Ranking all 31(!) Premier League managers this season: Mikel Arteta off top spot | OneFootball

It’s not even been two months since the last update on this, and a great deal has changed.

There are three new entries for one, although all of those were pretty predictable in some way or another.

When we did the January update, it already looked like Michael Carrick had beat Ole Gunnar Solskjaer to the permanent interim job in place of the interim interim Darren Fletcher at Manchester United.

There was also already by then a sense of inevitability about Thomas Frank at Spurs, even if the sheer depths of the horror were only being hinted at (and, if we’re honest, we probably wouldn’t have come up with the name ‘Igor Tudor’ as a replacement if you’d given us 50 goes).

And a new manager at Nottingham Forest is just a thing that happens every two months anyway.

There’s still a fair amount of movement up and down the list for the established names, though. And we reckon you can probably guess which of the new entries lands highest in the chart.

January’s positions are in brackets, with the full and oft-embarrassing justifications here to peruse at your leisure in the unlikely event these several thousand words aren’t quite enough somehow.

31) Igor Tudor (Tottenham, February onwards) (NE)

There are just so many astonishing things about this managerial reign already. First, that it even exists at all. That Spurs responded to the very real and present danger of relegation by gambling absolutely everything on a man with no experience of English football and whose last job at Juventus had ended with an eight-match winless run.

Yes, his reputation in Italy as a fixer (the good kind, to be clear) was not without merit. But Spurs had no clue as to whether that might translate to English football and were simply not in any position to gamble.

The second extraordinary thing is that he already looks absolutely doomed. Appointing him ranks among the most astonishing gambles ever seen by a Premier League club, but doubling down on it after a surely inevitable defeat at Liverpool next weekend makes it zero points from four games would be far greater.

It already feels inevitable that Tudor’s name lingers in Premier League lore as a byword for catastrophe.

But the most extraordinary thing is that Tudor has come into a side that was already on its current form the worst in the Premier League and somehow made that team even worse still.

Igor Tudor’s Tottenham would almost certainly lose to Thomas Frank’s Tottenham. In many ways, that kind of sums up just how unfair it all actually is: any other team on the kind of nightmarish run Spurs are currently enduring would know there was a way out of it down the line with a game against Spurs.

Never has a team been more in need of a game against Spurs than Spurs; alas, the one thing they can never have.

30) Ange Postecoglou (Nottingham Forest, Sept-Oct) (28)

Mate. Just…mate. Until his former former employers entirely lost the run of themselves, this was a genuine contender for worst Premier League managerial reign of all time. Incredibly it now has to fight just to get on the podium. But that is still firmly within the realm of ‘historically bad’.

Look, we sort of get it, we do. We get why he took the job. He probably did need to move fast to get back in the Premier League, try and convince someone to take a punt on him while those memories of Europa League glory were fresh enough in everyone’s minds to stop them thinking too long or too hard about the sheer ridiculousness of taking Spurs to 17th in the league. He wasn’t to know then that Thomas Frank was treating 17th as his target this season.

It’s asking a huge amount to say Postecoglou should have turned down a job that got him straight back into the European competition where he’d just had such spectacular success.

But…he should have turned down that job. Obviously he should. It went wrong in all the ways everyone knew it would go wrong, except at about five times the pace. There were, even among those truly cataclysmically awful results, flashes of what makes Angeball so beguiling. There were some lovely moves and stunning goals.

Yet for every one of those there were two or three defensive calamities, and injuries, for a team that just didn’t have those things last season.

It was always just so obviously asking too much of both Postecoglou and Forest’s players to make such a seismic shift in approach work without any kind of pre-season to bring in the right players and get everyone to understand the process.

Postecoglou will walk away with a nice pay-off for barely a month’s work, but with his reputation in tatters. It is only eight months since he did the unthinkable and delivered a major trophy to Tottenham, yet now, two sackings later, his managerial career at this level of club football is surely over.

There must have been better options with just a bit more patience. But still we’re kind of glad he did it, because Nuno to Ange to Dyche in barely five weeks is something the like of which will never be seen again.

29) Thomas Frank (Tottenham, August to February) (23)

We must grudgingly accept that he cannot go below Postecoglou in the rankings because he did, if your memory can stretch back far enough, win some Premier League games with Spurs back in the mists of time.

Of course, he never stopped winning Champions League games. Spurs have since the November international break won twice as many Champions League games as Premier League games, which is a sentence of such utter absurdity it simply should not be possible to say it even about Spurs.

It is also, of course, a sentence that could only ever be said about Spurs. Frank is a million miles from blameless, but he is in his own way also just yet another victim of a club that is more That Club than anyone else anywhere in the world could ever hope to be.

He gets a further shred of mitigation from the horrific injury crisis he endured throughout his reign. But, despite the concerted all-fronts defence mounted by His Majesty’s press corps, there really is no escaping the fact Frank was absolutely f*cking sh*tbone awful and should have been sacked months before Spurs finally acted. He was taking Spurs down, and the fact they’re still going down without him doesn’t get him off the hook.

There were so many obvious last straws before the axe finally fell. The most brutally early moment Spurs could have acted was after a 1-0 defeat to Chelsea. It remains the single most misleading scoreline of the season, because Chelsea should have scored so many more. The 0 was very accurate and correct, though. No denying that.

It was the game that first placed out in the open what had until then been masked by deceptively competent results from mainly rubbish football: that Frank was simply too small-time for the job.

He thought Spurs were Brentford, and the fact they now wish they were is neither here nor there. You can’t be Spurs manager and approach a Chelsea game with Plan A being let’s lose this as narrowly as possible, with absolutely no further plans in place.

There simply must be a middle round between how Frank approached home games against Chelsea and how Postecoglou did it.

The next sacking opportunity came soon after with another miserably small-time 4-1 defeat at Arsenal. The 3-0 defeat at Nottingham Forest should definitely have been the end for Frank, and ‘Ah let’s just give him the Dortmund game’ after he lost El Sackico to West Ham might just be the single most costly decision ever made by a big Premier League club.

That result, and the execrable performance that accompanied it, was when Spurs’ season truly shifted from disappointing to full-blown crisis. It dragged them back into the relegation fight while simultaneously breathing life into a West Ham side who had looked doomed before it.

When Spurs’ relegation is confirmed, it is the West Ham game that will come to be seen as the key turning point in both clubs’ seasons. Where and how the blame for Spurs’ catastrophic tumbling out of the league is divided up is a tricky business. The owners, the CEO and the terrifyingly incompetent and oblivious sporting director Johan Lange all take hefty chunks of it.

But as for how it should be split between the managers, that West Ham game alone is why Frank takes the bulk of the blame. Not that his adoring fans in the media will see it that way, of course. They will all pretend Frank would have turned it round if he’d just been given more time.

The very obvious truth is that he was given far, far too much of that.

28) Graham Potter (West Ham, Aug-Sept) (27)

Got absolutely none of the help he needed from the club in the summer, which meant all the talk during the late-season struggles last term about not judging Potter until he had his own players and a full pre-season to instil his methods became instantly moot.

But while Potter was not and is not the primary source of West Ham’s travails, let’s also not pretend he is blameless. West Ham didn’t help him, but he didn’t help himself either, and a once-promising career suffered another huge step back.

We’ll admit we didn’t really know how or where the road to recovery might begin for Potter, but will cheerfully admit we didn’t have ‘Simply be almost immediately named manager of Sweden’ high on our list.

That admittedly incredible run of promotions with Ostersund is still evidently highly regarded in a country that has had an absolute catastrof*ck of a World Cup qualifying campaign but one that still has enormous potential for absurd redemption with their Nations League success meaning they need only find a way past Ukraine then Poland or Albania to bag a place in North America despite finishing literally bottom of their qualifying group without a win to their name.

27) Vitor Pereira (Wolves, August to November) (25)

To be honest, we had The Fear when Wolves followed up that six-game winning run in March and April with four winless games to round out the season. Knowing Wolves’ fondness for letting the end to one season bleed into the next.

We didn’t think that bleed would be quite so bad as it was, though, even after they followed that little end-of-season slump with the classic ‘let’s sell lots of good players and not really bother replacing them’ tactic.

Pereira went from hero to zero alarmingly quickly, and it was clear he had no idea how to pull Wolves out of the tailspin in which they found themselves.

A real pity given how well he had them playing at one point last season, but hindsight has not been kind to that six-game winning run, either.

It was, rather brilliantly, the second-longest winning run any Premier League team managed in 2025 (and it was only at the very end of the year that Aston Villa – not Liverpool or Arsenal or Man City – bettered it) but it was also against three of the very worst relegated sides we’d ever seen as well as West Ham, Man United and Spurs who were all enduring nightmares of their own, from which one has still to wake.

So… yeah. Good fun, sure, but also perhaps the single most misleading six-game run in football history.

26) Nuno Espirito Santo (Nottingham Forest, August to September) (24)

Fell out with everyone, which given who that ‘everyone’ is at Nottingham Forest is kind of understandable. But f*ck, what a waste. Didn’t get the chance to follow through on the brilliant work he did last season and was the first manager out of a job in the Premier League this season.

25) Jamie Collins (Wolves, November) (22)

A shiny yet fictional pound on its way to the first reader who can remember the game Wolves’ Under-21 boss was in caretaker charge for. No, you don’t get a pound of any kind for saying it was a defeat.

Chelsea, it was. Lost 3-0. But it did take them until the second half to score, so it was very much not the worst Wolves effort of late 2025.

24) Darren Fletcher (Manchester United, January) (21)

The charitable reading is that if you squint hard enough his two-game caretaker interim reign before Michael Carrick’s permanent interim reign, legitimately contained genuine positives that hinted at what might come when Carrick arrived.

But it was still a reign that comprised a Premier League draw against Burnley and a home FA Cup defeat to what was at the time a woefully out-of-form Brighton. So, you know, not great really.

23) Ruben Amorim (Manchester United, August-January) (20)

His greatest achievement at Manchester United will ultimately be the fact he’s found a way to disentangle himself from a cursed club with reputation largely intact.

We’re not even being glib; that’s a stunning achievement that for most of his largely dreadful 14 months in charge seemed entirely impossible.

Yet in the end it was really quite simple and contains a valuable lesson for any other managers who find themselves entirely regretting the life choices they have made that have led them to their current predicament.

Just take on the faceless suits. It really is that easy to get away from any club.

Amorim tried more traditional approaches to getting the tin-tack. Absolute mule-brained stubborn and rigid insistence on his own methods even when they failed again and again. Losing just so very many football matches. Finishing 15th in the Premier League. Losing to Grimsby while p*ssing about with his little magnets. Losing a real-life final to Tottenham, for goodness’ sake.

None of it worked. But mildly suggesting that a random Blackburn winger from the 1990s might not be infallible? Game over.

Amorim’s entire Man United career feels like a modern football parable, and its final act one that should strike a chord with us all. While it may always be the head coach/manager – and Amorim was pretty keen to draw a distinction there as well – who must act as the public face and human shield of any football club it is the silent suits (whether those suits be business or track) who wield the power and yet are nowhere to be seen when trouble is really brewing.

22) Sean Dyche (Nottingham Forest, October to February) (17)

We’re really not sure what went wrong here, because if you appoint Sean Dyche you know you are getting Sean Dyche things. And he delivered Sean Dyche things with occasional moments of levity.

He purloined 22 points from his 18 Premier League games in charge, and Forest had lost only one of their last six in the league when he was removed.

Sure, it wasn’t always pretty but you also don’t get to play Spurs every week and the rest of the teams in this division are capable of making life awkward for anyone.

Did what was required in the Europa League as well, where Postecoglou’s failing was perhaps most conspicuous given what he did in that competition last season and it not being Dyche’s natural domain at all.

Dyche has recently BROKEN HIS SILENCE on his Forest departure on the Football Boardroom podcast, and it was both magnificently Dyche and hard to argue with. He described it as a ‘head-scratcher’, bemoaned the influence of ‘keyboard warriors’, said Forest think they’re something they’re not after ‘one good season in 30-odd’ and even did a little ‘You can’t even train players hard these days, in case a woke sees it’ bit after suggestions that Forest’s players were left exhausted by his methods.

Magnificently, you really could distil everything he said about what caused his downfall at Forest – a lot of which was entirely fair – to one simple phrase: Utter Woke Nonsense.

21) Vitor Pereira (Nottingham Forest, February onwards) (NE)

Pereira’s Premier League return perhaps more than any other appointment sums up just how batsh*t the managergeddon has been this season.

He’s back in the Premier League as Nottingham Forest’s fourth permanent managerial appointment of the campaign after starting the season by taking two points from 10 games at Wolves, and has arrived into a scenario where taking one point from his first three Premier League games legitimately constitutes a new-manager bounce that will likely keep Forest in the Premier League.

All he has to do now is do what almost everyone else has managed this season – although not, it should be noted, his Wolves side who managed only a deeply embarrassing 1-1 draw – and win at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in a couple of weekends’ time and the relegation fight is over.

There is inevitable glibness about just how little he has to do to succeed at Forest, but that’s not his fault. It’s Tottenham’s, and the Europa League win over Fenerbahce was impressive. And one point from his three Premier League games thus far really isn’t that bad given they were Liverpool at home followed by Brighton and Man City away.

It gets much easier now, domestically at least, with a checked-out Fulham, catastrophising Tottenham, tiring Villa and doomed Burnley all enormously beatable opponents in the next four Premier League games. Especially as three of those games are at home, and the other is at Spurs which is basically just as good.

20) Scott Parker (Burnley) (16)

An expertly navigated season in which Parker has never really looked like he might keep Burnley up but nor has he ever looked like it’s going to get truly embarrassing. Given his obvious status as the perfect man to get Burnley back up against next season, it’s always been just enough to keep him away from the deadliest sacking talk.

We kind of think that it’s also helped him that this has been such a turbulent season for managers. There has always seemed to be more drama going off elsewhere. Never has the spotlight landed on Parker for any real length of time, even during a seven-match losing run towards the end of 2025.

Few are the managers who survive a 16-match gap between league victories, but Parker has done just that and emerged unscathed on the other side.

We have more theories about how and why, if you’re interested. First, Parker has pulled off some eye-catching draws. Sounds more of a p*sstake than it’s meant to be, but it’s true. Already this year Burnley have taken points off Man United, Liverpool and Chelsea – the latter pair away from home.

They have also rarely been humbled. Since September’s 5-1 defeat at Man City – an occupational hazard that can happen to literally anyone outside the very, very best at any time – Burnley have lost only one Premier League game by more than two goals. At Sunderland, for some reason.

Parker is clearly a better manager than when we last saw him in the Premier League, it’s just it hasn’t necessarily equated to points on the board. He’s achieved the curious feat of making Burnley a team that is nearly always competitive in any given match, but not across 38 of them.

19) Calum McFarlane (Chelsea, January) (18)

Must be cursing that the deeply complicated back-and-forth and complex negotiations required to extract Liam Rosenior from Strasbourg meant he was also in charge for the shambolic 2-1 defeat at Fulham rather than just the eerily competent 1-1 draw at Manchester City.

18) Arne Slot (Liverpool) (15)

There are mountains of mitigation on field and off, but when you win the title, spend half-a-billion quid on improving the team and then limp along in sixth and in genuine danger of finishing below Everton, people are going to talk.

It’s not been a good season for Arne Slot, whatever happens from here. The question about last season’s success was always around whether this was early success for a new regime, or a last hurrah for Jurgen Klopp’s team but with a new man just happening to be sat in the big lummox’s chair.

Almost impossible now to argue it was anything other than the latter. That’s not to denigrate what Slot achieved last year. It may seem obvious to just let a team that knew what they were doing carry on doing largely that with a touch of refinement and influence here and there, but the ego on plenty of managers wouldn’t have allowed it.

Slot’s first season as Liverpool manager was very much one of evolution not revolution, and it brought spectacular success.

In hindsight, the scale of the summer’s changes was probably too much too fast. They have missed Trent Alexander-Arnold terribly. Alexander-Arnold is not the best player in the world, but for Liverpool he was perhaps uniquely irreplaceable, so specific and rare was his skillset.

A key knock-on effect of his absence has been the significantly reduced effectiveness of Mo Salah. Dominik Szoboszlai has stepped up, Hugo Ekitike has had a fine first season, and Virgil van Dijk is somehow just about upright and playing basically all of the football in his 35th year. But there have been so many strugglers, many of them previously reliable performers.

Cody Gakpo, Ibrahima Konate and Alexis Mac Allister have not had good seasons. Florian Wirtz and Milos Kerkez both took a long time to adapt to their new surroundings.

And throughout it all, Slot has never particularly convinced. He has spent far too much of the season far too rattled, and no longer looks like the perfect fit he did last season. Back then, Slot’s calmness looked like the perfect foil for a team built in Klopp’s slightly more chaotic image and there was an alchemic best-of-both-worlds quality to it all.

Now it just all seems a bit… sh*t.

17) Enzo Maresca (Chelsea, August-January) (10)

Another Big Six manager who paid the price (or got his escape, depending on your perspective) for off-field disagreements rather than on-field performance.

We haven’t ever, in truth, been entirely convinced by Maresca as an elite coach. But he also probably did do just about everything and more that could reasonably be asked of anyone working under the unique weirdness that is BlueCo’s Chelsea, where you are less a football coach and more a layer of middle-management bureaucracy in a vast and inscrutable player-trading empire.

We were even more frustrated this season than we were last with the way he self-fulfillingly talked Chelsea out of the title race, but we also understand what he was driving at. It must be immensely frustrating to try and work as Chelsea’s head coach, a job where the thing that is in many ways the biggest hindrance to performing to the best of your ability is also the very thing that means you won’t get the full credit if and when it does go well.

“Oh, anyone could succeed when they get half-a-billion quid to spend!” is a pretty compelling argument. But only if you as the coach get that half-a-billion quid to spend on the specific talents and player profile you need or want to try and drive on-field success. Not so much when that money is instead being buried on players that a spreadsheet suggests have the greatest potential for future profit.

It’s not even that BlueCo are wrong, in their own grim way. Chelsea’s sales sheet tells you this is a wild and unscrupulous but undeniably feasible way to run a business. It’s just surely not a great way to build a football team.

16) Fabian Hurzeler (Brighton) (9)

Has come under pressure at various points in a tricky season, but with survival now guaranteed it’s likely his most memorable contribution to the season will be his most embarrassing: crying his eyes out about Arsenal being beastly.

He’s not the first and won’t be the last manager to be Arsenaled in this way, but his response was deeply undignified and entirely disingenuous.

There really is no football club and no football manager who can complain about the dark arts in the way Hurzeler did. You certainly can’t pretend you’re loftily above it all, because show me a team and manager who don’t indulge in time-wasting when the situation requires it and I’ll show you a liar.

And, of course, he’s set himself up for a fall here now, because the next time Brighton are protecting a one-goal lead via the exact methods deployed by all teams since time immemorial, his hypocrisy will be called out and he’ll have nobody to blame but himself when the terminally online Arsenal fans are gunning for him with right on their side.

On which note, surely only a matter of time before an Arsenal fan somewhere sets up a twitter account about time-wasting where they pretend only Arsenal have ever been criticised for it.

15) Eddie Howe (Newcastle) (5)

A patchy season and a clear overestimation of a decent little run of results that propelled Newcastle briefly up the table and Howe up the rankings here last time out.

If they finish the season like a train they could sneak back into European contention, and it’s still possible that extending their run in this season’s Champions League by knocking out Barcelona in the last 16 adds a layer of gloss, but right now it feels like an underwhelming season is more likely to reach a fittingly underwhelming end.

The problem for Howe is that another mid-table finish this year would add to the impression that Newcastle aren’t quite able yet to act like the big club they believe themselves to be. Over the last four seasons they have alternated between Champions League-qualification seasons and disappointing ones when faced with the extra burden of European midweeks.

Big clubs handle that, and once again this season Newcastle haven’t been able to do so.

At some point Howe, impressively competent manager that he is, is going to start to look like a brake on the club’s sky-high ambitions.

14) Nuno Espirito Santo (West Ham, September onwards) (26)

Looked absolutely certain to be sacked a second time with West Ham circling the drain and seemingly heading for certain relegation around the turn of the year. Could have had no complaints at all if the 3-0 paddling at a previously winless Wolves had been his last act, and following that with a defeat to Nottingham Forest in a home six-pointer did hint at it being all over.

At that point, Nuno and the Hammers were 10 games without a win and in serious danger of being cut adrift at the foot of the table. What followed was perhaps the single most remarkable life-saving operation in Dr Tottenham’s long and distinguished career, made all the more impressive on this occasion by the noble sacrifice of not just handing the Hammers a lifeline but condemning themselves in the process.

Since a thoroughly deserved 2-1 win at Spurs, West Ham have taken a further 11 points from the next seven games to all but obliterate the gap between them and safety.

If they can just cling on through the next two games against Man City and Aston Villa, the run-in looks favourable. If all goes to plan their clash against Arsenal in May might even be a party occasion for both.

13) Liam Rosenior (Chelsea, January onwards) (19)

Still very much feels like nobody is taking the Premier League’s most LinkedIn manager entirely seriously, which is entirely his own fault of course.

The results have been broadly fine, with 10 wins from 15 games across four competitions in barely two months. It’s a fairly brutal schedule for a new manager, offering precious little time to work on anything beyond the next match a few days away.

His three defeats have all been by the odd goal against Arsenal, which isn’t ideal but nor is it catastrophic. The pair of home draws against relegation battlers Burnley and Leeds a touch more so – especially given the way in which advantages were squandered in both – but that does feel like more of a Chelsea issue than a Rosenior one.

Rosenior has also thus far been unable to do anything about Chelsea’ mad disciplinary problems, but the fact he has been let down by two of his most senior pros and they were both 25 years old feels distinctly Chelsea-coded.

Impossible at this point to say whether he’s actually any good or not, but we suspect the answer is a) probably yes and b) probably won’t make much difference because it’s Chelsea and nobody does two years anyway.

Let’s all just hope he hangs on long enough to do an all-access documentary that, to our absolute shock, he is very much up for. It’ll be a cross between The Office and that Bros documentary, and required viewing. Don’t ruin that for us, Chelsea, with your customary hiring-and-firing shenanigans.

12) Oliver Glasner (Crystal Palace) (10)

A lot of managers have had funny old seasons. Glasner is high on the list. At one point it even looked like he might be leading Palace into a relegation fight. Or even that he might be leaving them to it in the middle of a relegation fight.

When he confirmed he would not remain beyond the end of the current season and that Marc Guehi – Palace’s best player – was leaving for Man City, the Eagles were in the midst of a nine-match winless run that threatened to go Full Tottenham. And you never, ever go Full Tottenham.

Three wins in their last five – including one against the most on-brand self-sabotaging Tottenham effort imaginable – have squashed those concerns, but it does all just still feel like something rather wonderful is ending in a slightly unsatisfactory way.

Glasner will go down as one of the greatest Palace managers of all time for what he achieved last season, but while catastrophe has at least been averted, this one still feels like it’s a bit of a letdown.

The Conference could still change all that, with Palace now in a much more acceptable Full Tottenham position of being able to dedicate themselves entirely to European matters over the remaining months of the season.

11) Rob Edwards (Wolves, November onwards) (13)

Wolves were already doomed when he took over, despite it only being November, and it’s fair to say there was not exactly a new-manager bounce because a team that had spent three months losing almost all of the matches spent another couple of months doing just that.

Edwards’ appointment is perhaps the earliest any club has ever appointed a manager with one eye on getting them back up the following season. But there’s certainly every chance of that, because Edwards has taken the worst Premier League team of all time and made them competent.

It won’t be enough to save them, but a team that came into 2026 with only two points all season now sits in comfy mid-table in the 2026 calendar year table and that’s enormously impressive.

They’ve seen off your Derby Countys and the Southamptons of this world and you’d have to say now on current form they may very well not finish bottom of the league at least. Any team that can take seven points from three successive home games against Arsenal, Aston Villa and Liverpool is clearly doing something right and can be expected to collect further points along the way.

At present speed and course Edwards’ side will reel in Burnley. Is it too greedy when we’re already getting a Spurs relegation to also want Wolves to go past them? It probably is. But the fact it’s not impossible is staggering.

10) David Moyes (Everton) (12)

Fair to say it’s been an under-rated effort from Moyes and his team to quietly avoid chaos in a season full of it. Everton fans more than any other know the agonies Spurs supporters are currently enduring as the risk of ever-present Premier League being spaffed away looms large, and will thus be enjoying the sight of it happening to someone else more than most.

For Moyes and Everton ambitions now lie in an entirely different direction, with European qualification a distinct possibility for an Everton side now just a point outside the top seven and only five adrift of an unconvincing Liverpool in sixth.

This is where Moyes does his best work, isn’t it? Just quietly, unassumingly putting a good side into a good position. Generally, this is followed by one of two problems down the line. One, people start noticing that it’s going really well, and it instantly collapses in on itself.

Two, and this is the fear you have with Everton, thoughts start to creep in that there could be something more out there than the quiet mid-table calm Moyes offers. Now that Everton are one of the big new stadium clubs – and having a season almost entirely devoid of panic straight after the stadium move is a big win in itself – you always have the fear that there will start to be talks about ‘next level’ or ‘brand of football’ and before you know it Everton are 16th in November under a flailing manager and looking for a firefighter again. They must stay strong, they must remain vigilant. What you have here is very good indeed.

9) Pep Guardiola (Manchester City) (8)

Honestly? We just don’t know what to do here. It does feel like Manchester City have not, by Manchester City standards, actually been that good this season. Yet it is also and ludicrously true that it could end up being Guardiola’s best season of the lot with nothing like his best team.

Imagine if they win all four trophies. Imagine this being the season they decide to do that. Imagine the sheer discoursepocalypse that would greet the simultaneous existence of a Man City quad and another trophyless Arsenal season.

Feels more likely, though, that City end up second-best to Arsenal in all three domestic competitions as well as coming up short once again in Europe, where they have thus far been less convincing than Spurs.

Guardiola and City also have the widest possible range of outcomes for this season it is possible to imagine, because – and, again, we’re really not quite sure how this is so – at one end of the scale sits the quadruple and at the other sits a 60-point penalty and relegation.

Which has us thinking that actually the only way this season can actually end is with City pipping Arsenal to the title. At which point the Gunners join forces with 18th-placed Spurs for a blockbuster joint legal action to have City stripped of all their points and, by sheer coincidence because they are both just acting entirely altruistically for the wider good of the game, Arsenal crowned champions with Spurs saved from themselves.

8) Michael Carrick (Manchester United, January onwards) (NE)

His second interim stint at United has been longer than the first and even more impressive. Although we have absolutely no time for people cheating and combining the two and pretending they count as one reign for record-breaking purposes, there’s no denying his ability to calm a chaotic Manchester United environment.

Looks almost certain to get Man United back into the Champions League, which is genuinely impressive given the chaotic time they’ve had over the last 18 months, but should also have your Chelseas and Liverpools looking sheepishly at their feet and wondering how they’ve allowed basic competence to be so very effective.

‘Basic competence’ isn’t fair, either. Clearly, Carrick has delivered more than that. Yet it is head-spinningly absurd just how straightforward and obvious many of his most effective changes have been since he returned to the club.

Playing a formation the players don’t hate. Picking players in their best positions. Picking the best available players rather than banishing them in a huff. None of this should be revolutionary, yet all of it is in the wake of Ruben Amorim’s utterly ludicrous and chaotic destroy and exit.

It should not be possible for a player of Kobbe Mainoo’s obvious talents to become Like A New Signing, yet here we are.

The question now, of course, becomes what happens next. Carrick has done all that could have been asked and more – although five wins on the spin to f*ck haircut grifter off back to irrelevance would have been nice – in terms of getting the job on a permanent basis, yet the spectre of Ole Gunnar Solskjaer looms large.

The specifics of Manchester United’s long-running banter era make this a tougher decision than it appears to be, and we can accept that. Albeit we do find the sheer depth of Paul Scholes’ feelings on the matter a little unsettling.

What we would say on Carrick’s claims to the permanent job beyond the excellent results so far is this: if his surface-level similarity to a similar managerial appointment that went wrong excludes him, then who can Man United appoint?

Because over what is now significantly more than a decade in the (relative) doldrums, there really isn’t a managerial type they haven’t already tried and discarded. They’ve gone with experience, they’ve gone with bright young thing, they’ve tried Premier League-proven, they’ve gone with big-name megastar.

If Solskjaer is enough to rule out Carrick, then that lot is enough to rule out pretty much everyone else.

7) Marco Silva (Fulham) (7)

Marco Silva is the manager of Fulham Football Club, Marco Silva must always be the manager of Fulham Football Club. No good can come for either him or them in changing this.

6) Daniel Farke (Leeds) (6)

We’ll hold our hands up and say we a) didn’t expect him to still be Leeds manager in March and b) even thought there was a strong case for Leeds taking the brutal but based on his record justifiable move of thanking him after promotion and immediately looking elsewhere.

It just felt like it might cut out the middle man to do it in July rather than November.

And there were certainly points during the first half of the season when Farke’s days appeared numbered.

But it was in the last defeat of a run of six in seven games that Leeds’ season pivoted. That miserable run included defeats to what we knew at the time to be relegation rivals (Burnley, Forest) and what we would later discover to be (Tottenham) but ended with a 3-2 defeat at Man City in which Farke’s Leeds threatened the unlikeliest of comebacks.

A new formation and emboldened belief after that game has Leeds firmly on course for fairly comfy survival now. Eleven points from 13 games up to and including the City game and 20 points from 16 since doesn’t quite tell the whole story of just how different Leeds look before and after, but it still tells the story clearly enough. That first part of the season had them on course for 32 points across the season and near-certain relegation; the second part equates to 47 points over a full season and comfy lower-mid-table survival.

5) Andoni Iraola (Bournemouth) (11)

He’s done it again, hasn’t he? There can be few managers in Premier League history who’ve had a better signature bit than Iraola’s, and surely none with greater commitment to it.

His Bournemouth side remain utterly and resolutely wedded to the policy of only ever being in Champions League form or relegation form and it’s an absolutely wonderful way to go about your mid-tabling.

We all know the numbers by now, but they bear repeating. Five wins and three draws from the first nine games of the season. Five draws and six defeats from the next 11. Four wins and five draws from an unbeaten last nine.

They’ll probably beat Burnley at the weekend, but tell me this subsequent run-in doesn’t scream ‘three draws and five defeats’ given everything we know about Iraola and his team: Man United, Arsenal, Newcastle, Leeds, Palace, Fulham, Man City, Nottingham Forest.

Right up there with Marco Silva as manager who must never leave his current job, but much more importantly must never deviate from his patented, established pattern of results.

4) Unai Emery (Aston Villa) (2)

We really think he might sack it all off this summer, because it’s very possible he’s already taken Aston Villas far as he can and, frankly, further than their financial limits ought to allow.

The related fear, of course, is that this season ends with a whimper. It’s a very real danger for a team whose league form has dropped off sufficiently that entirely valid talk of title challenges is now a scramble to ensure a top-five finish. They should still do it, and it should still go without saying that Champions League qualification constitutes an entirely acceptable effort.

But they also have one of the tougher run-ins. Losing at Wolves was bad, and Villa looked a team running on fumes against Chelsea. And of their remaining games, only those against Sunderland and Fulham are against teams with little to play for. Although the Man City game on the final day may well be immaterial by then, they also have two six-pointers against Man United and Liverpool as well as games against teams scrapping for their lives in West Ham, Nottingham Forest and Spurs.

The Europa League is very much still there to be won, of course, which would change things dramatically again. Although Villa may pay the price here for failing to follow the lead shown last season by Manchester United and Spurs of successfully torpedoing their Premier League season before the knockouts.

3) Regis Le Bris (Sunderland) (3)

Loses points for tossing the FA Cup off so disappointingly. We will never understand or forgive clubs in mid-table safety who sack the cup off at this stage of the season. Premier League prize money can go whistle.

The Port Vale unpleasantness aside, it’s still been a wonderful season for Le Bris and his team. The win at Leeds was a touch unexpected and particularly welcome. Not because Sunderland were in any kind of danger, but because it just halts the idea that they might drift to the end of the season.

It would be understandable if they did having so entirely exceeded pre-season expectations, but it would nevertheless be a shame for a team that has had a top-half air about it for most of the campaign to stagger over the finishing line down in 13th or 14th – especially now there’s no cup run to keep the blood up.

2) Mikel Arteta (Arsenal) (1)

You don’t have to like him or his team, which is just as well, but he’s now a fascinating and substantial Premier League presence.

He’s also, more than any other Premier League manager since maybe Jose Mourinho, one who has been reduced entirely to slightly misleading caricature.

The difference with Arteta is that there are multiple misleading caricatures.

Here’s what he actually is: an excellent young manager on the verge of something truly extraordinary with a team he has painstakingly and to a clear plan built, honed and perfected over the last half a decade.

Here’s what he isn’t: a despicable dark arts only merchant who can only win by cheating, whether that be actual cheating or scoring all the goals from set-pieces which is basically the same thing.

But here’s what he also isn’t: a plucky upstart who has tweaked the noses of the big-spending clubs with his ragtag bunch of academy graduates and bargain buys.

Arteta is a big-club manager in every way, for both good and bad. Arsenal have spent a fortune, but over the last few years in particular always to a clear plan and always with a clear idea in mind as to what, precisely, they were looking for. Even Viktor Goykeres is kind of working out now.

It’s hugely impressive and if it was easy then every big club would be just as good at it, and they aren’t.

Recent Mailboxes make it clear that few figures in the game currently divide opinion quite like Arteta, but perhaps that’s because both his detractors and supporters have slightly mad ideas of what he actually is.

Almost certainly will, but definitely does need to win something this season, for his own record and possibly sanity. Does feel like however Arsenal’s potentially record-breaking season pans out from here, we’re all going to have to suffer some extremely potent discourse about it until the World Cup comes along.

1) Keith Andrews (Brentford) (4)

If he keeps Brentford in their current position then he’s manager of the year, isn’t he? It’s testament to how well the club operates that they have so seamlessly coped with a summer of such dire upheaval.

They lost a manager, they lost 40 goals, and they lost their captain. The outcome? They’re better than ever.

Thomas Frank is a very lucky man that the media love him so very, very much, because otherwise his career would be in even greater ruin than it already is. It’s not just that he was so utterly incapable of coping with the Spurs goldfish bowl – because there really is no shame in that – it’s that Brentford haven’t missed a beat in his absence.

Indeed, Andrews has them on course to finish higher than Frank ever managed even when he had your Ivan Toneys or Yoane Wissas or the Bryan Mbeumos of this world at his disposal.

There’s no great mystery to Andrews’ strengths. His Brentford team is relentlessly committed, impeccably organised and a menace from set-pieces. They’re Arsenal basically, but without the price tag and history and thus less annoying to everyone else.

The next month or so either side of the international break offer a wonderful chance for Brentford to cement their top-seven spot with relegation-threatened Wolves and Leeds up first, followed by direct rivals Everton and Fulham. Get that lot right and Andrews is in the awards shake-up for sure.