Claudio Ranieri sacked: Ranking potential replacements
Leicester manager Claudio Ranieri was sacked Thursday with the club in the thick of a Premier League relegation battle. But who should replace him?
Claudio Ranieri’s laid-back personality seemed to be the perfect fit for a Leicester team trying to come to terms with its own impossibility last season, but it seems that attitude was not so well suited to a title defense.
Leicester have been awful in the league this term, and with their place in the Champions League hanging by a thread after a 2-1 round of 16 first leg loss to Sevilla that was nowhere near as close as the score suggests, it’s hardly a surprise Ranieri was fired, even if the decision, announced by the club on Thursday, feels harsh.
The question now is who replaces him. The early favorites are an eclectic mix of names, some exciting, some deluded, some just plain stupid. Here are the top five, ranked from worst to best (but not necessarily most likely):
5. Alan Pardew
Alan Pardew, if you need any reminding, is an idiot. He was an idiot at Newcastle, and he was an idiot at Crystal Palace, who won only six of their 36 league games in 2016 under Pardew. The Leicester job not only requires a manager capable of steering a club clear of the relegation and not toward it, but also one who’s capable of handling this situation with the delicacy it deserves. The word delicate, to my knowledge, has never once, in the entire history of both words and Alan Pardews, been used to describe Alan Pardew.
4. Nigel Pearson
Nigel Pearson was the man who masterminded Leicester’s great escape in 2014-15, leading the Foxes to seven wins in their last nine Premier League matches to save them from the drop. He was also the man, of course, who led Leicester to last place in the table to begin with. In addition, there’s a not inconsiderable body of evidence to suggest Pearson is slightly (if not completely) unhinged, including the time he strangled Palace’s James MacArthur.
3. Frank de Boer
Frank de Boer spends a lot of his time getting linked to Premier League clubs, and yet he’s never made it to the Premier League. Is this his time? He did well at Ajax, winning the Eredivisie four times from 2010-16, but things didn’t go quite so smoothly at Internazionale. De Boer was sacked after 14 matches, of which he won only five. Inter aren’t what they used to be, but new manager Stefano Pioli has them up to fourth place in Serie A, which means de Boer was probably doing at least something wrong. De Boer was a great player, but it would be a big risk to expect a man with no experience of the Premier League to navigate Leicester through what looks like it will be a very tightly contested relegation battle.
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2. Gary Rowett
Gary Rowett did an excellent job at Birmingham, guiding them from the Championship relegation zone to the top half of the table in his first season. He had them up to seventh this term, before he was inexplicably sacked in December, and replaced by Gianfranco Zola, who is one of the most likable men in the sport, but also not, if history is any guide, a very good manager. That, along with the fact he played for Leicester for a couple of seasons in the early 2000s, makes Rowett a very eligible candidate. He lacks top flight managerial experience, but he’s young (42) and he has experience of a relegation scrap and he’s not Nigel Pearson and he’s especially not Alan Pardew.
1. Roberto Mancini
Roberto Mancini’s post-Manchester City career has been considerably worse than his pre-Manchester City career, but it hasn’t been a total disaster, and he’s got a lot going for him. He’s mostly a good defensive manager, which is an area Leicester need to improve quickly, and he’s a big enough name to excite a Foxes squad that has looked sort of dazed the past few months. He even played for Leicester, as a 36-year-old, for five games in 2001. That may be literally the only reason his name has even been linked with this job, but that’s one more reason than no reasons.