Twenty clubs start the 2026/27 Premier League season. Only three of them have an English manager in the dugout. If that were the whole picture, a list of the best English football managers would be a short and fairly grim read.
It isn’t the whole picture. The most decorated English coach working today is in charge of the United States women’s team. Another one dragged Sweden to a World Cup. So this rundown of the best English managers goes wherever the good ones actually are, and it covers six current English football managers. No ranking, before anyone asks.
How These English Managers Were Picked
- What they’ve done lately. The reputation they’ve built around the last eighteen months.
- What they’ve won, and where. A trophy at Newcastle and a trophy at Manchester City are not the same trophy. Promotions count. Qualifications count. So does the state of the club on the day they walked in.
- Whether they have an idea. Plenty of managers have a system. Fewer have a system they’ll abandon the moment it stops working.
- What happens to the players. Do they get better? Does the team look like it knows what it’s doing by March? Least measurable of the five, probably the most important.
- Where the career is going. Age, trajectory, and how much of the CV is still ahead of them.
Michael Carrick (Manchester United)
Carrick got the Manchester United job on 13 January 2026 as a stopgap. Ruben Amorim had gone, Darren Fletcher had covered two games, and the club wanted a safe pair of hands until the summer. He finished third and they gave him the job for good.
Most of what he did was subtraction. Amorim’s United had been bent into a back three that suited almost nobody in the squad. Carrick went back to a 4-2-3-1, dropped a double pivot in front of the centre-backs, and told the team to pass its way out in short hops rather than hit diagonals and hope. Bruno Fernandes moved back up the pitch where he belongs.
Even earlier, Middlesbrough under Carrick were among the highest-volume passing sides in the Championship three years running.
Why he belongs here: he holds the biggest job any English manager currently has, and he got it by fixing a squad two more celebrated coaches couldn’t.
- Age: 45
- Preferred formation: 4-2-3-1
- Current club: Manchester United
- In management since: 2022 (Middlesbrough), 2021 as a caretaker for Man United
Eddie Howe (Currently Without a Club)
Howe left Newcastle on 30 July 2026, the morning after a 4-1 pre-season defeat at Bristol City and three and a half weeks out from the opening fixture. He’d floated the idea weeks before, gone away with his family, come back and said it again. Nobody pushed him.
He’s on this list without a club because of what he did with the last one. Newcastle were 19th when he arrived in November 2021, at a club that hadn’t won anything in most of its supporters’ lifetimes.
He took them into the Champions League twice and, in March 2025, beat Liverpool 2-1 at Wembley for the Carabao Cup – a first major domestic trophy in 70 years.
The football was a hard-running 4-3-3: press high, get it forward fast, and Newcastle were among the quickest sides in the league at moving the ball upfield.
Last season was his worst. A bruising transfer window, the Isak saga running on and on, two derby defeats to Sunderland. He’d taken this team as far as he could, and he was probably right that this was the moment for him to leave.
Why he belongs here: a major trophy and two Champions League qualifications at a club with no recent history of either.
- Age: 48
- Preferred formation: 4-3-3
- Current club: None; left Newcastle United in July 2026
- In management since: 2008 (Bournemouth)
Graham Potter (Sweden Men’s National Team)
Potter took the Sweden job in October 2025 on a short-term contract with one instruction: reach the World Cup. Sweden were bottom of their qualifying group on a single point from four matches. He lost 4-1 in Switzerland and drew at home to Slovenia, leaving them to finish the group with two points and not one win.
On any normal reading, that was that. Except the Nations League had left a back door open. Sweden went into the play-offs, beat Ukraine 3-1 in Valencia, then Poland 3-2 in Solna with Viktor Gyökeres poking in the winner two minutes from time. First World Cup since 2018.
Sweden is where the reputation started, too. Östersund, fourth tier to top flight, a cup in 2017, and a night at the Emirates where they beat Arsenal. He speaks the language. Chelsea and West Ham did real damage to how English football rates him, and this job has undone most of it.
Why he belongs here: rescuing a qualifying campaign that was already lost is one of the harder jobs in international football, and he did it inside five months.
- Age: 51
- Preferred formation: flexible, often a back three
- Current club: Sweden men’s national team
- In management since: 2011 (Östersund)
Emma Hayes (United States Women’s National Team)
Hayes has won more than any English manager currently working, and it isn’t close. Thirteen years at Chelsea, 261 wins from 367 games, WSL titles and FA Cups stacked up in the cabinet. Then the United States called, and she won Olympic gold in Paris three months into the job, and took home the first Ballon d’Or ever handed out for women’s coaching.
For twenty years the USWNT played one way – press, force the turnover, run at people – and it had stopped working, because the rest of the world learned to sit deep in compact blocks.
Hayes has rebuilt them as a possession side with a hard defensive spine: two centre-backs in constant conversation, one holding midfielder, patient build-up. They won the 2026 SheBelieves Cup without conceding across three games, inside an 804-minute run in which nobody scored against them at all.
She’s been ruthless with the squad, too. Twenty-seven debutants and fifty different starters in her first thirty matches, a rate no full-time USWNT coach has come near. That’s a manager building for the 2027 World Cup, and it’s the kind of thing that gets you sacked the moment results dip. They haven’t dipped.
Why she belongs here: trophies, a genuine tactical rebuild of a national team with a very fixed identity, and a squad she is visibly constructing rather than inheriting.
- Age: 49
- Preferred formation: possession system with a single holding midfielder
- Current club: United States women’s national team
- In management since: 2008 (Chicago Red Stars)
Frank Lampard (Coventry City)
By late 2024, Lampard’s managerial career was mostly a cautionary tale. Derby, a Chelsea spell with not much to show for it, a holding job at Everton, then a caretaker return to Stamford Bridge that went badly enough to look final. Coventry were 17th in the Championship when they hired him that November.
He had them in the play-offs by May. The season after, he won the thing outright: Championship title with games to spare, 97 goals in 46 matches, at least fifteen more than anyone else in the division, and Coventry back in the top flight for the first time in 25 years. Championship Manager of the Season, and nobody argued about it.
A 4-2-3-1 is what he usually goes for – get it wide early, cross it, run at people, plus a set-piece routine good enough to survive the step up. Seven players reached double figures for goals and assists, which is what happens when a team attacks in numbers instead of through one man.
Lampard put the season “right at the top” of his career when the title was sealed. Considering his long list of accomplishments as a player, that says a lot.
Why he belongs here: a title by a distance, at a club taking no parachute payments, after most people had stopped expecting anything from him.
- Age: 48
- Preferred formation: 4-2-3-1 or 4-3-3
- Current club: Coventry City
- In management since: 2018 (Derby County)
Gary O’Neil (Ipswich Town)
O’Neil’s Ipswich appointment in June 2026 came out of a strange situation: Kieran McKenna had just got the club promoted, then walked away from it.
What O’Neil offers is one very particular skill, and he’s now proved it three times. Bournemouth, 2022, taking over days into a season most had already written off as a relegation – 15th. Wolves, 2023, inheriting a squad whose manager had quit three days before the opener – 14th. Then Strasbourg and a Conference League semi-final.
The method doesn’t vary much. A 4-2-3-1, a compact block through the middle third, break at speed when the ball turns over, and make his team thoroughly annoying to play against. It wins no style awards. It is also, more or less exactly, what a promoted side needs in August.
Why he belongs here: three strong examples of succeeding in difficult circumstances plus a European semi-final in just four years as a manager.
- Age: 43
- Preferred formation: 4-2-3-1
- Current club: Ipswich Town
- In management since: 2022 (Bournemouth)
Where English Coaching Stands Now
Only three English managers in twenty Premier League jobs looks like a crisis, and it gets written up as one roughly twice a season.
Then you look at where the others went. A World Cup with Sweden. Olympic gold with the United States. A European semi-final in France. A Championship title won by the length of the straight. The talent hasn’t gone anywhere. It just isn’t standing where people keep looking for it.
Much of that is the market. Premier League ownership is overwhelmingly international, recruitment runs worldwide, and a sporting director defending an appointment to a sceptical board would far rather point at a European trophy than a Championship promotion.
So English coaches have started building their cases somewhere else. Liam Rosenior has now managed at Strasbourg and Paris FC, with a short and brutal Chelsea spell in between. Behind him is a group of English coaches grinding away in the EFL and the academy setups who’ll get their look in the next two or three years.
And this list will look different by then, because one of these six will almost certainly be out of work in the near future. That’s the job. Keeping track of it week to week is what the football predictions pages are for.
What’s changed underneath all of it is that there’s no longer an English way of coaching. The old caricature, all organisation and directness and not much interest in keeping the ball, fits almost none of the six above.
Carrick’s United pass their way through the middle in short hops. Hayes took the most transition-obsessed team in world football and taught it patience. Potter picks a different shape depending on who’s in front of him. Whatever the English style used to be, it stopped being one thing some time ago.
FAQs About the Best English Football Managers
Who is the best English football manager right now?
Depends entirely on what you’re measuring, which is why there’s no ranking here. On trophies it’s Emma Hayes, comfortably. On the size of the job it’s Michael Carrick at Manchester United. On the last twelve months alone it’s Graham Potter, because dragging Sweden to a World Cup out of a group they’d already lost is the hardest single thing anyone here has done.
Which English manager has won the most trophies?
Bob Paisley. He won 20 major trophies at Liverpool between 1974 and 1983, and he’s still regarded as the most successful English manager the game has produced. Among those working today, Emma Hayes has won the most.
Which English managers coach in the Premier League?
Three, going into 2026/27: Michael Carrick at Manchester United, Frank Lampard at Coventry City and Gary O’Neil at Ipswich Town. The other seventeen clubs are led by Spanish, German, Italian, French, Austrian, Irish, Scottish and Bosnian coaches.
Why are there relatively few English managers in the Premier League?
Because the market is global and clubs hire on reputation. Ownership is mostly international, recruitment runs worldwide, and a coach with a European trophy is simply an easier appointment to justify than an English manager with a promotion behind him.
There’s a pipeline problem underneath that, too: English coaches tend to start in the EFL, where budgets are thin and patience is thinner, so fewer of them ever assemble the record that gets noticed higher up. The ones who have broken through lately mostly did it by leaving England first.
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