Rodgers, Gerrard, Klopp and other former Premier League managers we want back | OneFootball

After binning off Vitor Pereira, Wolves toyed briefly with the idea of going fully mid-table Serie A and just bringing Gary O’Neil back for another go like some kind of West Midlands Genoa.

Instead, they’re now going to bring Rob Edwards back to the Premier League, thus allowing a few good months with Middlesbrough to entirely erase all consequences of a double relegation with Luton.

Nottingham Forest have already brought not one but two former Premier League managers back into Our League this season, Ange Postecoglou briefly and Sean Dyche for who knows how long, while West Ham got Nuno Espirito Santo back in a big manager’s chair barely two weeks after he left Forest in high dudgeon.

In short, the managerial merry-go-round has never felt so back. So here are 10 more former Premier League managers we would very much like to see back somewhere this season, please.

Brendan Rodgers

Just as well we’re keen, because it’s just definitely happening, isn’t it? Someone is going to take a punt on La Brendan and that is a huge boost for fans of insane self-regard and Premier League managers delivering unironic David Brentisms apparently lifted direct from the most unhinged corners of LinkedIn.

The brilliant thing about Rodgers, and it’s a really clever part of his whole schtick, is that yes, he’s great fun, tremendously cringe, and you don’t necessarily really want him in charge of your club because everyone will take the p*ss; but he’s not actually a bad football manager, at least not straight away.

That’s the genius of it. Anyone can be David Brent. But David Brent who’s actually competent at his job right up until he isn’t? Not even Gervais could pull that off.

Rodgers is so tempting for all manner of mid-to-low-level Premier League clubs precisely because there is a very high chance of some short-term Leicester City-type gain before the longer-term Leicester City-type pain.

You can absolutely see, say, Leeds going for it. And you can absolutely convince yourself that it might be a good idea. And it really might actually be a good idea, for around 18 months tops.

So yeah, Leeds is a good option here. But we would also happily accept Forest just to see how (and, of course, how quickly) his departure from the City Ground manages to be even more acrimonious and dignity-shedding on all sides than his Celtic one. Because it somehow definitely would be that.

Steven Gerrard

We just really want him to be Liverpool manager. Because it would be funny and probably not go at all well and we just want to watch the world burn.

He’s apparently third favourite for the job should Arne Slot manage to maintain his current relegation form long enough to get the actual sack, and it’s a grand shame for all who enjoy watching big clubs do daft, catastrophic things in real time that the current odds for any of that actually taking place misrepresent their true chances by many orders of magnitude.

But a man can dream, while reluctantly contenting himself with watching whatever your Manchester Uniteds and the Tottenham Hotspurs of this world are up to. But it feels a bit ‘We have big football clubs doing daft, catastrophic things in real time at home’ if we’re honest. This really does mean more.

Frank Lampard

We really need a ‘nepo baby’-like title for managers who owe their entire career in that particular field to their prowess as a player. We just can’t quite land on what it should be – something like ‘top-pro baby’ but not so lame.

Anyway, the point here is that yes, we do really want to see Frank Lampard back managing in the Premier League but we want him to have earned it. We want, very specifically, to see him managing a Coventry City side that he has got promoted into the Premier League. We do not want to see him simply handed another Premier League job on a silver platter and Leeds, we are looking at you. Don’t make us tap the sign.

We know this contradicts pretty much everything we just said about Lamps’ old sparring partner Steven Gerrard, but consider this: shut up.

Jurgen Klopp

That now infamous throwaway podcast line about a potential Liverpool return turned everyone into Lloyd Christmas, but we understand the desperate desire people have to see Klopp and his heavy-metal football back in the Premier League.

He was great to have around, produced a brilliant football team that won the lot in riotously entertaining fashion and was absolutely guaranteed to say something ridiculous and dangerously high in salt after any game that didn’t go well.

He was, in short, the perfect Premier League manager and it hasn’t been the same without him. He isn’t coming back, we know he isn’t coming back, we should all accept he isn’t coming back but we all heard him telling us there’s a chance.

Jose Mourinho

Talking of great managers and hilariously salty losers, here he is. The Special One. The walking real-life meme. The man, the myth, the legend.

Sure, he’s not really actually any good at being a football manager any more and is currently safely tucked away back in Portugal where he can’t really do any damage. But you can’t deny the Premier League is a better and more importantly funnier place with Jose sulking around the place.

The good news is that through years of practice and training he has now managed to get his standard three-year destroy-and-exit down to around 18 months, so there’s every chance he’ll be available soon to pop up at somewhere like Newcastle and start being incredibly rude about anything and everyone while insisting on being shown great deferential respect himself because of some stuff he did at Chelsea over a decade ago.

Ange Postecoglou

We miss him already. Again.

The Premier League is just better vibes when the big Aussie barrel of contrasts is here, with his ability to deliver the world’s grumpiest post-match interviews and most profound and insightful and interesting pre-match interviews and being able, with nothing more than subtle shifts in intonation, to give the word ‘mate’ a range of meanings from, well, ‘mate’ to ‘the sh*t on my shoe’.

And, of course, just losing loads and loads of football matches in increasingly silly and entertaining ways while refusing to learn a single lesson from it.

We’re not the first to say it, but a manager who can say in September, when things are going badly wrong, and he is manager of f*cking Tottenham, that he’s going to win a trophy and then actually do it is just absolute cinema.

That’s a manager you want in your league, even if not always necessarily at your club. Because, you know, of all the defeats.

Our solution here is that every Premier League club should be required to employ Postecoglou for a six-to-18-month period on some kind of rota basis, for the culture and the greater good.

Gary O’Neil

A Proper Football Man. The next generation of Premier League firefighter. Spoke well at his Leeds/West Ham/Fulham/Forest/Burnley unveiling, I thought.

Antonio Conte

We’re not sure where or how he might turn up back in the Premier League, to be honest. He’s one of the very best and most successful coaches in the world and that can be quite limiting, especially when you’ve developed something of a reputation for falling out with everybody and bringing everything crashing down around you by the end of your second season.

It’s somehow even panning out that way at Napoli, despite winning the league in his first season and currently sitting two points off top spot 11 games into this. The usual rumblings and grumblings and dark complaints about transfer decisions the club has taken are all starting to surface.

It just feels like the middle of the Venn Diagram of Premier League clubs who’d want Conte and Premier League clubs Conte would be interested in is vanishingly small.

But we shouldn’t give up hope. In a world where Conte’s hair can magically grow back, all things are possible and we’re saying, as seems to be the case for so many of these ‘big enough to interest this great but flawed manager, small enough to go down this road’ type of situations, Newcastle.

Mauricio Pochettino

Still a part of us that expects him to turn up back at Spurs at some point in the future. Does feel like one of those situations where both he and they were happiest in those times and, while you probably shouldn’t go back, there is still some unfinished business.

Weirdly, though, Pochettino seems to have managed to pull off something quite strange, in that having a short-lived spell at Chelsea has actually made it less likely rather than far, far more likely that he will go on to manage Spurs.

We can’t explain the science of it, but for some reason Chelsea and then Spurs is absolutely fine, but Spurs and then Chelsea and then Spurs isn’t.

Still, though, you’d like to think there’s a fourth Premier League job out there somewhere for a manager who did his best work here and managed to last over five years at Spurs, where two years is about the limit for absolutely everyone else.

Thomas Tuchel

Just be nice to have the 2026 World Cup-winning manager in the Barclays next season, we reckon.

But we’re not sure Luis de la Fuente is particularly up for it, so we’ll have to settle for the return of Tuchel instead.