League championship above all else, Benitez fulfilled all other expectations and won the fans over. Not so with Roy Hodgson. Throughout his brief stay at Anfield, he never really seemed to fit in and was generally grumpy—perhaps partly due to constant questions about when he would be fired or step down.
It did not help that Liverpool supporters had a tempting fantasy of replacing their favourite manager with someone else when Kenny Dalglish put in a bid for the position prior to Hodgson’s confirmation. In January, those aspirations would be realised when Hodgson was relieved of his and Liverpool’s suffering. Despite winning a League Cup, Dalglish was only with the team for a season and a half before leaving after leading them to an unprecedented eighth-place result.
Harry Redknapp is replaced by Glenn Roeder (West Ham)
Another appointment in the boot room. After seven mostly prosperous years, West Ham lost patience with Redknapp when he completely wasted the £18 million Rio Ferdinand windfall on complete garbage and then demanded more funding. Traditional Redknapp.
Frank Lampard Sr., his assistant, also quit, increasing the likelihood that Lampard Jr. will be sold and making this an even greater sliding door moment for Barclays overall than it may have been otherwise. Prior to the start of the 2001/2 season, Roeder, the reserve team coach, was confirmed as a permanent appointment after being appointed as a caretaker. It was rumoured that the Hammers had rejected offers from Steve McClaren and Alan Curbishley.
After leading the club to seventh place in his first season, Roeder struggled the next year due to a clogged blood vessel in his head, forcing Trevor Brooking to step in for him. With three games left, the Hammers managed seven points, but despite having a Premier League record of 42 points—a record never to be beaten—they were still relegated.
When the next season began in the second division, Roeder made a comeback, but he was unable to last until August and suffered a loss on the road at Rotherham. Once again, Brooking filled in as interim manager when Alan Pardew was being courted to leave Reading.
Joe Kinnear is replaced by Egil Olsen (Wimbledon)
Which is more humorous? Joe “Which One Is Simon Bird” Kinnear, who was replaced by a crazy Norwegian wearing wellies, still has the sixth-longest managerial tenure in Premier League history (it is now fourth here since Klopp and Guardiola are obviously ineligible).
Naturally, Olsen is only seen as a humorous character in England. Everywhere else, he’s portrayed as an eccentric but intelligent professor with an almost obsessive fixation with off-the-ball runs and intriguing, progressive views about how football ought to be played. When, in his capacity as Norway’s manager, he nominated Hege Riise, the winner of the Golden Boot in the Women’s World Cup, for FIFA’s World Player of the Year, it notably created a commotion.
But he was fired from the Crazy Gang after less than a year, just before Wimbledon’s 16-year stint in the top division came to an end, since he was unable to pull a song out of them.
David Moyes is replaced by Roberto Martinez (Everton)
As one of the three individuals who have been with a single Premier League team for more than ten years, Moyes has a notable history of being on both sides of this issue. The fact that no Everton manager has managed the team for over 500 games since Moyes’ departure is not shocking or scandalous, but it is telling that Martinez—Moyes’ replacement—is the only one who has managed the team for more than 100 games.
We find ourselves marvelling at the sheer eclectic nutty magnificence of Everton’s wild decade of managerial selections (Martinez, Koeman, Allardyce, Silva, Ancelotti, Benitez, Lampard, and Dyche) for the first and not the last time since the decade of Moyesian peace. Along with many wild caretaker periods for Duncan Ferguson and David Unsworth. Crazy. Is it now too selfish to want a comparable ten years of puzzling mayhem over Stanley Park?
Sir Alex Ferguson is replaced by David Moyes (Man United)
If nothing else, Moyes’ decision to leave his position as Sir Alex Ferguson’s chosen successor at Manchester United after 11 years at Everton suggests that Liverpool’s best course of action may be to just ignore Klopp’s suggestions about the next manager.
Ferguson made a few mistakes throughout the United team’s dominance in the Premier League’s first 20 years, but this particular error was significant.
To be fair to Moyes, the years that have passed have shown that nobody at all was likely to be able to carry out this task. Ferguson is something of a problem here as well, continuing to throw a long shadow over the team. However, Ferguson shares some of the blame since, after using a string of really excellent teams to win United’s championship earlier in the season, he attempted to repeat the feat with a very subpar squad for his farewell performance.
It proved the extent of his brilliance, but unintentionally salined the land for the unfortunate mortal sod that occurred to trail after him. Moyes only seems to have really recovered from everything in the past year or so at West Ham.
Top 10 Premier League clubs who had incredible success before losing it all
Unai Emery has taken over as Arsene Wenger’s replacement at Arsenal.
I think this one is the most concerning for Liverpool out of all of them. It’s simpler to look back on Moyes at United or even Hodgson at Liverpool and say, “Well, they just got that really wrong.” Just let’s not make a huge mistake.
A very different situation at Arsenal, where they hired a highly competent manager who has now shown his managerial abilities once again, including here at Barclays. However, he was unable to succeed at Arsenal in the difficult and selfless role of attempting to unseat a true great.
Emery’s failure at Arsenal is the one that most obviously indicates that it is simply not feasible to succeed in the Barclays, out of all the managers who have failed in the role after taking over for a long-standing leader.
Arsenal is now back on track under Mikel Arteta, but it took him a good two years to turn things around. Many managers would not have had the luxury of time during that period, and it’s almost a given that he would not have if Wenger had succeeded Emery as the manager.
An entertaining little exercise: if Arteta and Emery had been appointed the other way around, would Arsenal be in a better or worse situation now? Yes. Take a moment to consider it.
