Underappreciated Marco Silva has earned the right opportunity as Fulham exit leaves huge void

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Evening Standard

·3 de junio de 2026

Underappreciated Marco Silva has earned the right opportunity as Fulham exit leaves huge void

Marco Silva will be a tough act to follow at Fulham after stabilising the club in the Premier League

Fulham were fast becoming a yoyo club — too good for the Championship but too poor for the Premier League — until Marco Silva first pitched up at Motspur Park.

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Silva’s departure from the club five years later, after rejecting a new £7million contract to instead become Benfica manager, comes only after the outstanding achievement of his 15-year managerial career: promoting Fulham back to the Premier League and stabilising them there, finishing 10th, 13th and 11th, twice, in four top-flight campaigns.

Though player recruitment has been smart and shrewd, the club’s owner Shahid Khan has not always invested to quite the extent Silva hoped and expected. A club of Fulham’s size must make peace with its place in football’s food chain, but losing their best players to pastures new necessitated that Silva reinvents Fulham each year.

He did. Initially tipped for immediate relegation for the third straight time as a newly promoted club, they are now top-flight staples.

Exit: Marco Silva

Silva, formerly of Hull City, Watford and Everton, views our league as the promised land and rebuffed offers from Saudi Arabia and Europe to stick it out at a club that came to value him to an extent no English club ever had before.

Now, though, the right opportunity has arisen at the right time for a head coach who had been pondering his future for a long while. Five years and out, for the league’s second-longest-serving current manager, after only Arsenal’s Mikel Arteta.

It is telling that despite never finishing higher than tenth in their newly promoted 2022-23 campaign under Silva, Khan and his board of directors never came close to moving him on. West Ham’s relegation is the last loose thread of an ugly unravelling which began by dreaming higher than David Moyes’s midtable solidity.

Clubs of Fulham’s size must be careful what they wish for, and the board knew they had a good thing going with Silva.

His departure deprives the Premier League of one of its most effective coaches. He became inwardly frustrated when transfer business didn’t match his grand designs or was completed needlessly close to the deadline but remained professional and leaned, always, on his ability to dust himself off and get the best out of the players who were in front of him.

Clubs of Fulham’s size must be careful what they wish for, and the board knew they had a good thing going with Silva

The hot-and-cold Aleksandar Mitrovic suddenly caught fire upon Silva’s arrival and banged in 43 goals — the most by a single player in a 46-game league season in English football history — as 110-goal Fulham ran riot and won the Championship in Silva’s first campaign.

Joao Palhinha was decent already but looked a world-class defensive midfielder in two seasons under Silva. He elevated Harry Wilson; had Raul Jimenez reborn after his sickening skull injury. In Bernd Leno, Alex Iwobi and Emile Smith Rowe, he got a tune out of players who’d fallen on hard times in different parishes.

The work Silva has done at Fulham feels underappreciated by English football more widely. He is straight-talking, maybe lacks in charisma or natural warmth, and perhaps this is why.

He could be relied upon like clockwork to insist in every passing post-match press conference that Fulham had been the better team even when they hadn’t, and had deserved a penalty whether or not they had. He is relentless, rigorous and fiercely competitive.

Perhaps if the Cottagers had ever got over the line and secured European football for themselves, in the way Brighton, Crystal Palace, Bournemouth or Sunderland have, his body of work would have elicited greater acclaim.