The work of Arne Slot and to a lesser and ever-dwindling level Enzo Maresca have set us thinking: What are the best ever second conditions for professionals in the Premier League?
We set some pretty tough rules for this which, as you will soon see, we kind of instantly regretted but did feel necessary to truly highlight the task at hand.
To qualify for this list a manager must be in a ) his first season with the club and b ) his first season as a Premier League manager. If both those successes dont use, therefore it doesnt matter. You often get on this roster by doing well with the staff you got promoted, for example. You often actually get on this listing by being Claudio Ranieri at Leicester. He now Knew The League, didnt he?
And were only interested here in full seasons. No place below for your Arsene Wengers or your He Klopps or the Thomas Tuchels of this earth.
This is a tough list to permeate because very few managers have actually managed to turn up in the Premier League at a new club with no prior first-hand knowledge of the league and deliver.
Slot has every chance of taking top position here when the dust settles on this year, with even Maresca likely to take a place in the top 10 if he can avoid total crisis over the decades ahead.
10 ) Sven-Goran Eriksson ( Man City 2007/08 )
Timing in life is everything, isnt it? You have to know what might have happened had Erikssons first venture into the Barclays with Man City come just a year or so later when their entire world changed. Rather, he was among the last to experience the callousness of Thaksin Shinawatras program.
Erikssons season at City is now generally considered a failure, remembered best for the absurd 8-1 defeat at Middlesbrough on which it ended. But the risk here is that we view that time through a mirror of what Man City are rather than what they were.
Eriskssons part won both Manchester derbies that year, for example, at a time when that would be as compelling an accomplishment as United doing it now. At the end of November Eriksson had City in the top four when this was pretty far indeed from the ordinary run of things.
Even with the fall across the next half of the time, City however finished ninth with what was at that time their highest always Premier League items pull.
It was not a great time, but it was not somewhere near as bad as past condescendingly suggests.
9 ) Pep Guardiola ( Man City 2016/17 )
And Guardiolas first season is viewed harshly too in light of what he would go on to achieve. Its about a slow victim of his own success scenario here, which is equally unjust when the groundwork in that challenging first season and it was a difficult season that also ended with 78 points and third place in the league set City up for the extraordinary success that was to follow.
City had won a couple of Premier League titles before Guardiola, but its easy today to believe that what he has achieved was expected at a pub with Citys resources and power. But it really wasnt. Guardiolas second season, which now looks contradictory alongside his early steamrollering succcesses, was in truth a substantial improvement.
Sure, City struggling 10 defeats and finishing a distant third will never be the most eye-catching point about 2015/16 but even then it was enough to walk out as a much bad post-takeover season for City. Guardiola didnt inherit a champion team.
READ: Top 10 all-time Premier League managers list has Guardiola at 2 )
8 ) Andoni Iraola ( Bournemouth 2023/24)
One thing thats clear when compiling this list is just how few managers actually qualify. How rare it is for a new manager to get the chance to come in before the season and start something new.
And how that is even rarer when you drop below the scare-quoted Big Clubs. Bournemouths decision in the summer of 2023 to dispense with the services of Gary ONeil, who had so impressively accepted the hospital pass in the wake of Scott Parkers huffy exit after a thrashing for the ages from Liverpool, was met with predictable opprobrium from the media.
Be Careful What You Wish For is a depressingly small but undeniably common starting point for the coverage of any club or fanbase that dares to dream of something bigger or better or even just less joylessly drab to exist through.
Binning off a young English manager who had done all that could be reasonably asked of him and more and replacing him with a very foreign manager who doesnt Know The League at all was perhaps the single most Careful What You Wish For act in Barclays history.
Iraolas side then lost six and won none of their first nine games. Anyone who wasnt busy hailing Ange Postecoglou the greatest manager who had ever lived was to be found Told You So-ing Bournemouth for having so miserably failed to take the slightest bit of care in their wishing.
Then they went and won seven of their next nine games. Later in that season they would have a run of six wins in 10 that still contrived to contain a defeat to Luton.
They would end the season a perfectly creditable 12th, well clear of any relegation unpleasantness on 48 points and having shown more than a few hints that even better could follow.
Even better has duly followed, with Bournemouth now finding themselves firmly in the midst of a Champions League fight and no longer being told by anyone they should have taken more care what they wished for.
READ: Mikel Arteta sack inevitable as five outgoing Premier League managers named
7 ) Ange Postecoglou ( Tottenham 2023/24)
Okay, so it was actually more 10 games than first season. But what a 10 games they were, eh? After those 10 games, Spurs had 26 points and an ocean of possibilities before them.
Then it quickly became all too clear that Angeball was, in fact, unsustainable player-breaking, disaster-courting nonsense. Nobody brings out the best and worst in Spurs like Chelsea, and the infamous night Angeball collapsed irredeemably in on itself was undoubtedly among the worst.
Just as on the Titanics maiden voyage there were over 1000 miles of uneventful, very pleasurable cruising, Spurs started that game against Chelsea in enormously and by this point predictably impressive fashion. They took an early lead and when Son Heung-min appeared to have made it 2-0 inside 15 minutes we all had to stop and wonder if Spurs daft, permanent-banter-era Spurs were actually going to do something extraordinary with their season.
They were not. Son was offside. Cristian Romero performed a madness, Destiny Udogie got sent off as well, and Spurs ended the evening playing a never-before-seen 0-8-1 and losing the game 4-1. So Angepilled was English football at this point, though, that the wider initial response to a catastrophic defeat to a hated rival was unquestioning praise for the sheer brass balls of the man, of his admirable conviction in sticking to his principles in the face of such adversity.
It seems genuinely insane now, and it was, but it really is only in hindsight that an awful lot of people have acknowledged that this 4-1 home defeat against an at-the-time-struggling Chelsea might have been A Bad Thing.
Spurs season never truly recovered, but they did still finish fifth. Given the abject misery of the way the previous season had finished under Antonio Conte and the assorted caretakers that followed, and the summer loss of the truly irreplaceable Harry Kane, it was a very decent albeit very, very weird and clearly unrepeatably fortunate first season for Ange and his unorthodox but invigorating approach.
6 ) Erik Ten Hag ( Manchester United 2022/23 )
Easy to forget now because it all went so horribly wrong, but Ten Hags first season at Manchester United was one of enormous promise. Its genuinely quite dizzyingly disconcerting to consider that this is all such recent history.
It is barely two years ago since Ten Hag appeared to have decisively won the battle against Cristiano Ronaldo ( and to a lesser extent Piers Morgan ) by managing the fading superstar out of the club successfully.
It is less than two years ago that a smiling Ten Hag was delivering his first silverware as United manager with a Carabao win over Newcastle at Wembley, while also steering his team to the FA Cup final against City.
It is less than two years ago that Ten Hag took a squad that had staggered home a distant sixth the previous season and restored them to the Champions League places with a solidly impressive third-place finish, two places and eight whole points better than Liverpool.
It is less than two years since Marcus Rashford was ending the season with 30 goals for Erik Ten Hags upwardly mobile Manchester United.
Life moves pretty fast.
5 ) Manuel Pellegrini ( Man City 2013/14)
Perhaps the least memorable and certainly least attention-seeking of Citys post-riches managers, it is perhaps fitting that the games everyone remembers from Citys title success in his first season didnt even actually involve City at all.
Indeed, we have a strong suspicion that so potent a moment of Pure Barclays is Gerrards Slip and Demba Bas goal that a large number of English football fans have fully Mandela Effected themselves into an understandable belief that Chelsea won the league that year after Liverpools collapse in that game was compounded by the Crystanbul nonsense at Selhurst Park a few days later.
While Citys status as supporting actors in their own title win is probably never going to change, its also a bit of a disservice to a team that was strikingly good and, at its best, capable of the sort of utter overpowering dominance that became the norm as Pep Guardiola brought them to their final form.
A lot of people may not remember City actually won the league that season, but even fewer would instantly recall that City did so by scoring 102 goals even more than that swashbuckling and ultimately banter-doomed Liverpool side under Brendan Rodgers.
4 ) Carlo Ancelotti ( Chelsea 2009/10 )
Let us all raise a quizzical eyebrow at the fact Carlo Ancelottis superb first season at Chelsea isnt even the second-best first season for a Chelsea manager in the Premier League. They really do things differently there.
On pure numbers, Ancelotti should take the crown by virtue of delivering not just the Premier League title but also securing the Double.
But he stood on the shoulders of sulky Portuguese giants at Chelsea, plus he only won the league title by a single point from Manchester United in a title race that went down to the final day where an 8-0 win over a Wigan team that had an uncomfortable penchant for getting thrashed in London that season sealed the deal.
Ancelottis Chelsea were an absurdly overpowered attacking force. That 8-0 final-day win over Wigan was no rogue end-of-season outlier. It was the fourth time that season theyd hit seven at home after also doing so against Villa, Stoke and Sunderland, and they ended the season with 103 goals 17 more than second-placed Man United and at least 20 more than anyone else managed that season.
Ancelotti had such fun managing a Premier League team in blue that he returned incongruously eight years later to briefly and, in the end, rather cruelly make Everton look like proper actual contenders before being lured away by Real Madrids siren call.
READ: Top 10 Premier League teams of all time
3 ) Rafa Benitez ( Liverpool 2004/05 )
Benitezs arrival in English football could very easily have been overshadowed entirely by another altogether flashier and more attention-grabbing new face, but the former Valencia boss still made his mark. And how.
In the league, Liverpool endured a classic transitional season in which manager and a much-changed squad took time to get to grips with each other. They not only finished outside the top four, but to make matters worse landed below Everton of all teams.
None of that would matter at all, though, because of That Night In Istanbul or The Best Champions League Final In History.
Nothing about Liverpools early passage through the competition hinted at what was to come. They barely made it past Austrian outfit Grazer AK in the preliminary round, losing 1-0 at Anfield after a 2-0 away win in the first leg and lost at both Olympiacos and Monaco surprise finalists the year before in the group stage.
The first real hint that something special might be brewing came with a pair of fine 3-1 wins over a strong Bayer Leverkusen side in the last 16, while Liverpool gritted their teeth and stubbornly held out for a goalless draw in Turin, always only a single goal from elimination after a 2-1 first-leg win over Juventus.
That was nothing, though, compared to an infamously tough pair of semi-final games against Jose Mourinhos Chelsea in which the only goal over the two legs wasnt even really a goal at all, with Luis Garcias ghost goal early in the second leg at Anfield proving decisive.
Then came the final, which remains one of the very best in Champions League history. From 3-0 down at half-time against Milan, Liverpool roared back to 3-3 before Jerzy Dudeks jelly-legged heroics in the penalty shoot-out secured a fifth European title for Liverpool and back-to-back European success for Benitez, who had won the UEFA Cup with Valencia the year before.
2 ) Jose Mourinho ( Chelsea 2004/05 )
If you werent there its hard to truly grasp now just how big a deal Jose Mourinhos arrival in our league was. He was and remains the ultimate disruptor, but back then before he completely gave into the dark side of his character and became more meme than man he was that and so much more.
The English press pack fell hard and fast for The Special One, the charismatic and charming Portuguese who had just architected Portos run to UEFA Cup and Champions League glory in back-to-back season and was now here to shake up a Premier League that had grown awful stale.
It had been almost a decade since Blackburns title win and the idea of a local businessman being able to buy the league with a few million quid as a kind of pet project already seemed awful quaint.
Since Rovers success, a formidable Man United-Arsenal duopoly had grown ever tougher to break. The last nine titles had been split between them, 6-3 in Uniteds favour and five of the last seven had been Fergie-Wenger one-twos in one order or another.
Newcastle, Leeds and Liverpool had all had a go at breaking the stranglehold but never managed it. And then along came Mourinho to not just shake up that duopoly but smash it to pieces.
Arsenal and Manchester United duly finished miles clear of everyone else, as had become the norm, with 16 points separating Everton from United and another six points between United and Arsenal.
But then, 12 points beyond that sat Chelsea, Premier League champions for the first time and as dominant as any champions could be. They lost just once all season, and their absurd record of 15 goals conceded remains one of the leagues most unbreakable milestones.
Chelsea and Mourinho decisively shifted the Premier League landscape.
1 ) Antonio Conte ( Chelsea 2016/17 )
It does tend to get rather lost in the whole Leicester Fairytale caper, but Chelseas run from 2014/15 through 2016/17 deserves to go down as one of the great three-season Premier League arcs. From first, all the way down to tenth, and straight back to first. It goes without saying that nobody else has come close to such a nonsense, and as soon as you see those numbers 1st, 10th, 1st , it quickly dawns that literally only one Premier League club could ever do it. Chelsea.
Weve already established in this list that nobody defies the managerial stability maxim more magnificently than Chelsea, a club who throughout the Abramovich Era would routinely burn through managers at a rate of one every two or three years if it was Jose Mourinho and every one or two years if it was Literally Anyone Else, but crucially have this seemingly chaotic off-field activity deliver consistent on-field success for pretty much 20 years.
That fallow year in 2015/16 was quite something, though, with Mourinho completing what would become a trademark destroy-and-exit early in the season, with Guus Hiddink brought in to steady the ship and steer Chelsea through the remainder of a deeply awful season.
And then came Conte, with his hair-hat and his fancy ideas about back threes. The genius of Conte in that 2016/17 season was his patience. Seems hard to square with the manager we now know him to be, but he very pointedly did not come barging in and insist everything would be done his way from the start.
And he could have done that. Because 10th FFS. But no. He gave Chelseas underperforming huffy divas enough early-season rope to prove they didnt actually know best.
Chelsea started that season with a back four and, because they happened to begin against West Ham, Watford and Burnley, accidentally won their first three games. But then they took just a single point from the next three against Swansea, Liverpool and Arsenal. That was all it needed.
Now my way, said Conte, probably. In came his preferred back three having established that proper teams were still having it all too easy against Chelseas previous set-up.
They won 13 in a row to take an iron grip on the title race that they would never relinquish despite being pursued hard all the way by a disconcertingly unSpursy Spurs team that won 12 of its last 13 games that season without ever getting within seven points of Contes dominant side.
Contes true colours would come out the following season, that ended with recrimination, an unhappy separation and because Chelsea still also an FA Cup.
