Don’t think we’re getting too far ahead of ourselves as we consider the contentless desert of the new vast interlull stretching out before us in imagining that either Spurs or Man United or both might soon be looking for yet more new managers.
Roberto De Zerbi and Michael Carrick are currently first and second in the Sack Race, and heading for El Sackico next month if they can both hold on that long.
And the best part is that the long trail of broken and damaged careers left in their wake by these two absolute basket-case football clubs absolutely will not put anyone off having a go themselves. The great thing about the managerial merry-go-round is that once you’re on it, it’s almost impossible to get off.
Ange Postecoglou is back in the game exchanging banter with Cristiano Ronaldo. Ruben Amorim? Has turned up at actual Milan, for now at least. Erik Ten Hag is working for FC Twente and you bloody know how much he loves that. And Thomas Frank is… well, anyway.
Here then are 10 possible managers who might just be daft enough to have their careers temporarily derailed by a disastrous six-to-18-month reign at one or both of the country’s thickest football clubs.
It’s always the managers who have hit upon a good thing at a good club that you really fear for in these situations. This time last year, Daniel Farke was still the Championship specialist who couldn’t hack the Premier League, the idea that he might soon become one of the top-flight’s longest-serving managers an absurdity.
He wouldn’t make it to Christmas, surely. But then, while getting a heavy beating from Man City, something happened. Something clicked. What if instead of two centre-backs there were three centre-backs, Daniel thought to himself.
The great thing about a back three is that 93% of the times it’s been tried, it’s been a catastrophe. But the other 7% is pure unexplainable, logic-defying alchemy that turns relegation candidates into European contenders and Victor Moses into an instrumental weapon in a title charge. Don’t bother checking the numbers, we’ve been through it very carefully.
Of course, what would make this even more fun were Farke to abandon upwardly mobile Leeds for cul-de-sac-bound United or drain-circling Spurs is that both those clubs have recent experience of being in the 93%, courtesy Messrs Conte and Amorim.
Increasingly funny to think that in Conte’s disastrous second season at Spurs they were still in the top six when he left before fading to the unimaginable depths of… eighth. But he did also have the absolute cheat code of Harry Kane scoring 30 goals instead of Dominic Solanke scoring no goals in a team that was in every other way at least as moribund and defective – if slightly less expensive – than the current one.
READ: Premier League winners and losers: Brighton, Arsenal, Brentford, Alonso, Coventry, De Zerbi
Obviously the worst thing Sir Gareth could possibly do now is get back into football management in any capacity and remind people that he’s not actually that good at it.
If we haven’t learned the lesson, after watching Lionel Scaloni and Luis de la Fuente win the last two World Cups, that elite international management and elite club management are essentially entirely different jobs with an entirely different vibe, then we never will.
Southgate also had the good fortune to watch England’s latest World Cup experiment with an elite manager from the club world end in an almost sarcastically accurate tribute to all the worst failings – real and imagined – of Southgate’s reign. Thus raising his stock even higher and no doubt helping with book sales and his LinkedIn numbers.
There is a safe, secure, easy and lucrative future for Gareth Southgate that requires him to do nothing other than be a professional Gareth Southgate. The only way he can ruin that is by trying his hand at club management again.
Which is perhaps itself the reason why the only two clubs we can actually picture him managing are these two wallies. They are surely the only two who’d be daft enough to try it – we already know Sir Jim Ratcliffe would desperately love to give his fellow knight of the realm a leg up. But while we don’t consider Southgate to be a stupid or vain man, they also feel like the jobs, ones that require a saviour, that might just tempt him.
Life in the ol’ Ipswich goldfish bowl just got too much for McKenna in the end, and he wisely and understandably decided to take a break from the game. What better way to get back in the saddle than with a quiet, low-key appointment at either United, where he rose at one time to assistant manager under Jose Mourinho, or Spurs, where he spent time as both a player and a coach in the academy?
McKenna thus finds himself in the invidious position of having Club DNA out the wazoo for both Spurs and United. Which really should, when you think about it, be enough to disqualify any manager from any position in the game. It’s a monstrous combination that science should never have attempted.
We definitely worry about this one. There’s still an inevitable sense that at some point The Arsenal Unpleasantness will be a distant and dim enough memory for Emery to take a ‘can’t beat them, join them’ approach to making himself once again a part of the Premier League’s Big Six.
We don’t think he’d be stupid enough to take the Spurs job; they’re in an even deeper hole than Villa were when he took over there, and he now has far greater Barclays wattage than he did then.
But the United job worries us. We can all too easily picture him in that very Partridgean tie and blazer badge combination pack that Man United managers sometimes have to wear for some reason.
Don’t do it, Unai. It’s a trap. And the boxes for the tie and blazer badge combination packs have faded after United were made promises about storage that were not kept.
Surely there’s no harm in Spurs at least finding out what the outcome might be if they snaffle the overperforming head coach from Brentford? What’s the worst that could happen?
There’s no clearer evidence, in a way, for how Tottenham can ruin your life than Mauricio Pochettino.
All managers leave Spurs broken and bruised and shaking their head in confused anger at some element of the ridiculousness of it all. For yer Contes and Mourinhos, this manifests as furious if awkwardly and undeniably righteous anger despite their own undoubted bit-part roles in the mess they left behind.
For someone like Ange Postecoglou, it’s the ‘Spurs does funny things to people’ bafflement at just how weird absolutely everyone inside and out is about this absurd club. Although he phrased it as being aimed at others, we always think it was aimed inwards too.
And if you’re Thomas Frank, it just makes you love Arsenal even more than you already did, which was loads.
But there’s a greater tragedy that can befall a Spurs manager. Far, far greater than the agony of growing to hate this stupid club is the impossible excruciating and lasting pain of growing to love this stupid club.
That is Pochettino’s fate. We’ve had doubts about the timing but we’ve always maintained that on some fundamental level neither Spurs nor Pochettino can truly move on with their lives until they discover once and for all if they can rebottle that lightning, if it can ever work again.
It almost certainly can’t. It’s almost certainly a terrible idea. But even relegation under Pochettino would give both him and Spurs some kind of closure at least.
This might in a very confusing way be a terrible idea that both parties actually do need to consider.
Alternatively, he could end up at United, which strikes us as being a terrible idea for Pochettino and for United and for Spurs and thus is what will probably happen.
This is an interesting one. Howe is very clearly a capable Premier League manager. Silly to pretend otherwise. He also carries huge support within the media that definitely helps him if not necessarily the club he’s in charge of.
But we’ve never quite been able to shake the idea that he’s a high floor, low ceiling kind of guy. He would, we imagine, be a less catastrophic choice for Spurs than United simply because Spurs’ crisis is the more acute and existential. On-field, at least.
With the obvious exception of Pochettino, who has the advantage of having already done one of the jobs for five years and been linked with the other for just about as long, Howe is the easiest of all the manager here to picture in both jobs.
Whether it’s now or in five years or 10 or for the briefest moment in time just before the seas boil and claim us all, we are certain at least one and very possibly both these clubs are in Howe’s future.
Tell us we’re wrong. Tell us ‘2026-2028 Spurs, 2028-2030 England, 2030-2031 Manchester United’ isn’t just the most basic five-year Wikipedia career trajectory for High Performance Eddie from this precise moment.
In theory we should be able to at least rule Spurs out here given Fabregas’ past affiliations, but there’s no escaping the fact that a big part of Tottenham’s humiliation kink – and, look, whatever makes you happy, there’s no shaming here – is bringing in high-profile people who have either very Arsenal or very Chelsea vibes.
So why not both? Fabregas would be an ideal manager to deepen Spurs’ despair, allowing Arsenal and Chelsea to yet again – as they so often do – put aside their surface-level differences to indulge in their true favourite pastime of dunking on Spurs with a communal round of ‘Agent Fabregas’ banters.
Nevertheless, a far more likely if equally misguided scenario would be to see Fabregas inexplicably swap the good thing he’s got going on down by the lake in Italy for the United Chucklef*ck Comedy Hour.
There’s a vague hint of continuity logic to it, with Fabregas a kind of starrier Carrick Plus. A thinking man’s midfielder in his playing days, with the one tiny difference that he’s actually proved himself a capable manager as well. Until, of course, he rocks up at Carrington and sets his career back 18 months.
Let’s face it, we’ve all waited long enough for this one. Nagelsmann has been an absolute racing certainty for ‘chaotic and ultimately disastrous 18-month Premier League stint’ since he first donned the wacky suits at Hoffenheim and Leipzig all those years ago as the enfant terrible of football management.
With frankly shocking, deeply German and very suspect disregard for Our League Exceptionalism, Nagelsmann instead chose to have that chaotic, big club disaster at Bayern Munich for some reason. This was entirely unacceptable, although following that up by continuing the surprising but very welcome recent trend for Germany to be one of the funniest rather than most soul-destroying teams at major tournaments was necessary rehabilitation.
To us, there’s always been something of the Chelsea about Nagelsmann, but failing that it was always these two clubs where his most natural Barclays home seemed to exist. Both have had a go at making it happen, albeit we can never really know for sure just how hard they tried.
The other good thing here is that his Bayern struggles and ultimate failure with Germany might have put Nagelsmann in the curious position of no longer being quite an attractive enough proposition for United to take the gamble.
A few years ago, you might have thought that such a slightly diminished Nagelsmann might thus become the ideal kind of manager to fall prey to Tottenham’s charms, except brilliantly Spurs have spent the last few years diminishing their own reputation to such an extent that even Nagelsmann at his most beggy can afford to be a chooser.
So he might actually have saved himself from ending up with either. Clever of him, frankly.
Just such an obvious but beguiling trap, isn’t it? Both Spurs and United are absolutely lazy enough to just go “Who’s currently the most conspicuously over-achieving manager of a smaller but infinitely more sensible Premier League club? Let’s have him then” without a second thought about the actual suitability of the manager or his tactics for the expensive, messy squads he would inherit.
And recency bias being what it is, the weekend before the international break couldn’t have gone worse/better (your mileage may vary) for the whole terrible idea.
Watching Brighton run all over the champions on the same weekend as Spurs Groundhog Dayed their way to another painfully predictable identikit catastrof*ck at the Albatross Arena and United’s players enjoyed a gentle stroll by the Thames, it was only natural to start thinking.
Spurs and United fans must all have been thinking “Why can’t we do that?” And there’s a very good chance one of them may be about to find out.
The thought of Hurzeler trying to get Spurs to be as coherent as Brighton, or United’s collection of meandering wastrels to run as hard is so ludicrous we do now kind of have to see it in all its twisted glory.
Hurzeler obviously won’t be at Brighton forever. At some point he’s going to be lured away by a bigger club. But he’d be a damn fool to be lured away at this specific time by these specific clubs. Especially Spurs, but especially United.
