The clamour for Michael Carrick to be given the Manchester United job permanently hasn’t quite started yet.
There have been one or two articles, a few “…well, they could do a lot worse…” comments, some obvious enthusiasm after how they played against Manchester City in winning last weekend’s derby at Old Trafford 2-0, but for the moment it’s all been relatively low-key.
We’re yet to see a gaggle of his former team-mates queue up to insist he is given whatever contract he wants, or jokingly-but-actually-slightly-seriously asking where he wants his statue placed, as was the case with a previous United interim manager, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer.
But if this upward trajectory continues, then all that won’t be too far away.
Putting aside the psychodrama of Manchester United’s world and their obsession with former players stepping in when everyone needs a comforting hug, there is a question that this situation naturally poses: should you ever give the caretaker boss the permanent job?
It’s easy to see why clubs might do this: if the temporary man has done well, is giving him a full-time contract any more of a risk than getting in someone completely new? In theory, you can think of it as a free-trial period, like one of those vegetable-box things you can get heavy discounts on for a few weeks, before committing yourself to the full subscription.
But in practice, clubs considering the removal of ‘interim’ from a guy’s job title do sometimes resemble the Tobias Funke character in the U.S. sitcom Arrested Development when he’s asked if an open marriage has ever worked before. “No, it never does,” he says. “I mean, these people somehow delude themselves into thinking it might, but… but it might work for us.”
But has it worked before? The short, reductive answer is: as a rule, no, it doesn’t work… though with one or two examples to make an optimistic club think, ‘It might work for us.’
In the 34 years of the Premier League era, there have been 21 occasions when a caretaker manager/head coach has graduated to permanent status.
There are a variety of ways you can judge whether those decisions have been successful, but let’s start with a crude one: of the 21, only four had a better record, in terms of Premier League points-per-game, after they were given the permanent job as opposed to when they were in caretaker/interim charge.
Premier League caretaker managers who got job permanently
Manager
Club
Season
Games as caretaker
PPG
Games as full-time manager
PPG
PPG diff
David O’Leary
Leeds
1998-99
3
0.66
142
1.81
1.15
Stuart Gray
Southampton
2000-01
9
0.9
10
1
0.1
Peter Reid
Leeds
2002-03
8
1.63
12
0.67
-0.96
Chris Coleman
Fulham
2002-03
5
2
147
1.22
-0.78
Stuart Pearce
Manchester City
2004-05
8
1.87
77
1.12
-0.75
Glenn Roeder
Newcastle
2005-06
15
2.13
37
1.14
-0.99
Lawrie Sanchez
Fulham
2006-07
4
1
18
0.72
-0.28
Joe Kinnear
Newcastle
2008-09
9
1.1
12
0.92
-0.18
Tony Adams
Portsmouth
2008-09
1
1
15
0.67
-0.33
Ricky Sbragia
Sunderland
2008-09
4
1.75
19
0.74
-1.01
Paul Hart
Portsmouth
2008-09
13
1.08
13
0.54
-0.54
Steve Kean
Blackburn
2010-11
1
1
58
0.9
-0.1
Kenny Dalglish
Liverpool
2010-11
16
1.83
40
1.3
-0.53
Roberto Di Matteo
Chelsea
2011-12
11
1.64
12
2
0.36
Tim Sherwood
Tottenham
2013-14
1
3
21
1.86
-1.14
Garry Monk
Swansea
2013-14
13
1.15
54
1.35
0.2
Mike Phelan
Hull
2016-17
7
1
13
0.46
-0.54
Craig Shakespeare
Leicester
2016-17
13
1.77
8
0.75
-1.02
Ole Gunnar Solskjaer
Manchester United
2018-19
13
2.46
96
1.72
-0.74
Scott Parker
Fulham
2018-19
9
1
39
0.72
-0.28
Gary O’Neil
Bournemouth
2022-23
11
1.18
23
1
-0.18
There are plenty of caveats here, not least that seven of those had five games or fewer in charge initially, so purely in terms of sample size, it’s slightly unfair to compare records before and after. Points-per-game also isn’t a perfect way of judging things, not least because it only takes into account league form: so Kenny Dalglish winning the 2011-12 League Cup, Liverpool’s first trophy in almost six years, in his post-caretaker permanent spell, isn’t included.
Scott Parker perhaps shouldn’t even be on this list: he was in interim charge of Fulham from the February of the 2018-19 season, having been an assistant under the sacked Claudio Ranieri. He couldn’t prevent their relegation three months later but was appointed permanently, then got them promoted back to the top flight at the first time of asking. His Championship record isn’t counted here, but the 38 games of the following Premier League season, when they went back down again are, so he is among those with a worse post-permanent record.
Nevertheless, it does more or less accurately illustrate a broader point, that these managers tend not to do as well after getting the full-time gig.
Another way of looking at it is how long they spend in charge, after being appointed permanently: only eight of them lasted 38 games (a full season’s worth) or more, with eight taking charge of 15 matches or fewer.
The shortest post-caretaker reign belongs to the late Craig Shakespeare, who had 13 games in temporary charge of Leicester City after stepping up from an assistant position when they fired Ranieri in February 2017, signed a three-year contract that summer but was then given the boot eight games into the following Premier League season.
Stuart Gray at Southampton in 2000-01 was a slightly curious case: after Glenn Hoddle left to take the Tottenham Hotspur job in the March, assistant Gray was installed as a stop-gap and collected just two points from his first seven games, before beating Manchester United and Arsenal back-to-back in the final two fixtures of the season.
That was enough for Southampton to give him the permanent gig, with a reported three-year — three years! — contract in the summer, and definitely not because they couldn’t get anyone else, having reportedly been turned down by Harry Redknapp, Steve McClaren and David Moyes. “He is one of the new breed set to lead in the new Premiership,” asserted the club’s then chairman Rupert Lowe, insisting Gray was not his “second choice”. Gray then took six points from the first eight games of the following season and was out before the end of October.
The late Glenn Roeder at Newcastle United is one of the more extreme examples: after Graeme Souness was sacked in February 2006, Roeder stepped up from his position as head of the club’s youth academy and took 32 points from the remaining 15 games, delivering a seventh-place finish. Stretched over a full season, that record would have been enough for 81 points and a Champions League spot. Roeder was appointed permanently in the summer, but the following season was beset by injuries and a failure to replace retired striker Alan Shearer properly, and he resigned before the last game of the campaign with the team in 13th.
Roberto Di Matteo’s time at Chelsea has a case to be one of the weirdest managerial spells of all time. After the Andre Villas-Boas experiment failed, former Chelsea player turned assistant Di Matteo took over for the last three months of the 2011-12 season: his league form wasn’t great (five wins in 11 matches), but under him Chelsea lifted the FA Cup and then the European Cup that May, which we can probably all agree is a solid return.
Chelsea’s then-owner Roman Abramovich, with seeming reluctance, gave him a two-year deal, but then sacked Di Matteo in the November, though his league record in that permanent spell was actually better (seven wins in 12) than the one when he was caretaker.
Three names on this list were appointed permanently after only one game in temporary charge, for a range of reasons: Tim Sherwood at Tottenham in December 2013, Steve Kean at Blackburn Rovers in the same month three years earlier and Tony Adams at Portsmouth in October 2008. None were, to put things kindly, huge successes.
The list also reveals a few examples of instant buyer’s remorse, as only six of the 21 converted interims won their first game after earning that permanent contract. You can imagine some panicked glances around various directors’ boxes, frantically checking if those deals were definitely binding.
It’s easy to see why an interim appointment doesn’t necessarily make a good permanent one.
A caretaker’s spell almost by definition represents a small sample size — the longest on this list is 16 games, by Dalglish at Liverpool — so clubs are not necessarily judging from reliable evidence. A caretaker boss could easily benefit from a ‘new-manager bounce’, which they then can’t sustain. There might be differences in motivation, for both manager and players, depending on the interim’s status.
So are there any genuine successes among our 21?
Parker could make a case, given relegation was more or less assured when he first came in, and he took Fulham straight back up. Chris Coleman, also at Fulham, went on to spend 171 games as their permanent manager from 2003-07. Dalglish’s tangible results weren’t great, but after the Roy Hodgson debacle, nobody at Liverpool was sorry that he was their manager again.
David O’Leary is the most objectively successful, even if he’s sort of on the list as a technicality.
When George Graham left Leeds United for Tottenham in October 1998, assistant O’Leary was the obvious choice to succeed him, but was initially reluctant, and as such, his first three games in charge were as a caretaker before he was persuaded to take the job full time. There he stayed for almost four years, and although it all turned out to be built on sand/chairman Peter Ridsdale’s excessive and unsustainable spending, he did take Leeds to four top-five finishes and two European semi-finals.
And then there’s Solskjaer.
An Old Trafford folk hero from playing days, he is seen as the ultimate example of a club getting too carried away with the good performance of a caretaker manager, but even looking back now, Manchester United were almost left with no choice but to give him the job full time in March 2019: he had been caretaker for 13 league games after the sacking of Jose Mourinho, of which they won 10 and lost one, they also beat Arsenal and Chelsea away in the FA Cup and were one of the few teams to stop Liverpool winning at that time.
Plus, of course, there was that extraordinary win against Paris Saint-Germain in the Champions League.
Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s results were so impressive that he was appointed permanently by Manchester United (Julian Finney/Getty Images)
Perhaps cooler heads should have prevailed and put a decision off until the summer: United did then only win two of their last 10 games that season after he signed his permanent contract, losing six. Maybe they should have seen a drop-off coming, because nobody could have sustained those early results. But those early results, combined with the sentiment at the club attached to the former striker and how cleansing those winter months were after the toxicity of Mourinho’s final days… it would have taken an ice-cool head not to give him the job.
You wonder what United will do if Carrick produces similar results over the coming weeks and months. Will United heed the lessons of history, both from their own experience and in the wider Premier League? Or will they fill themselves with optimism and go with their hearts again?
After all, they might think, ‘It could work for us…’
