No one hires a new manager with a plan to eventually fire them, but as we know, it almost always ends up that way.
As with all marriages, there is a honeymoon period first. It’s wonderful times when a new manager bounces in, players are receptive to new sounds, everything is juicy and even when it’s not, it definitely is. Definitely Is going to be.
Then it becomes routine and both parties become a little less forgiving of each other. Sometimes, as we are now seeing with Antonio Conte and Tottenham, it can even be bad.
Eventually, that’s usually all that’s left to foot the divorce bill — the sacked manager pay-offs — and some of those are huge.
Chelsea spent a lot of money to get Villas-Boas from Porto in 2011 and vice versa, they had to spend bug money to get rid of him too.
The expectation was that he would be a new Jose Mourinho, and he has proven himself to be Europe’s top coach, even if he is not an elite one.
He remained in charge for less than a year, but his team won the Champions League that season under Roberto Di Matteo.
Tottenham like to tie down their assets with long contracts, and it works well as long as the club really want to keep them.
Pochettino signed a new five-year deal in May 2018 and has looked set to remain at Spurs for a very long time.
Just 18 months into that contract however, Spurs decided they wanted to get rid of him and had to pay a huge sum to avoid the contract they felt would protect him.
Let’s level up with you here: there are a lot Chelsea managers on this list. In fact, it’s literally half of them.
Tuchel is the latest after being shown the door by new boss Todd Bohli after the American claimed he did not share a vision for the club.
Still, considering what Bohli has spent since taking over at Chelsea, £13m may not seem like much.
Premier League clubs certainly dominate this list, but the price for Russia to get rid of Fabio Capello was eye-watering by anyone’s standards.
Capello took charge of the Russian team in 2014 and four years later was considered the man to take home the World Cup. That only lasted 18 months.
There is some suggestion that he may have received more than the £13.4m reported at the time, but either way it sounds like a good job if you can get it.
OK, back to Chelsea right away, it seems. When Scolari swapped Brazil (via Portugal) for Bridges, it was a lucrative appointment.
Despite Chelsea being the Premier League’s top scorer, finishing in the top four and progressing to the knockout stages of the Champions League, Scolari was released in February of his first season.
However, he did not let this payment deter his passion for football. In fact, he had nine jobs after Chelsea and was still living in his native Brazil at the age of 75.
Enter the king of managerial pay. Jose Mourinho is one of football’s most successful managers, but he’s apparently also a pretty good lawyer.
By the time he arrived at Tottenham, his star was perhaps beginning to fade a bit, although his track record still guaranteed him a top wage.
It came in handy when they sacked him in 2021, pocketing £16m just for walking away. Remarkably, it’s not even close to being the second biggest payoff of his career, never mind his biggest.
investment on psg is huge and with it come commensurate expectations. And, as we all know, with great expectations comes great manager turnover.
PSG have certainly gone through a lot of managers since their fortune-changing takeover in 2011, but not all of them have performed quite as well as Laurent Blanc.
Blanc won three league titles with PSG but was sacked after failing to achieve success in Europe. He paid £17m for it in 2016 and PSG are still not achieving in Europe.
When Jose Mourinho received an £18m payday in 2007 for failing to deliver a third Premier League title or European trophy in a row, it was actually easy to sympathize with him.
He had turned the club around and made them serial winners, yet not even a slight dip in performance was allowed for a solitary season.
It was a record payoff at the time, but it was a record he would break himself, as well as another person.
Mourinho and Man Utd seemed a perfect fit and it was a job he had always wanted. It was also a happy marriage at times.
He won two trophies straight off the bat and since then it became clear just how many internal obstacles he was battling during his time at the club.
While the marriage had its moments, the divorce bill was huge, but it’s not the biggest.
While Jose Mourinho may be the king of payoffs, it is Antonio Conte who has collected the biggest sum in history. In fact, no one else even came close.
Conte won the Premier League in his first season in charge of Chelsea and then the FA Cup in his second season. Apparently, though, that wasn’t enough for the Stamford Bridge hierarchy.
They sacked him at the end of that second season and, according to his 2017/18 accounts, it cost him £26.6m to do so.