The sheer number of elite-level vacancies that have been confirmed or are expected ahead of this summer is mad. But the Liverpool job is not most tempting.
7) Napoli
Luciano Spalletti felt he was “leaving a squad that is strong in all aspects, that has the foundations to build on,” when he entered a year-long sabbatical in the summer, which lasted all of two months when Roberto Mancini vacated his seat as Italian national team manager to fulfil a life goal of becoming Saudi Arabia head coach.
Napoli are ninth in Serie A and have won as many games in all competitions this season as Wolves, because entrusting strong aspects and solid foundations to Rudi Garcia and then the actual Walter Mazzarri is frankly asking for bad things to happen.
Both have long since been dispensed with for the current set-up of Slovakia manager Francesco Calzona – former assistant to Spalletti and Maurizio Sarri in Naples – as caretaker until the summer. He has drawn his first two games.
Beyond the situation in the dug-out and the inherent need to work with the notoriously collaborative Aurelio De Laurentiis, there is one glaring point in the ‘cons’ column when it comes to the Napoli post: Victor Osimhen is almost certainly off in the summer and Khvicha Kvaratskhelia might not be far behind.
That would certainly provide funds to invest in the squad, but those crumbling foundations are about to lose its biggest support.
6) Chelsea
It remains to be seen quite what fate befalls Mauricio Pochettino after his latest consummate final bottling, but no particularly demanding mental gymnastics are required to envision a scenario in which Todd Boehly asks James Corden for his managerial advice and embarks on the search for a sixth different manager in two years.
That statistic alone will sit in the back of the mind of even the most self-assured coach. Chelsea have long been a trigger-happy club but under Roman Abramovich the pay-off – aside from the actual lavish pay-off – was that you would have a couple more winner’s medals in your belongings.
Not so anymore, plus the experience seems to scar the incumbents. Thomas Tuchel has failed in his only job since, Graham Potter is so haunted he remains out of work and Frank Lampard has run out of people to tell he wanted to sign Declan Rice.
Factor in Chelsea needing to sell all their best Academy-developed first teamers to account for the expenditure necessary to assemble such a genuinely laughably unbalanced squad, and you have a rather unappealing mess of a mid-table job with perennial trophy-based ambitions.
5) Barcelona
“The feeling of being Barca coach is unpleasant, it’s cruel. You feel that often there is a lack of respect, you feel they do not value your work, and this wears you down terribly. It affects your mental health. I am a positive person but the energy goes down to a point where you think that there is no sense.”
A reminder that there are two clubs ranked lower in terms of desirability for prospective managers than Barcelona, whose current and soon-to-be-former coach Xavi literally explained that he was leaving his boyhood club a year before the expiration of his contract because he found the experience depressing, having won La Liga and a Spanish Super Cup in three years.
There is also the crippling debt, the reliance on a mid-30s wage burden in Robert Lewandowski, the absence of any more magic economic levers to pull and, of course, the Spotify.
READ MORE: Napoli v Barcelona more sad than ‘boring’ as these champions not in big league anymore
4) Newcastle
Eddie Howe has at the very least not lost the specific part of the dressing room Martin Dubravka occupies, such were the Newcastle back-up keeper’s heroics in guiding the manager to his first FA Cup quarter-final on Tuesday.
In fairness, there is no indication Howe lacks the support of any Newcastle player; most of them owe him a career and would surely be offloaded by a coach who does not harbour that same personal loyalty and allegiance.
In simpler terms, Dan Burn and Miguel Almiron will ensure that any downed tools are promptly collected, organised and perhaps even used to fix a defence which no longer legally qualifies to be described as such.
The prospect of a trophy does muddy the waters somewhat and injects this jumbled Newcastle season with some intrigue, excitement and jeopardy. But while those Premier League problems persist against every English non-former European champion, Howe cannot honestly say his position is without scrutiny heading into the summer and beyond.
Whoever inherits his Magpies will be greeted with a more favourable set of circumstances than that which Howe took over from Steve Bruce little over two years ago. Hands are clearly still tied more than might be expected for an unthinkably rich sportswashing endeavour, but there is more than enough there for someone to mould.
3) Bayern Munich
The whole transactional box-ticking nature of the Bayern Munich job has perhaps temporarily been rendered null and void, much to the goalscoring embarrassment of Harry Kane. It used to be that a manager could take a little time out of their career and enhance their personal trophy collection with a Bundesliga and maybe even a DFB-Pokal to go with Champions League group-stage dominance and ultimate knockout disappointment. Nowadays you get arrested by Xabi Alonso for even thinking of sleepwalking to a Bundesliga.
Bayern are, however, almost entirely without the sort of proper financial problems any real superclub saddles themselves with, and anyone who challenges their machine tends to be dismantled fairly quickly.
That Ottmar Hitzfeld remains their last manager to serve more than three years in the job, with the Champions League final defeat to Manchester United last millennium occurring roughly in the middle of that reign, says enough. It is still a short-term post, albeit one many would covet even if just to secure the Germany leg of their own individual world tour.
2) Liverpool
One of the prerequisites Jurgen Klopp had to satisfy before even considering his Liverpool future was the state the club would be in when he left it. Not one to break a contract easily, the German was heavily protected against being sacked and would not otherwise walk away unless he was convinced the Reds could thrive without him.
He wanted to leave them in a position of strength, opposite to the form in which he found them back in October 2015.
Klopp has essentially confirmed as much in interviews since, saying “this team is set up for the future” and “all that we built over the last eight and a half years is an incredibly strong structure behind the scenes, so everything goes in the right direction”.
The Carabao Cup final seemed to specifically convince Klopp he could go: “The future for this football club is bright. If it wasn’t going to be okay, I wouldn’t be leaving.”
There are some questions yet to be answered over the futures of Virgil van Dijk, Mo Salah, Trent Alexander-Arnold and a select few others, while the simultaneous sporting director search could complicate matters slightly. But there cannot be many better, more settled clubs to test and ultimately disprove the theory that replacing a legacy manager is a fool’s errand.
1) Manchester United
Not to go all Roy Keane and Gary Neville, but This Is Manchester United Football Club We Are Talking About Here. And regarding their potentially imminent vacancy as more desirable to a certain calibre of manager than Liverpool’s upcoming opening is irrefutably not to be misconstrued as saying they are in any way shape or form better, for that is clearly not the case.
Rather, it’s the respective circumstances which separate the two opportunities. Liverpool’s next step will inevitably feel backwards or a climb down, such has been Klopp’s transformative touch and connection with the supporters and squad. There is no escaping just how monumental a task it will be to succeed him and continue his work while applying an adequate amount of personal strokes to an unimprovable canvas.
If Manchester United are to herald their brave new era by appointing their own man, they will be given more time and patience than usual as that executive chain of command is finally put into place. The proper remit to sort fundamental squad issues and the casting of being the first INEOS appointment would grant a certain amount of power and influence, with budget increases only appealing further.
In terms of shoes to fill, one of those pairs is decidedly smaller and thus probably more inviting to at least try. Whether this fresh approach eventually solves all their problems or not and returns them to their seat at the top table, the Manchester United job will forever fascinate managers because of the ‘I can fix him’ concept, no matter how many toxic relationships they have already had on that same premise.
