Liam Rosenior the poster boy for all-timer Premier League season of rotten managers

Liam Rosenior has become the latest Premier League manager to look woefully out of his depth in what has become a theme of this season.

While Premier League manager sackings are nothing new – you have to go back to the 2019/20 season to find the last time fewer than eight clubs dispensed with their manager – this campaign has offered some particularly incompetent managerial spells.

The season started with one of the earliest manager sackings in Premier League history as Nuno Espírito Santo’s summer of discontent stretched into the new campaign and led to Evangelos Marinakis pulling the trigger.

What came next was a move that almost everyone but Marinakis and Edu could see would be a failure – the appointment of Ange Postecoglou.

The Greek-Australian was like Schrodinger’s manager in that he was simultaneously a brilliant and terrible manager due to winning a European trophy at Spurs but also guiding them to a 17th-place finish.

Dropping him into the Forest set-up with a squad built for a manager who had almost the polar opposite style was always going to end badly. Postecoglou was sacked after 39 days following eight games without a win.

In his place, Forest hit the panic button and brought in Sean Dyche, who did steady the ship but there were still some notable holes that suggested a sink into the Championship was coming; Dyche lasted 114 days and Forest turned to a man whose CV included guiding Wolves to two points from their first 10 games of the new season.

Vítor Pereira had only signed a new three-year contract 45 days before his sacking at the Molinuex but does seem to have improved Forest, or just made them not quite as bad as Tottenham. Speaking of.

If (when) Tottenham do go down, the 2025/26 season will become a case study for any potential owner of a football club in how not to run it. Last summer, they were faced with the tough choice of sacking a club legend but while firing Postecoglou was the right move, appointing Thomas Frank proved to be the wrong one.

The former Brentford boss is a competent manager but as soon as he was in north London, he seemed woefully unprepared for that level. Asking your players to play like Arsenal may work at Brentford but it very much does not at Spurs , and Frank failed to grasp that managing a club that size is as much about managing egos as it is about tactical instructions.

Revelations that he was an Arsenal fan in his youth followed by the coffee cup incident saw the fans turn on Frank but those same fans would have been asking “who?” when they heard who the club appointed as his successor.

Igor Tudor was billed as a firefighter, someone who could move the club clear of the relegation zone, and yet the football somehow got even worse. Tudor lost five of his seven matches and left the club a point above the relegation zone.

Poor manager choices are not just something the clubs at the bottom make either. Manchester United began the year with Ruben Amorim, a manager they seemed determined to back despite all logic telling them he was not the right man for the job.

After a disastrous first season, United kept faith with Amorim over the summer and results had begun to turn in their favour but it was the Portuguese boss’s refusal to adapt his system that led to his demise.

Amorim’s record has only looked worse with the arrival of Michael Carrick who, from the outside, has not done much more than play a back four and put the players in their favourite positions.

And then there’s Chelsea . BlueCo’s desire to have synergy across their brands extended to the manager’s position when they parted ways with Enzo Maresca, someone who dared to not want to be told by medical staff what minutes the starting XI should play, and gave Liam Rosenior a six-year deal.

To the shock of very few, that has blown up in BlueCo’s face with Chelsea on their worst run since 1912 and Strasbourg fans in open revolt about becoming a feeder club.

Not every failed manager has been cut from the same cloth. Frank was an experienced Premier League operator not fit for a big club. Maresca was unable to work in the conditions he was presented with. Tudor and Rosenior were brought into a league they had no managerial experience of and were expected to get immediate results.

This season has been an exceptional year in terms of just how many managerial misfires there have been, but coaches do not operate in a vacuum and every instance has a common connection – poor choices by the owners.

Forest’s problems have been caused by a trigger-happy owner who sided with his now-exiled sporting director over the proven manager. Wolves’ relegation has been years in the making with the club selling off their best assets and failing to even attempt to replace them.

BlueCo’s ownership of Chelsea has been a how-to guide on turning Premier League challengers into a club focused on buying young players and (maybe) flipping them for profit, while Tottenham is an example of how to repeatedly shoot yourself in the foot, making accusations that your CEO is a secret Arsenal fan all the more believable.

Managers are not getting worse. Look at Brighton, Brentford, Bournemouth and Fulham for examples of where a well thought-out plan was accompanied by a well-chosen manager. Maybe some of the biggest clubs should give idea that a pop.