The 4 managers in Premier League history who were worse than Igor Tudor | OneFootball

Igor Tudor’s time at Tottenham extended to 44 days, five Premier League matches and one Premier League point. Staggeringly, this isn’t the worst record in the competition’s history.

Tudor was drafted in by Spurs to replace Thomas Frank, but left the club deeper in the relegation mire than when he arrived.

Sitting alongside luminaries like John Gorman, Terry Connor and Billy Davies with 0.2 points in their first five games, here are four managers who were somehow even worse.

Eric Black (Aston Villa)

Stepping into the smouldering Villa Park bonfire in April 2016, Black had seven games to add a sheen of self-respect to Villa’s first relegation season since the 1980s.

Six defeats in seven capsized that pipe dream, with Black losing his first five matches in the hotseat.

Lowlights included a 4-0 walloping by Alexandre Pato’s Chelsea and losing 3-2 at Watford despite leading in the 90th minute.

Several years as Steve Bruce’s assistant at Birmingham also did little to endear Black to the Villa faithful.

Ivan Juric (Southampton)

Juric had the lowest of hanging fruits after taking over from Russell Martin in December 2024, with Southampton more open at the back than a first-time traveller to India partaking in some street food.

The Saints were already rock bottom, but losing at home to West Ham was a particularly inauspicious start.

Defeats to Crystal Palace, Brentford (5-0 at home), Manchester United and Newcastle followed to complete a quintet of misery.

Juric left when Southampton’s relegation was confirmed in early April. They finished the campaign on 12 points, with a party barge on the Solent to celebrate beating Derby’s record.

Scott Parker (Fulham)

Another late-season face-saving exercise, this time at Craven Cottage in March 2019 when Fulham replaced Claudio Ranieri with Parker.

Ranieri himself had only been in charge for four months, taking an expensively assembled Fulham squad to the brink of relegation.

Parker lost his first five games as manager, with a 4-1 defeat at Watford in a self-defeating 5-4-1 formation being the nadir.

In fairness, he followed this with three successive wins and got Fulham promoted the following year. We’ll gloss over him taking the Cottagers back down in 2020-21.

Mick McCarthy (Sunderland)

Sunderland had already sacked Peter Reid in September 2002, appointing Howard Wilkinson and Steve Cotterill as dual managers in a bizarre move.

With the Sunderland squad pathologically opposed to scoring goals, this experiment was terminated in March 2003 with the Black Cats’ relegation steamship already 200 miles from the harbour.

McCarthy was the designated sucker to take over and did nothing to stop Sunderland’s sprint towards Division One.

They lost the final 15(!) matches of the season, including nine under McCarthy, to go down on 19 points. Managing Roy Keane’s moodswings was surely better than trying to get a tune out of Kevin Kyle?

Sunderland stuck with McCarthy through two seasons in the second tier, sacking him in March 2006 en route to breaking their own miserable record and finishing on 15 points.