Nine of 20 Premier League teams have changed managers. Strap in – this could be unpredictable

Episodes of the Premier League Years, the Sky Sports show that boils down each season into two hours and is arguably the UK’s greatest cultural achievement, often begin with a montage of that season’s new arrivals.

Whoever is putting together the 2026-27 edition might want to start work now, because it could take a while.

From the start of this season, nine of the 20 Premier League clubs will have new managers. That’s the highest number in the division’s history: the next highest was eight, which came in the summer of 2016, when Pep Guardiola arrived at Manchester City, Antonio Conte took over at Chelsea and Jose Mourinho signed up for the Manchester United job.

But there are even more layers this year. Two of the remaining 11 managers, Michael Carrick and Roberto De Zerbi, weren’t in charge of Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur at the turn of the year. Ipswich Town, who have replaced Kieran McKenna with Gary O’Neil, will be the first promoted club since Hull City in 2016-17 to enter the Premier League with a different manager from the one who took them up.

Mikel Arteta and Unai Emery are the only managers who have been at their clubs for longer than three years. Regis Le Bris, who arrived at Sunderland in 2024, is the fourth longest-serving manager in the Premier League. David Moyes, whose second spell at Everton is barely 18 months old, is seventh. Bournemouth’s Marco Rose is 12th, and he has yet to take charge of a game.

Compare this to the start of last season, when the only managerial changes were Thomas Frank moving from Brentford to Tottenham Hotspur and his former side replacing him from within, appointing Keith Andrews. It didn’t take long for the chaos to begin, but 12 months ago, the outlook was steadier.

This is a season of unprecedented uncertainty, and what makes it particularly interesting is how much change there has been at the top.

Five of the ‘Big Six’ — Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur — have installed a new manager since the turn of the year. Xabi Alonso (Chelsea), Andoni Iraola (Liverpool) and Enzo Maresca (Manchester City) arrived this summer, while De Zerbi arrived in April and Carrick took the United job on a temporary basis in January, made permanent in May.

Throw in Newcastle bringing in Matthias Jaissle to replace Eddie Howe, and of the seven teams that have qualified for the Champions League in the last decade, 85 per cent of them have a brand-new or relatively new manager.

And with this newness, inevitably comes a range of questions.

Will Iraola be able to translate his Bournemouth football to Liverpool? Can Carrick turn a good few months as United caretaker into a successful whole season? Will Alonso make sense of Chelsea, a squad so young that he took one look at it and immediately insisted they sign a few adults?

Maresca was hired as a sort of continuity candidate, having worked under Pep Guardiola before. But his City squad already looks very different and much less experienced, and might be even more so by the end of August: will that be a positive or a negative? De Zerbi saved Tottenham from oblivion last season but can that translate into something longer-term? And who knows about Newcastle, who have lost three crucial players and only really brought in promising youngsters, all of whom will be managed by someone recruited from the Saudi Pro League.

It’s one of the reasons that Arsenal are such clear favourites to retain their title: even though you can ask legitimate questions about their forward options, the quality of their first XI and their style of play, they are the most stable and predictable team among the contenders.

The uncertainty extends beyond the biggest clubs too. Fulham, after five seasons with Marco Silva at the helm, have brought in Alvaro Arbeloa, who spent the second half of last season in charge of Real Madrid. But those 28 games represent his only senior experience so far, and he only took charge of his first game of any description last May.

Nottingham Forest pulled off a coup by recruiting Oliver Glasner, but the Austrian is their fifth manager in a year: can you trust them to stick with him if early results go badly? Glasner’s replacement at Crystal Palace is Pierre Sage, who has a good record in France, but moving to a new league is fraught with uncertainty.

Kieran McKenna spent five years at Ipswich and led them to three promotions, so anyone replacing him has a tough job by definition: good luck, Gary O’Neil.

Perhaps all of this is overly negative, and the downsides of these collective risks have been overemphasised. To that point, the last time there was something close to this level of managerial churn was the 2016-17 campaign, and it worked out pretty well for some.

Of the eight new managers, only one — Mike Phelan at Hull — lost their job during the season. Chelsea won the title under Conte after finishing 10th a year earlier, in “the Mourinho season”, as he called it. With Mourinho, United finished sixth but won the League Cup and the Europa League. Guardiola’s first season at City wasn’t regarded as a huge success in relation to the rest of his time there, but they finished a place higher than in 2015-16 and won 12 more points.

Conte won the Premier League in 2016-17 (Michael Regan/Getty Images)

On the other hand, Hull were relegated, as were Sunderland, with David Moyes at the helm in his only season there, although there were factors beyond merely the identity of the manager. Watford dropped from 13th to 17th under Walter Mazzarri, and Southampton regressed two places after replacing Ronald Koeman with Claude Puel.

This season, admittedly, we probably do broadly know which teams will be nearer the top and which at the bottom. But even with that in mind, there remains so much uncertainty that it’s impossible to predict anything. Which makes it maybe the most interesting and potentially exciting season in years.

At least one of these new managers is going to flame out spectacularly. At least one of them will be out by November. At least one of them will be a roaring success. At least one of them will probably win a trophy of some nature. Maybe at least one of them will disgrace themselves in an entertaining fashion.

The thing is: we don’t really know, and not knowing is good. That’s a good feeling to enter a season with.