Nottingham Forest are on the hunt for a fourth permanent manager of the 2025-26 season after sacking Sean Dyche. There’s more than a whiff of panic to the decision.
Just a few weeks ago, the Premier League relegation battle was almost non-existent as West Ham in 18th continued to show little sign of life. Now, however, they’re looking resurgent and those above them are panicking.
In the space of less than 24 hours, the two teams directly ahead of them in the table have sacked their managers. First went Thomas Frank at Tottenham, and now Sean Dyche at Nottingham Forest.
Some may argue each decision was warranted, exclusive of West Ham’s sudden and quite dramatic uptick in form, especially in the case of Frank. But it hardly feels coincidental that both managers have gone so close together with the threat of relegation becoming an ever-greater worry.
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15 hours ago Matt Furniss, Ryan Benson, Oliver Hopkins, David SegarIn that respect, we must home in on Forest.
Fans, players, staff and owner alike will have been expecting three points on Wednesday night at the City Ground. Wolves, one of the worst Premier League sides ever, were the visitors and they have been cannon fodder for practically everyone this season.
Anything other than a win would be not just a massive disappointment but potentially damaging when most would have looked at that fixture as being as close to three guaranteed points as you can get in the Premier League. Any win is truly precious when relegation is a genuine possibility.
However, an evening characterised by frustration and fury was the outcome. Granted, Forest didn’t dare lose, but their 0-0 draw felt like a defeat.
Forest managed 35 shots over the course of the match, their most in the Premier League since their return for the 2022-23 season and the most in competition history by any Dyche team (351 matches).
Forest’s 2.55 expected goals (xG) was the second-most xG generated in a match by a team who didn’t score since the start of last season (Leeds (2.63) v Burnley in October).
Forest’s finishing definitely left plenty to be desired, though José Sá in the visitors’ goal more than played his part, becoming only the fourth Wolves goalkeeper to register 10 saves in a Premier League game.
Sá’s instinctive stop to claw Morato’s goal-bound effort away from point-blank range was particularly important – that shot not going in was the clearest sign of any that it wasn’t to be Forest’s day.
The boos that greeted the full-time whistle were intense. It’s quite possible the fury of that reaction even swayed Forest owner Angelos Marinakis, who cut a frustrated figure in the stands during the game.
By midnight, rumours of Dyche’s dismissal were doing the rounds, and Forest confirmed they were on the hunt for a fourth permanent manager of the season the following morning.
But Dyche will – and did, pre-emptively, in his post-match press conference – argue his dismissal was harsh.
“We’ve not had a bad run of results, really, but they’re wrong-end-of-the-table results,” he said. “The run we’d had in five games [before the Wolves draw], we’d gotten the same points as Arsenal and Man City, but no one even mentioned it. There’s the truth of the stats. I’m not making excuses, I’m just saying.”
In fact, Dyche could win the Premier League Manager of the Month award for January on Friday after being nominated last month – we’re pretty sure he’d be the first to win it having been sacked between the award announcement and nomination confirmation, but don’t quote us on that.
Either way, the point is Forest’s results hadn’t too bad. His 1.22 points per game at Forest is better than his record at either Burnley (1.1) or Everton (1.15) in the Premier League, and also a considerable improvement on what predecessor Ange Postecoglou (0.2) managed earlier this season.
Similarly, when looking at results across the Premier League since Dyche’s appointment on 21 October last year, Forest are 12th in the table. Their 22 points in that time is level with Leeds, Bournemouth and Sunderland, all of whom have come in for a reasonable amount of praise in recent times.
When Dyche took over from Postecoglou, Forest were in the relegation zone and two points adrift of Burnley in 17th place; they are currently three points clear of the bottom three.
The irony is, if Forest had just dismissed anyone else and Dyche was available, he’d be a prime candidate to take over. Whether you think his ability to steer teams away from relegation is exaggerated or not, the fact is he’s only been relegated from the Premier League once.
Of course, we can’t simply paint a rosy picture of Dyche’s reign. According to reports on Thursday, Marinakis consulted several senior players after the Wolves game. That he then went on to dismiss Dyche doesn’t say much for his level of support among the players, some of whom were apparently unimpressed by the manager’s training methods.
Quite often there is more to a managerial change than just results, and it would seem this is the case here as well.
But when it comes to results and points, there’s an argument Dyche couldn’t have done much more. He took a team who were averaging 0.63 points per game and leaves having almost doubled that output.
Presumably, however, the Forest hierarchy believe that has still been insufficient, with this side almost unrecognisable from the one who, 12 months ago, were pushing for Champions League qualification.
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3 days ago Ryan BensonEither way, while Dyche isn’t the perfect manager, Forest’s decision probably says more about their haphazard internal decision-making processes and the fear stoked by West Ham and Tottenham than it does about Dyche.
After all, Forest will be the first Premier League team in history to appoint four permanent managers in a single season when Vítor Pereira is likely hired.
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