Ange Postecoglou, David Moyes and the 10 worst Premier League managerial tenures ever - ranked

Football fans under the age of 25 will probably know of Les Reed from previous lists such as this. He has only ever been a manager once, and it turns out there's a pretty good reason as to why he never entered the profession again.

Reed, who will turn 73 before the end of 2025, has enjoyed a successful career in a variety of backroom staff, developmental and consultancy roles, notably helping build the Southampton teams of the mid-2010s and more recently advising Ryan Reynolds and Rob Mac at Wrexham. He's clearly a clever man, just one not suited to being a football manager.

Charlton Athletic were an established top-flight side heading into the 2006-07 season, but following the departure of club legend Alan Curbishley, the only manager they had ever employed in the Premier League, they first turned to Iain Dowie, who was arguably awful enough to have made this list instead having won only two non-cup matches before his autumn dismissal. Reed, Dowie's assistant, was named as successor, but he proved out of his depth in the hot-seat and won merely one of his eight games at the helm, which came courtesy of a last-minute goal to beat Blackburn 1-0.

Alan Pardew became the Addicks' third manager of the season and managed to take the survival race down to the penultimate week of the campaign, but it was too little and too late to save the south Londoners from relegation.

Aston Villa's decline and eventual relegation from the Premier League in 2016 truly began with the appointment of Tim Sherwood a year earlier, but hey, he managed to steer them clear from the drop at the end of the 2014-15 season and led them to an unlikely FA Cup final. When ex-Arsenal star Remi Garde was brought in as his replacement, there was genuine hope and belief he could bring together a band of misfits.

That Villa team included names such as Jack Grealish, Idrissa Gueye, Jordan Veretout and Jordan Amavi who would go on to have fine careers elsewhere, yet ultimately the team lacked enough quality around them, as Garde came to find out. Despite earning a credible 0-0 draw with title favourites Manchester City during his first match in the dugout, Garde emerged as the victor in only two of his 20 Premier League matches at the helm, with own goals being scored on both occasions to boost Villa's chances.

It was a strange failure considering Garde had steered Lyon through their post-Ligue 1 titles patch of transition and only left the club in 2014 due to personal issues. This short stint in the West Midlands made him effectively unemployable in Europe again however, with his next - and to date, latest - job coming in MLS with the Montreal Impact from 2017 to 2019.

Listen, is it harsh for David Moyes to make this list considering how woeful every Manchester United manager has been ever since his reign? Yes, but we also need to remember how his spell felt in the moment.

The Red Devils were the reigning champions. It was no secret they had wanted other managers to succeed Sir Alex Ferguson instead - Jose Mourinho, Jurgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola were among the names floated at the time - and so Moyes walked into an unideal situation from the off. That also slightly reduced the weight of expectation on him, yet he still managed to limbo beneath that bar regardless.

United's philosophy under Fergie was 'win at all costs'. It transcended formations and personnel. Under Moyes, they endeavoured to do the opposite and was the first in a long line of failures at Old Trafford. Ruben Amorim may yet crack this list when all is said and done, while Erik ten Hag's final 18 months where the vibes went straight to hell are worthy of a place here, but the United nomination has to go to the man who started this run.

Roy Hodgson has earned a deserved reputation of steering teams to safety and making them competitive against top sides. You can see why Watford pivoted to him in January 2022 having already dismissed Xisco Munoz and Claudio Ranieri with the team teetering on the brink of the relegation zone.

The blueprint seemed simple enough. Hodgson, at this stage breaking his own record for oldest manager in Premier League history, would bring steady principles to a side in need of stability and they would cobble enough points together to move away from the drop. It sounded great in theory, less so in reality.

The veteran manager couldn't bring together a fractured dressing room and, if anything, made relations between the club and fanbase worse. Following their 1-0 defeat at his past (and future) club Crystal Palace, Hodgson applauded the Selhurst Park home crowd, but neglected the away end, claiming they were too far away for him to acknowledge.

Remarkably, Hodgson, who failed to secure even a single home victory at Watford, lasted until the summer before being shown the door by the trigger-happy Pozzo family, seemingly heading into retirement before heading back to Palace for old time's sake.

One of the Premier League's greatest overachievers will also be remembered as one of its worst-ever managers. How is that possible? Let's look at the case of Paul Jewell.

As a rookie manager in his mid-thirties, Jewell took Bradford City into the top-flight in 1998 and even kept them up on the final day of their maiden Premier League season. He would later return to the top tier as manager of Wigan Athletic in 2005, taking them to their highest-ever league finish in their first season at that level and narrowly avoiding the drop a year later before he resigned.

That Derby County team of 2007-08 called on Jewell to save them in November of that season, to that point having won only one Premier League game. Jewell added a grand total of zero victories to that tally as the Rams were relegated with a record-low total of 11 points. He was sacked midway through the following campaign back in the Championship and only took on one managerial post after leaving Pride Park, leading Ipswich from 2011 to 2012.

No manager has ever given the Premier League so much content in such a short space of time as ex-Southampton boss Nathan Jones. He had enough quotables to fill a book.

This is a manager who said his side gave away a 1-0 lead to 10-man Wolves because the pressure of having the extra player was too much. This is a manager who consistently called on God and Jesus in hope of his tactics working. This is a manager who insisted he was one of the best in Europe when Southampton took him from Luton Town. This is a manager who said he relished management because staying at home and 'marrying a nice Welsh girl' would have been too easy.

Well, one win in eight league matches painted quite the harsh picture of reality, Southampton tumbled to the bottom of the table and that is where they would finish the 2022-23 campaign. In his final match, Saints fans brought a gigantic, novelty P45 in protest against Jones. Soon enough, he found the real one in the post.

Poor Alan Shearer. A competent club wouldn't have put an unqualified man in charge of a team desperately scrapping against the most surprising of relegations. Nevertheless, he took the job on and paid the price.

Newcastle fans love no one more than Shearer, which is why Mike Ashley sought to lift the mood at St James' Park with such a hail-Mary hire in April 2009 with only eight games of the season remaining. They had entered the season with Kevin Keegan, who left at the start of September, while Joe Kinnear took brief charge before health issues saw him step aside. Chris Hughton, who would later earn the permanent gig, stepped in as caretaker on two occasions but was neglected for the top job before they were sent to the Championship.

Shearer managed one win - a 1-0 victory against relegation rivals Middlesbrough, who were coached by Gareth Southgate - and his beloved Geordies were sent down on the final day of the season thanks to a limp 1-0 loss away at Aston Villa. When Newcastle folk talk about his legend, they make sure to leave this chapter out.

An incredibly creative player who was an integral part of Hamburg's European-conquering team of the late seventies and early eighties, Felix Magath went on to enjoy adulation as a manager in his native Germany, where he won Bundesliga titles with Bayern Munich and Wolfsburg. It was only five years removed from that triumph with Edin Dzeko and Co. when he took the Fulham job.

Magath did actually win three of his 12 Premier League matches, which is far from the worst record for a side in relegation trouble, but he made such a negative impact off the pitch too that he had to make our cut. Brede Hangeland, a Barclaysman in every sense, spun a story of how his manager wanted him to try and rub cheese on his thigh in order to combat a muscle injury. Needless to say, Magath found himself out of touch with the players at Craven Cottage, and a handful of games into the 2014-15 campaign with the team bottom of the Championship, out of work too.

After leaving Fulham, Magath was appointed head coach at Chinese side Shandong Taishan in 2016, lasting only a year in charge, before returning to his homeland with Hertha Berlin in 2022, with the capital club only surviving relegation after his nine-match tenure.

The most recent entry to this list, Ange Postecoglou will almost certainly be remembered by English football fans for somehow winning the Europa League and finishing 17th with Tottenham in the same season. Those who are and were always sceptical of the Australian, however, will pick at his Nottingham Forest tenure instead.

The enigmatic and motivating Postecoglou was almost destined to fail, which speaks of Forest's wider issues. Nuno Espirito Santo was unceremoniously sacked three games into 2025-26 despite having led them to European qualification, publicly claiming his relationship with controversial owner Evangelos Marinakis had collapsed and reports claiming this was due to the arrival of Edu Gaspar from Arsenal as their global head of football.

Marinakis greased the wheels for Postecoglou's arrival over the summer when awarding the ex-Spurs boss with an award in Greece, yet to wait until just after the transfer window had closed to make such a managerial change of polar opposites smacked of someone who didn't know what they were doing. Without a pre-season and with the players and fans resistant to Nuno's departure, Postecoglou couldn't even benefit from any sort of 'new manager bounce' and lost four of his five Premier League games, while he accrued one point from their two Europa League matches and saw a 2-1 lead slip in stoppage time at Swansea in the Carabao Cup.

To put the cherry on the faeces cake, Postecoglou's departure was confirmed by Forest 18 minutes after the full-time whistle of their 3-0 defeat to Chelsea, with reports claiming he quickly saw the players in the dressing room before being escorted out of the stadium and driving away in his car. An undignified ending to a 39-day era.

If Jose Mourinho reckons you are the worst Premier League manager in history, you probably are the worst Premier League manager in history. Apologies to Frank de Boer and anyone defending his corner over this.

Crystal Palace turned to the Dutchman as they looked to evolve from a team who constantly scrapped to beat the drop to a side who were easy on the eye. De Boer's previous success and demonstrative philosophy at Ajax was the selling point, and his inability to kick Inter on in 2016 ensured his stock was low enough to consider the Selhurst Park role.

Throughout the summer of 2017, Palace fans bought into what De Boer was trying to build, implementing a 3-4-3 system with instructions to keep possession. It only took a 3-0 battering at home to newly-promoted Huddersfield Town on the opening day of the season for the club to panic. The pressure was immediately on De Boer, whose side lost their next three league games without scoring a goal. Enough was enough for chairman Steve Parish, who brought the experiment to a premature end in September and appointed Hodgson.

To date, De Boer remains not only the sole permanent manager to lose every Premier League game he took charge of, but to have never had their team score even a single goal in that time.