In the end, there was a ‘Blink and you might have missed it’ feel to Igor Tudor’s tenure as Tottenham Hotspur head coach.
The Croatian departed the struggling north London club on Sunday by mutual consent after seven games in charge. He is grieving the loss of his father, of whose death he had been informed after the 3-0 home defeat to Nottingham Forest a week ago. A club who had hoped he might instigate an immediate upturn in results are still floundering, winless in the Premier League since December 28, as they look to stave off a first relegation since 1977.
Tudor spent only 44 days in charge. Even in an age when impatience and panic are rife across boardrooms, that is no time at all. And yet it is not the shortest tenure of the 34-year Premier League era. That dubious honour still belongs to Sam Allardyce at Leeds United — more on that shortly — even if fleeting stints in the dugout feel as if they are on the increase.
The 10 shortest Premier League reigns have all come in the past 20 years, and four of those in the last three.
And that underlying impatience is not limited to the English top flight. French coach Wilfried Nancy was fired after 33 days at Scottish side Celtic in January and, in the second-tier Championship back south of the border, West Bromwich Albion sacked Eric Ramsay the following month after, as with Tudor at Spurs, 44.
If their latest choice of leader does not induce an immediate incidence of the fabled ‘new-manager bounce’, teams are increasingly willing to look swiftly to whoever the next guy might be.
It isn’t always the fault of the club involved.
Top of the list remains former England manager Allardyce. Infamously, he lasted just 67 days and one match in charge of the national team in 2016, but his stint in Leeds nearly seven years later was even shorter.
He arrived at Elland Road after the dismissal of Javi Gracia (who also makes the list) with just four games of the 2022-23 Premier League season remaining, but could not live up to his ‘firefighter’ reputation for saving seemingly-doomed teams as Leeds slipped out of the Premier League, taking a single point from those matches.
Allardyce then announced he did not fancy the rebuilding job the Yorkshire club faced in the second tier. “At this stage in my career, I am not sure taking on this challenge, which is potentially a long-term project, is something I could commit to,” the then 68-year-old told reporters at the time. He has not managed since.
At least Allardyce’s eventual departure, upon the expiry of his contract, was respectful and mutual. Predecessor Gracia’s, after 72 days, had been distinctly impersonal.
As The Athletic revealed at the time, Gracia was notified over the phone, on his birthday, that his 12-game stint was over. He had picked up 10 points from the first six of those matches to lift Leeds out of the relegation zone, and they were still above the trapdoor when the club decided to make their second managerial change of the season, following the earlier sacking of Jesse Marsch.
If delivering the news as Gracia celebrated turning 53 was harsh, consider the shocking way Charlton Athletic dispatched with Les Reed’s services in 2006.
Reed was told his 41-day reign was over on Christmas Eve. Yet, considering how he was received and treated during his time at The Valley, his sacking may have been viewed as an early present.
He had been promoted from the role of Iain Dowie’s assistant after Charlton pulled the plug with the south-east London club bottom of the Premier League on eight points, 12 games into the season. However, during Reed’s six weeks as manager, they won only once and were knocked out of the League Cup at home by Wycombe Wanderers, then of League Two.
The club gave him a vote of confidence after that shock defeat, but the narrative had long since been set in stone. Reed was taunted in the media with nicknames such as ‘Les Miserables’ and ‘Santa Clueless’ as Christmas drew near, and he seemed to treat the club’s situation with a relaxed manner that alarmed those internally.
He was replaced by Alan Pardew, Charlton finished second-bottom, were relegated, and haven’t played top-flight football since, spending the majority of the past two decades in the third tier.
Retrospectively, there may be some sympathy towards how Reed was treated, but sometimes there can be little empathy when managers take on jobs at notoriously volatile clubs.
Under owner Evangelos Maranakis, Forest head coaches have had a very short shelf life. Ange Postecoglou, for example, must have known what he was getting himself into when he agreed to succeed Nuno Espirito Santo last September.
Forest failed to win any of their eight games under the Australian — the worst start by any permanent manager or head coach at the club in 100 years — and he was also unpopular with a section of the fanbase.
In the latter stages of a 3-0 home defeat to Chelsea, which proved to be Postecoglou’s final match, television cameras spotted that Maranakis had already left his seat in the directors’ box. It seemed obvious what was about to happen. Postecoglou was told he was sacked just minutes after the final whistle and immediately left the stadium.
Talking about knowing what you are getting yourself into, Watford have been the kings of the multi-managerial changes in recent years, with 18 permanent appointments in the past decade. Quique Sanchez Flores has been two of those (as has Gracia, for that matter, though his stints were both too long to qualify for this article).
Sanchez Flores’ initial stay lasted a whole season, when Watford finished mid-table in the 2015-16 Premier League and reached the FA Cup semi-finals, but the Spaniard left the club by mutual consent at the end of it. “The club and I don’t have the same point of view about the season,” he told reporters when the news was announced.
Just over three years later, he was back, as countryman Gracia’s successor, and the second time around, the two parties proved even further apart. Sanchez Flores lasted just 86 disastrous days. After one win in 10 Premier League games, and with Watford still bottom of the table, he was gone again.
Sometimes, managerial appointments simply don’t look like a good fit from the off.
Bob Bradley had enjoyed a distinguished coaching career in his native United States, including five years leading the national team that included reaching the knockout phase of the 2010 World Cup, before he was appointed at Swansea City in October 2016 to become the first American to manage in the Premier League.
He didn’t enjoy the best of starts as the supporters’ trust, which owned a 21 per cent share in the Welsh side, stated it was disappointed not to be consulted on the choice of Bradley. And it did not get much better for him.
Bradley was sacked after only 86 days and 11 games, having picked up just eight points and watched his team concede 29 goals in those matches. He did not take the decision well, accusing Swansea officials of listening to negative voices from the outside and abandoning the plan that had been put in place.
“You can look at even top managers and recognise that in a league as competitive as the Premier League, anyone can go through a stretch of 10 or 11 games where you don’t get the results you should,” he told BBC Radio Wales at the time.
He is right, of course, but in the modern game, not many managers survive such a sequence of poor form — even if they have not been in the job long.
The stakes in the Premier League are simply too high for teams to show much patience and the honeymoon period for a new appointment can be fleeting, as Tudor has now discovered.