It’s hard to escape the conclusion that there is a serious problem with managerial selection in parts of the Premier League. Poor decisions are damaging clubs’ reputations for sporting success, business ethics, on-field performance and financial results. So what’s going wrong?
Why Premier League Managerial Appointments Keep Failing
Premier League clubs say that managers are appointed via rigorous processes. Boards and sporting directors tell us they focus on strategic fit, tactical philosophy, recent success, leadership capability and compatibility with the club’s structure under a Director of Football. Candidates are assessed on their playing style, data analytics are deployed, references are checked, and personalities are evaluated.
And yet, with alarming regularity, the final decision proves to be incorrect.
Research from Sheffield Hallam University showed that between 1992 and 2016 around 40% of managers changed each season, aided by employment law loopholes that allow instant, high-profile dismissals without notice. Little has changed since. We are already up to 25% turnover this season. There has been a recent storm of walkouts, resignations and sackings, a recycling of old heroes, and a strong sense that more turbulence lies ahead.
Some clubs have done well over time. Manchester City, Arsenal and Liverpool stand out. Others, such as Brentford, Bournemouth and Newcastle, have shown that leadership stability can coexist with competitive success. However, a 40% annual casualty rate dwarfs CEO turnover elsewhere in UK business, which has hovered between 7 and 17% in recent years, with average FTSE CEO tenure of five to seven years.
The Integration Problem Football Keeps Ignoring
Selection is only part of the problem. Research into successful executive integration in large and complex organisations consistently highlights three predictors of success: role clarity, relationship building and time for cultural alignment. Even in standard corporate environments, effective integration takes longer than 100 days. Football clubs routinely fail on all three counts.
Modern club structures, particularly the rise of the Director of Football overseeing all football activity, have become breeding grounds for misunderstanding and conflict. Managers with global profiles are often required to report to figures with less status or experience. Role ambiguity is rife. Reuben Amorim’s recent insistence that he is a manager, not a coach, is only the latest public expression of a long-running problem.
Managing upwards is a core leadership skill in organisational life. It is one that many Premier League managers appear to lack or reject outright. Nuno Espírito Santo struggled badly on this front at Nottingham Forest. Enzo Maresca at Chelsea and Amorim at Manchester United seemed either unable or unwilling to play by the unwritten rule: keep conflict inside the club.
When things unravel publicly, the damage is significant. The recent, highly public exchange between Celtic’s owner and departing manager Brendan Rodgers crossed, in many observers’ eyes, the line between robust feedback and personal attack.
Cultural fit matters too. Gary Neville has spoken repeatedly about Manchester United’s failure to appoint managers who fit the club’s “DNA”, though what that DNA actually is behaviourally remains frustratingly vague. Fit is easy to invoke but hard to define, yet it remains one of the strongest predictors of leadership success.
Meanwhile, pundits on Match of the Day routinely argue that managers need more time. And yet Wilfried Nancy, whose process-driven, long-term philosophy might reasonably have required patience, was given just eight games at Celtic before being dismissed. It was a spectacular failure to understand what mattered, both to the manager and to the club.
So clubs struggle with selection, struggle with integration, and incidentally continue to show a remarkable absence of gender diversity. It is always a “he”, isn’t it? High-profile external appointments from overseas leagues are consistently preferred to internal succession too. Something is clearly going adrift.
A Better Way to Think About Leadership Selection
To be fair, football clubs are not FTSE-style businesses. The pressure for immediate results is relentless. League tables update weekly, fan sentiment shifts daily and there is evidence that decisive action after managerial failure can sometimes pay off. But clearly something is broken. The question is how to do better.
Current events at Manchester United are instructive. The media response has been to circulate a familiar shortlist of emotionally intelligent, politically astute managers who might “handle the job”. Pep Guardiola and Jürgen Klopp had these qualities; Erik ten Hag and Amorim did not, so let’s learn the lesson.
But this is precisely the wrong way to proceed.
The right approach is to start by defining the specific success factors for the role now. Not in general, not historically, but at this moment in the club’s development. Context matters because leadership demands change with it. That means understanding the current strategic context, the stakeholder landscape, the expectations of fans and players, the realities of the hierarchy, the formal structures and the informal power networks, and the style of leadership that will work today. All of these need attention, prioritisation and then translation into experiential and behavioural characteristics.
A turnaround requires different qualities from stable maintenance. Roy Hodgson’s exit from Liverpool was driven not only by results but by his deteriorating relationship with supporters. Klopp’s successor faces the challenge of sustaining success. Manchester United’s next manager faces something altogether different.
From careful analysis, the critical behavioural and experiential requirements can be defined and embedded into the selection process. It is not easy, but done thoroughly, it works. And once appointed, paying disciplined attention to integration, relationship building, cultural alignment and structured feedback in the early months materially improves the odds of success.
None of this is new. These are well-established principles of executive assessment and development. They are unfashionable at times, often ignored in the heat of the moment by the powerful, and repeatedly relearned the hard way. But they remain true.
And this is where Gadby comes in.
At Gadby, we work with organisations facing these challenges: high-stakes leadership appointments, intense scrutiny, complex stakeholder environments and little margin for error. Whether in sport or business, success comes from clarity about what is truly required, discipline in how decisions are made, and care in how leaders are set up to succeed.
Football may be exceptional in its passion and pace, but it is not exempt from the fundamentals of good decision-making. Until clubs take those fundamentals seriously, selection and integration, the chaos on the touchline is unlikely to end.
High-stakes leadership decisions deserve more than instinct.
Discover how Gadby helps organisations get leadership appointments right the first time.