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3rd manager in 2025
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Nottingham Forest are set to announce Sean Dyche as their new manager. According to Sky Sports, Dyche verbally agreed to take over at the club on Sunday night, with the club hoping to conclude negotiations and announce the 54-year-old coach before their important Europa League match against Porto on Thursday. Roberto Mancini and Marco Silva were both reportedly in the running for the job, but Dyche is apparently the man Forest will task with turning their season around, following just one win in their first 11 games of the season.
In rather dramatic fashion, the Reds will make Dyche their fourth manager since winning promotion to the Premier League in 2022 and their third coaching appointment of 2025. To the surprise of many, Forest opted to part ways with Nuno Espírito Santo after he guided the club to seventh last season and replaced him with former Celtic and Tottenham boss Ange Postecoglou. However, that proved to be a disastrous call, with the Australian manager’s tenure at the City Ground lasting just 39 days after a disastrous eight-game spell that saw him pick up just one point. As such, Dyche has been recruited to try and rescue Forest’s flailing campaign. But is he the right man for the job?
Sean Dyche’s record in the Premier League
Dyche makes the move to Forest just nine months after departing Everton and will have to work quickly to prove to fans of the club that he is the right man to turn their fortunes around in the English top-flight. However, when we take a look back through his record in the Premier League over the course of his managerial career, there isn’t a huge amount of evidence to suggest that Dyche can emulate what Espírito Santo achieved last season.
For example, when we take a look at Dyche’s 10 previous seasons in the Premier League first at Burnley and then at Everton, we can see that while he certainly had some high points - particularly his 1.42 points-per-game averages in the 2017/18 and 2019/20 seasons, when he finished seventh and tenth with the Turf Moor side - but over the course of more than 330 games in the English top-flight, Dyche’s average stands at just 1.11 points per game. Which, rather unremarkably, works out at around 42 points over the course of an entire Premier League season.
That, unsurprisingly, won’t be enough to win over Forest fans. Although such a return would technically be better than what Forest achieved in their first two seasons back in the Premier League, it’s considerably short of the 65 points Espírito Santo picked up last season. In that league campaign, the Spaniard averaged 1.64 points per game - which is 15% better than Dyche’s best ever record in the Premier League. In the 54-year-old manager’s defence, Dyche would perhaps argue that he’s never had a squad as talented as Forest’s last season to work with.
However, that will certainly be put to the test this season. Whether Dyche can match the lofty expectations and ambitions of Forest and its passionate owner Evangelos Marinakis remains to be seen. But there’s little doubt that if he can turn things around at the club this season and get them back to where they were at the end of last season under Espírito Santo, then it will take a level of success that the English manager hasn’t yet shown in the Premier League.
