Friends, season nine, episode five, The One with Phoebe’s Birthday Dinner. Joey is left alone at a restaurant table. His five companions have all deserted him. At that moment, everybody’s orders arrive. “Dinner for six for one?” says Joey, tucking his napkin into the neck of his shirt, as the waiters drop an array of plates. “Well, you boys are about to see something really special . . .”
And so are we, at Nottingham Forest. Four managers, one campaign. Never been tried before, not in the top division. Will it work? Can it work? Let’s pull up a chair, crack open the wine and find out.
Hell, I’m watching. Who isn’t watching? Watford once had four managers in 37 days — of course they did — in 2014, but there were extenuating circumstances. Beppe Sannino resigned and was replaced by Óscar Garcia, who then stood down due to ill health with Billy McKinlay appointed and dismissed after two games for Slavisa Jokanovic. Barnet also had four managers in League Two in 2017-18 — Rossi Eames, Mark McGhee, Graham Westley and Martin Allen — but the first two moved into other roles within the club, so may not technically have been sacked.
Dyche departed shortly after Forest drew 0-0 at home to bottom side Wolves
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Permanency is the key here. There are plenty of clubs that have been through four bosses including caretaker or interim appointments, and some that even got to five. Blackburn Rovers did in 2012-13 and Leeds United in 2014-15, both in the Championship. Derby County, Newcastle United, Portsmouth, Aston Villa, Swansea City, West Bromwich Albion, Watford, Chelsea and Leeds have all had four in a season, including temporaries, as Premier League clubs. Yet the moment Vítor Pereira becomes the permanent replacement for Sean Dyche — at least until the end of the season — Forest trip into the record books.
Yet Evangelos Marinakis, the owner, retains the support of the fans. He sacks who he wants, sues who he wants, bans who he wants, does what he wants, and they sing about and love it all. At what point, however, are they going to call this for what it is: chaos. And, look, I get it, the love of the common people. Nottingham Forest were a big club, a great club. They were European champions, their players were household names. And then they spent 23 years out of the top division, including three seasons in the third tier.
Fans of the biggest clubs can no longer imagine what that is like. Your club disappears, from the national newspapers, from the sports bulletins. It almost ceases to exist. Nottingham was the one place where Leicester City’s miraculous title win was resented. Not because of local rivalry, but because if Leicester’s was the greatest achievement in English football history, it took away Forest’s enduring claim. That Brian Clough taking the club from promotion in Division Two to the title in Division One and then the European Cup in successive seasons was the pinnacle of attainment and would never be matched. Then everyone gave that crown to Leicester in a year when Forest finished 16th in the Championship, were knocked out by Watford in the FA Cup and Walsall in the League Cup. No wonder they were bitter.
Then along came Marinakis, and made Forest great again. Not as they once were, because that would require a second miracle, but in a way that made the fans proud. Forest did not come up humble, they did not arrive to consolidate, maybe yo-yo a little, to go down and come back stronger.
Marinakis has taken Forest back to the top flight and into Europe but is not afraid to change his manager
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With Marinakis at the helm, Forest came up to have a go. And it cost them points deductions, and they haven’t many friends at PGMOL, but if your team was Forest you didn’t care because the big guy sitting in the main stand like a resentful busted sofa, glowering, didn’t care either. He did what he did for Forest. He wasn’t respectful, he didn’t duck his head or acquiesce. And after 23 years in the hinterland, he was exactly who you wanted to run your football club. Even in this, the season of chaos, Marinakis has spent £180 million on 16 players, trying to compete.
Except there is also a moment when the reality screams: this is nuts. And that’s probably on your fourth manager of the season. Different styles, different beliefs, Marinakis is a shipping magnate but if a craft was tossed and listing as badly as this, the crew would be heading for the lifeboats. Nuno Espírito Santo liked to counterattack, Ange Postecoglou played on the front foot, Dyche had always favoured tight defence and a big target man, Pereira deploys a high press.
It has been hard for players such as Jesus to settle at Forest when their manager keeps changing
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It’s as if Marinakis is hitting a random manager generator and employing what comes up. So if you are Igor Jesus, coming to English football from a career largely in the Brazilian league, what are you to do with this? Lurching from one regime to another, no wonder he has only scored two Premier League goals all season.
At what stage does Marinakis’s belligerence turn ruinous? The numbers aren’t on his side. There have been 20 clubs that have deployed three managers in a Premier League season and 14 of them went down. Survivors include Tottenham Hotspur and Chelsea in 2022-23, neither of whom were seriously threatened by relegation that year.
Marinakis consulted the players before sacking Dyche, but how likely are they to speak truth to power? Nobody will have called him on his judgments this season. Players can be self-satisfied. We still hear that, in Elliot Anderson, Forest have a £100 million player. Declan Rice raised that on the back of winning the Conference League for West Ham United, but Rice kept his club stable. Try getting relegated and see what you’re worth.
And Forest are in Europe, too. They play Fenerbahce in a Europa League play-off on Thursday. Win that and they will face Real Betis or Midtjylland for a place in the last eight. At which point, potentially, they sit five matches from the Champions League. Given that when Marinakis arrived the club had to beat Ipswich Town to stay out of League One, of course he is in credit. Yet, having sacked his first manager after three league games, his second after eight and his third after 26, only so much can be grateful history or hopeful projection.
If there is sympathy it is over the fallout between Nuno and Edu, the newly appointed global head of football. Getting Edu from Arsenal was a coup. Marinakis clearly thought he could offer recruitment strategies benefiting the manager. He won’t have imagined the pair at loggerheads. When that happened, one had to go. Maybe Marinakis picked the wrong one. Yet Postecoglou and Dyche’s strengths and weaknesses were obvious. Marinakis knew what he was getting. And if he didn’t, what is the global head of football up to?
Anyway, we’ll see. Either way, are we not entertained? Comedy tonight, as the song goes. Tragedy tomorrow, maybe. And that’s fine — if it’s not your club on the stage.
If Tudor fails, will Pochettino really fancy Derby away?
Mauricio Pochettino loves Tottenham Hotspur. Never had to prove that love in the Championship, though.
The last time Tottenham were outside the top division was 1977-78, when Pochettino was six. He has only known the club as upwardly mobile. Challenging for honours, planning a magnificent new arena. This is what is at stake under interim manager Igor Tudor.
By waiting for Pochettino in the summer, as Tottenham almost certainly are, there remains a risk that the club they present to him bears no resemblance to the one he left in 2019.
Tudor has no experience of coaching in England
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Tudor has never played or coached a single game in the unique environs of English football and his ten previous managerial jobs have yielded a harvest of the Croatian Cup with Hadjuk Split in 2013. Tottenham are five points from the relegation zone with Arsenal the next opposition. It is one hell of a gamble to hand the remainder of the campaign to a Premier League novice. No matter Tudor’s pedigree — he is often credited with making a strong first impact — this is a very different challenge. For every new coach who thrives in the Premier League, like Arne Slot, there is another who sinks, like Ivan Juric, another Croatian with zero experience here, who took Southampton down like a stone last season.
Yet the consequences for Tottenham if that happened would be exceptional. Pochettino may love the club, but will he love an arm-wrestle with Derby County, say, for a promotion place? Will he love a Tottenham shorn of its best players, on a very limited budget, without European exposure? Tottenham’s players are unlikely to have relegation clauses in their contracts. The Championship would be financially disastrous. That is the gamble being taken with Tudor.
Nicholas F Beucher III, husband of Joe Lewis’s granddaughter, Joanna Silverton, the daughter of Vivienne Lewis, oversees the family’s interests from Orlando, Florida. This is a board that wants to be adored and, having delivered one crowd-pleaser by getting rid of Thomas Frank, no move would play more positively than the return of Pochettino from the United States.
An interim appointment as good as makes the job his to turn down, when the World Cup is over. What job, however, depends on Tudor. He may help deliver the manager of the fans’ dreams, or the stuff of their worst nightmares. That’s some cliff edge. And probably not how Daniel Levy would have done it.
Arsenal didn’t like it up ‘em
Arsenal’s match at Brentford played out like an episode of Dad’s Army. There was Mikel Arteta on the touchline imploring his players not to panic, while Keith Andrews, like Corporal Jones, seemed to have very much decided that the league leaders didn’t like it up ‘em. And they didn’t. David Raya was in a frightful flap on receiving the treatment Arsenal mete out to opposition goalkeepers, while every Brentford dead ball or long throw brought carnage. It seemed bizarre that, having poached Nicolas Jover, a former set-piece coach at Brentford, this should come as a surprise. More worryingly, it has delivered a blueprint of how to trouble Arsenal for the rest of the season. Rob Edwards, manager of next week’s opponents, Wolves, will certainly have been taking notes.
Is the FA proud of this?
There really should be no surprise around Thomas Tuchel’s new contract. This was what the FA always wanted. It was Tuchel who came up with the idea of the 2026 World Cup, win or bust, and the FA who finessed that necessity into a pretend strategy. From the start, they have been trying to abandon it, make the parameters less strict, discuss the future beyond. Imagine what they would have offered Tuchel had he beaten a team inside the world’s top 39 in a competitive game. Five years? Ten? The deeds to Wembley Stadium? Still, if Tuchel has successfully turned Albania, Serbia, Latvia and Andorra into an audition, he’s a smart man.
Tuchel has extended his contract as England manager
EDDIE KEOGH/THE FA VIA GETTY IMAGES
Mark Bullingham, the chief executive, clearly can’t believe he got Tuchel, and can now ride him all the way to the home European Championship in 2028, as if he had a plan. Do you know how many Euros hosts have had a domestic coaching system so dysfunctional it could not produce its own national manager? Two: Luiz Felipe Scolari, a Brazilian leading Portugal in 2004, and Marco Rossi, an Italian, managing Hungary, one of 11 co-hosts, at Euro 2020.
The FA can’t even hide behind the elite clubs any more: Manchester United, Chelsea and Newcastle United all have English managers right now. Tuchel says he is proud, so good luck to him. What the FA has to be proud of, however, remains unclear.
Row that got to heart of international sport
So many have been saddened by the ban on Ukrainian skeleton slider Vladyslav Heraskevych, whose “helmet of memory” carried pictures of his fallen fellow athletes, killed in Russia’s war. Those young faces would have meant everything to him, and to his compatriots. Even the IOC president, Kirsty Coventry, was in tears as she confirmed he had refused to change the motif and would therefore not be allowed to take part. Strange, isn’t it? Almost as if what matters in international sport is nationality. That there are some things more important than just winning. That international competition has at its heart notions of representation and identity that set it apart, that engender deeper emotions, unique to it alone.
Heraskevych’s ban has been a major story
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Remove that, and you’re just sliding down a hill. Not everyone gets it, of course. Not everyone is attuned to the specialness of international competition. But hey ho. Just a thought.
A damning statistic
Since 2006, Italy’s men’s cricket team have won as many World Cup matches as Italy’s men‘s football team: one. Italy beat Nepal by ten wickets in Mumbai on Thursday, and England 2-1 in Manaus in 2014. I don’t know who comes out of that worse: them, or us.
Judging own nation is wrong – but don’t just blame the French
It at first appears damning that French judge Jezabel Dabouis should give her own country’s pair her second-highest mark in the Olympic ice dancing competition, and their American rivals her lowest. The gold medal for Guillaume Cizeron and Laurence Fournier Beaudry is under scrutiny, with silver medallists Madison Chock and Evan Bates described as “the true champions” by their American team-mate and gold-medallist figure skater Ellie Kam.
The French victory has caused anger in the US
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To the layman, both couples performed beautifully while delivering very different routines, making Dabouis’ verdict highly suspicious. Judges’ marks should be vetted, say the American pair. Indeed. So let’s also look at the deliberations of the United States judge, Janis Engel, who had the Americans top but the French third from bottom. Such variance. This fact is, however, going largely unreported in the howls of protest driven by the American media. Expect a presidential intervention soon. Maybe Trump will annex the ice rink.
It was 2002 when the pairs skating was impacted by a voting scandal, again centred on a French judge. Marie-Reine Le Gougne claimed to have been pressured by her federation to vote-swap with Russia, awarding high marks to their pair in return for high marks to France in the ice dancing. When the scandal became public, the IOC reformed judging procedures. So how come, 24 years later, judges can still mark their nation’s representatives? It simply should not be allowed.
The only consolation here is that, remove the scores of the French and American judges, and the podium stays the same. So bias had no influence; although not for want of trying, perhaps.
Benefit of the doubt?
Host nations often deliver boosted results at an Olympics but Italy’s improvement is incredible. At Beijing in 2022, Italy came 13th, with two golds, seven silvers and eight bronze medals. As of yesterday in Milan-Cortina they placed second behind Norway, with six golds, three silvers and nine bronze. In other news, Rebecca Passler, an Italian biathlete, has been granted dispensation to compete after testing positive for the banned substance letrozole.
The Italian National Anti-Doping Prosecutor’s Office were sympathetic to Passler, who told them she had returned home from a World Cup competition in the Czech Republic last month to be with her mother, who is receiving treatment for breast cancer. The pair shared food, in particular a jar of Nutella, consumed with the same spoon. Officials took into account a negative test in December, and the low levels of the substance, when giving her the benefit of the doubt.
“They have been very difficult days,” said Passler, “but I have always believed in my good faith.” Whether we should have faith in Italy’s superior performance this winter, however, is entirely a matter for you.