The managerial merry-go-round

Kind of surprised Smoochie hasn't been 'tipped' for Leicester. I wouldn't want to be forced to wish failure, though.

They're still arguing whether they should hire Potter or Benitez, they're nowhere near ready to accept someone like Sabri. My guess is that they'll end up with some unheard of foreigner from the Spanish second division, convince themselves that they've pulled a masterstroke by hiring the new Mourinho, and then fire him when they're mid table at Christmas.

Sabri was fired by Cardiff at the end of last season for keeping them up. Add in our COVID-era collapse and there's no way he's on the radar of a team looking to get promoted automatically before their parachute payments run out.

They'll probablyprove me wrong but with most of their best players leaving and all of their players showing no fight last season, they are going to find it hard to bounce back. Vardy is not going to emulate Mitrovic. They need to get money in for Barnes and Maddison asap and put a viable team together.

Sounds like it's going to be Enzo Maresca, Pep's assistant. So not quite a Spanish second division nobody, but I feel confident in the trajectory all the same. The whole "hire an untried assistant from a big club to work his connections and get the best loans" model hasn't ever really worked that I can recall. Paul Clement and Brian Kidd spring to mind.

Arteta?

Was promoted from assistant to head coach at Benfica for his first job.

Was not hired by Arsenal to bring in big name loans from City.

Queiroz didn’t exactly set the world alight, if memory serves.

Deleted. Someone got there before me and spazzed the quote function anyway.

Scheteeeve was No2 at sheep under Jim Smith before taking on the role at Utd.

Did OK for a bit at Muddlesbrough as manager before absolute laughing stockery ensued everywhere else.

Mark Warburton has left West Ham, where he was on the coaching staff.

Craig Shakespeare was rubbish.

So apart from a few, most are shite.

This new Leicester bloke has had one management job a couple of years ago in Italy where he failed winning 4 games out of 16.

Maresca confirmed at Leicester. Nothing against the bloke, but hopefully he's a disaster.

It feels like the ‘Pep’s assistant’ thing is a bit of fluff to appease the fans who thought they were going to get someone of Potter’s calibre. He was basically a senior coach at Citeh for a year.. whatever Arteta learned from his time with Pep, this guy almost certainly did not. And Citeh won’t be loaning out players as a favour.. they are very ‘deliberate’ in their development strategies, and doing favours for kinda-mates isn’t part of any of them.

He could be good for them, obviously, but he seems several grades lower than what they were after. I wonder if their financial situation forced them to aim a little lower than the status they think they have.

Meanwhile, Brendan Rodgers and Brendan Rodgers' big portrait of Brendan Rodgers so Brendan Rodgers can admire a big portrait of Brendan Rodgers is off back to Celtic.

Because Brendan Rodgers.

Brendan Rodgers

It also feels not too dissimilar to when we came straight back down in 1999 following that horror show season and BFR fiasco.

We were all suffering with delusions of adequacy and relevance and talking about (then) high profile high stock names like Hoodle and MON.

We ended up with a recently retired England midfielder whose managerial experience was a few less than stellar games leading Sampdoria from the stands.

We all tried to convince ourselves that it was an exciting progressive thinking marquee coup of an appointment.