3 managers Sheffield United could replace Ruben Selles with if sacked ft. ex-Sheffield Wednesday boss | OneFootball

Sheffield United manager Ruben Selles is already under pressure after four straight league losses - there are viable alternatives out there

With just four league games under his belt, new Sheffield United manager Ruben Selles is under enormous pressure at Bramall Lane.

To say that this has been a disappointing start to the season for the Blades would be something of an understatement.

With four matches of their Championship season having been played, the Blades are rooted to the foot of the Championship table with a most unwelcome four defeats out of four - that's even a worse record than their bitter rivals Sheffield Wednesday, who have been under EFL restrictions all summer.

All of this is turning up the heat on Ruben Selles, who only arrived in South Yorkshire over the summer as a replacement for the popular Chris Wilder, who was sacked after failing to get the club back into the Premier League at the first attempt.

Wilder's dismissal was a demonstration of where the expectation levels were set at the club for the coming season, and there's no doubt that Selles is failing to live up to the billing.

There's already been plenty of speculation that Selles might not be long for the position, and United fans made their feelings clear about the Spaniard after they were defeated 1-0 at Middlesbrough, but in the potential event that Selles departs, the club will need a new manager, and fast.

Here, FLW looks at THREE potential replacements, should that eventuality come to pass.

3 Tony Mowbray

Sheffield United are in a bad way at the moment, and the application of a little experience at this level of the game might well suit them down to the ground - and there are few managers more experienced at this level of the game than Tony Mowbray.

It's fair to say that Mowbray's last two managerial appointments, at Birmingham City and West Bromwich Albion, did not go as planned, with his stint at Blues ending through no fault of his own due to illness.

But he's been managing at Championship level for the best part of two decades, and has taken two different clubs to promotion - West Bromwich Albion from the Championship to the Premier League in 2007-08 and Blackburn Rovers from League One into the Championship in 2017-18.

He's not a name that will set pulses racing, but Bramall Lane has been a febrile place since it became apparent that this season wasn't going to plan from the get-go, and Mowbray's appointment could represent a steady hand on the tiller to pull them clear of a surely unthinkable relegation fight.

2 Michael Carrick

It really isn't so long since Michael Carrick was being talked of as one of English management's potential next big things.

Carrick was sacked by Boro over the summer after a dramatic late tail-off in form cost them a place in the Championship play-offs.

A failure to win five of their last six games of the season cost them a place in the top six and cost Carrick his job, but whether that's a reflection on him or on the way in which managerial hirings and firings are carried out these days is very much open to question.

He comes from a considerable pedigree, having stepped in as a caretaker at Manchester United in 2021, leaving the position unbeaten in three games, he took Boro to the play-off semi-finals after finishing 4th at the end of his first season and to the semi-finals of the EFL Cup in 2024.

Carrick also succeeded Chris Wilder in getting this job in the first place, and the fact that he turned around a team that had been struggling under this particular manager may also prove appealing to the Blades' senior management.

Well, it would be contentious, that much can be said for certain, but taken from an entirely dispassionate angle, the former Sheffield Wednesday manager Danny Rohl could prove to be an inspired choice to make a switch across the city to Bramall Lane.

The most obvious asset that Rohl would bring with him would be a demonstrable ability to work under difficult conditions.

He may have ended up falling out with the Wednesday owner Dejphon Chansiri, but he spared them from relegation at the end of the 2023-24 season and to an extremely respectable 12th place in the Championship last season.

Rohl can be a prickly character at times, but he's extremely highly-rated, to the extent that there was Bundesliga interest in his potential availability in the summer.

He wouldn't be the first to have managed both clubs, either. Both Steve Bruce and Danny Wilson have done this before, although there were protests against Wilson when he was appointed at Bramall Lane in 2011.

It would certainly be a gamble. Those associated with the blue and white half of Sheffield are never going to be given much shrift by those on its red and white side.

But, like both Tony Mowbray and Michael Carrick, Rohl knows this division well, and considering what he achieved under Chansiri at Hillsborough, there is an intriguing question to be answered about what he could achieve with a board that actually backed him.

He may be a bit of a wild card choice, but were he to reach the potential he demonstrated on the other side of the city, he could even prove to be an inspired one.