Igor Tudor and Spurs next? Ten managerial firefighters who couldn’t prevent relegation | OneFootball

Everyone knows that the first and best thing to do when facing the prospect of relegation is to just bin off the idiot manager and replace him with someone else. The new-manager bounce will take care of the rest.

Sometimes, though – and you’ll be as shocked as we were to discover this – it doesn’t actually work. Sometimes the new-manager bounce is a new-manager splat.

Igor Tudor is not the first and nor will he be the last to come into a crisis-addled flailing shambles of a club and discover that somehow the flailing-crisis-shambles is in fact far, far worse than he’d expected.

Here are 10 firefighters who came in to save a club from relegation but only managed to pour more fuel on the situation and took them down. Tudor’s place on this list awaits him as soon as he’s finished calling his own players sh*t and thick, opposition players and referees cheats, and gone back to Serie A where that sort of unpleasantness could simply never exist.

We’ve made up some simple but also occasionally self-serving rules. It doesn’t seem fair to include those firefighters who turned up at a house already razed to the ground. All of these, like Tudor, arrived to a club where survival was a realistic prospect. All of these teams went down, but none were worse than 18th when their supposed saviour rode into town.

It also doesn’t matter whether the firefighter was themselves removed before the formalities were completed. It seems fair that you don’t get let off for being if anything too sh*t and also because while we do think Spurs will go down we also don’t think there’s any way that happens with Tudor still at the helm.

Spurs interimed an interim less than three years ago when they were in the top six, for goodness’ sake. They’ll definitely do it once they’re 18th. And it will probably be poor Ryan Mason who gets the gig again.

Sam Allardyce (Leeds United 2022/23)

Mason replacing Stellini in late April wasn’t even the last managerial change of that season, though. Leeds went for broke in May itself, with four games left.

Sporting director Victor Orta left the club after a 4-1 spanking at Bournemouth, with manager Javi Gracia following him out of the door a day later.

In came Big Sam, the firefighter’s firefighter, for a four-match rescue mission to save a team that was – and this feels important – outside the relegation zone when he arrived at that late, late stage.

One point from four games later, culminating in a 4-1 home defeat to Mason’s silly Spurs, and Leeds were down, finishing 19th and five points adrift of safety.

Alan Pardew (West Brom 2017/18)

‘Alan Pardew replacing Tony Pulis as manager of West Brom’ is a perfect collection of words to encapsulate a specific era of Barclays but what was sadly one of the very worst attempts ever at replacing one Proper Football Man with another and expecting anything to change.

“The immediate challenge will be to get the results we need to pull ourselves up the table,” he said upon his arrival.

Barely four months later he was gone, with West Brom now in fact bottom of the table after an eight-match losing run and 10 matches without a win.

Claudio Ranieri (Watford 2021/22)

Feels harsh to include any Watford manager really, but it does feel like we absolutely have to have one, and a Premier League winner who took a team down surely fits the bill.

Xisco Munoz was sacked in October because Watford managers are always sacked in October. They were pulling up few trees, but they were 14th and four points clear of the bottom three at that admittedly early stage.

Ranieri made a wild start. His first game featured a Roberto Firmino hat-trick in a 5-0 defeat to Liverpool. His second featured a Joshua King hat-trick in a 5-2 win over Everton. This was also a game that featured a fine example of how Richarlison goals are always cursed; he put Everton 2-1 up with 63 minutes gone.

A few weeks later, Watford beat Man United 4-1 and all seemed well. They then lost their next six in the league and lost 4-1 to Leicester in the third round of the FA Cup having lost 4-2 to them in the league. There was a draw against Newcastle, but a 3-0 home defeat to Norwich which saw the Hornets replace the Canaries at the foot of the table was the final straw after 13 Premier League matches that produced two startling wins but also 10 harrowing defeats.

In came Roy Hodgson, who did at least manage to lift them back above Norwich but no further over the closing months of the season.

Nathan Jones (Southampton 2022/23)

Is Nathan Jones the reason we allowed managers taking over teams in 18th to make the list? We prefer not to speak.

As a general rule, any opportunity to talk about Nathan Jones’ infamous spell in charge of Southampton should be grasped firmly.

This was a man who in those short but glorious months in which he burned so bright took potshots at everyone from Frank Lampard to the manager of Havant & Waterlooville, who after taking just two points from his first six Premier League games used a press conference to praise himself for the dignity with which he’d carried himself, and at one point gave himself a 50 per cent win ratio by pretending that a league game against Liverpool didn’t count but a Carabao game against Lincoln absolutely did.

He was equal parts Tim Sherwood and Brendan Rodgers and the Premier League has been poorer for his absence ever since he was sacked just for losing almost all of his matches.

In all he was in charge of Southampton for just three months, in the middle of which there was an entire World Cup because 2022 was a wild time.

Alan Shearer (Newcastle, 2008/09)

Has somehow always managed to avoid any of the blame for taking Newcastle down despite the fact he absolutely took Newcastle down.

There were unfortunate circumstances, with Shearer replacing Chris Hughton who had stepped in after Joe Kinnear’s heart trouble forced him to step back from the role.

That perhaps explains why discussion of Shearer’s short-lived and ill-starred Newcastle reign always contains a deal of praise for the fact he stepped up when the club was in a time of need, and not always enough attention on the fact that Newcastle were relegated by a single point after he managed only five in the eight games he spent in charge.

Hughton was back in charge for the recovery mission the following season, and duly hoovered up 102 points to finish 11 points clear at the top of the Championship.

Terry Connor (Wolves 2011/12)

Has spent much of his coaching career working as an assistant to Mick McCarthy, whose infamous “it can” response to the suggestion a run of terrible form can’t possibly carry on makes him perhaps the patron saint of this feature.

But when McCarthy was eased out by Wolves with the team just inside the relegation zone back in February 2012, Connor moved into the spotlight as his replacement after Wolves failed to secure the ‘experienced manager’ they reportedly sought.

Things started okay with a 2-2 draw against Newcastle but this was the very falsest of dawns. Seven straight defeats and, in all, no wins and just four points from his 13 games saw Wolves relegated and Connor’s top-flight managerial career over before it had really started.

Has since worked again with McCarthy in various jobs, as well as a brief stint as head coach of Grenada. Not to be confused with Granada, of course. Or, thanks to their ‘Spice Boys’ nickname, white-suited mid-90s Liverpool.

Ruud van Nistelrooy (Leicester 2024/25)

Easy to forget now given how meekly they ultimately went down under Van Nistelrooy, but there was actually little sign of them being such a hopeless cause when he hoodwinked the club by beating them twice during his short stint as Man United caretaker.

Leicester were outside the relegation zone when the Foxes gambled on Van Nistelrooy’s star power as the replacement for Steve Cooper’s less flashy reliability.

He new-manager-bounced his way to victory over West Ham in his first game but then had two separate eight-match losing runs broken only by a 2-1 win at Spurs, who simply cannot help themselves in these situations.

By the time Van Nistelrooy’s Leicester collected their other two wins – in May, against fellow promoted-relegated pair Southampton and Ipswich it was all far, far too late.

The only thing that can really be said in the Man United legend’s defence is that Leicester have not improved conspicuously for his departure last summer.

Ole Gunnar Solskjaer (Cardiff 2013/14)

Before he was at the Manchester United wheel and in between spells with Molde, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s first crack at Premier League management came with Cardiff. It went… poorly.

Cardiff were struggling but outside the bottom three when Solskjaer replaced Malky Mackay. Solskjaer immediately lost a vital six-pointer at home to West Ham before defeats to both Manchester clubs in quick succession.

In all Cardiff lost 12 of their 18 Premier League games under Solskjaer to finish rock-bottom. Lowlights included a 4-0 home defeat to another relegation rival in Hull, a 6-3 loss to Liverpool and successive painful trips to the north east to get slapped silly by Sunderland (4-0) and Newcastle (3-0) in the space of a week at the end of the season.

Solskjaer kept his job despite it all, lasting until September in the Championship before being sent back to Molde to think about what he’d done while still somehow remaining a Manchester United manager in waiting.

Neil Adams (Norwich 2013/14)

Solskjaer wasn’t the only firefighter to f*ck it in 2014, though. And the best thing is that neither Solskjaer nor Norwich’s Neil Adams were even the worst offenders that season. That would be Felix Magath, but we’ve boxed ourselves into a corner with our own stupid rules so can’t include him because while he undoubtedly made Fulham worse, he did so – arguably more impressively really – despite taking over when they were already bottom.

Adams was a panicked appointment from a club that could see what was coming. On the face of it, they weren’t in the worst position. When Adams replaced Chris Hughton after a 1-0 defeat to West Brom, the Canaries were still five points clear of the bottom three with five games to play.

Problem was, those five games were against Fulham, Liverpool, Manchester United, Chelsea and Arsenal. A Norwich statement said they had put their youth-team coach, a man who at that time had no first-team managerial experience, in charge “to give the club the maximum chance of survival”.

They were mainly trying to convince themselves. Once Norwich had lost at Fulham, it looked ominous. Over the next couple of weeks, Norwich would play their part in the drama unfolding at England’s biggest clubs.

Losing only 3-2 to Liverpool in a game where they trailed the league leaders 2-0 after 11 minutes was, had any of us been paying attention, perhaps a bit of foreshadowing for the infamous nonsense Liverpool had in store over their next couple of games.

Next up for Norwich was a 4-0 defeat against Manchester United, who had just replaced David Moyes with Ryan Giggs.

They did get a point at Chelsea – their first away point since new year’s day and the end to a five-match losing run but it wasn’t enough. They were all but down, the formalities rubber-stamped by defeat to Arsenal on the final day.

Harry Redknapp (Southampton 2004/05)

Redknapp’s defection from Portsmouth to Southampton caused fury on the south coast, but little did the Pompey fans realise quite what a spectacular destroy-and-exit Agent ‘Arry had planned for their hated local rivals.

He not only took them down in 2005, but hung around to make sure they didn’t come back up the next season, only finally deciding that enough was enough – or perhaps that his work was done – when future wingnut politician Rupert Lowe did the most Rupert thing any Rupert has ever done by appointing rugbyman Sir Clive Woodward to his football club’s coaching staff.

By the time 2005 was through, Redknapp was back at Portsmouth and all was right with the world.