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Study: Jose Mourinho made almost £100 million in three failed Premier League jobs


The price of being a Premier League manager

Being a manager in the Premier League comes with some obvious pitfall.

Football managers are under pressure from fans and the industry on a daily basis and can be subject to taunts from opposition fans both in person and online. Managers also risk having their faces plastered all over the national media, and are ultimately reliant on the performance of their players in order to keep their jobs.

There is also very little job security - there have been over 400 managers since the Premier League started in 1992 - in what is often referred to as the ‘managerial merry- go-round’ there is often no loyalty, with players, fans, staff and pundits alike queuing up to stab you in the back.

So why is the position as Premier League manager such a sought-after one?

Firstly, the chance to test yourself at the highest possible standard is an obvious appeal to anyone with any ambition and with the likes of Pep Guardiola, Jurgen Klopp, Thomas Tuchel, Antonio Conte, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer and Marcelo Bielsa currently in the Premier League, it is undoubtedly the pinnacle of football management.

However the money ain’t half bad either

101 Great Goals’ Managerial Payouts has researched every manager that has been sacked in the Premier League over the last 10 years (2011/12 - 2020/21) to reveal which managers have made the most money despite performing poorly and losing their jobs, and the true cost of their performance.

Jose Mourinho has been paid the most in the Premier League

Jose Mourinho is someone who always demands a high price in negotiations, and with three high profile sackings in the last 10 years (Chelsea, Manchester United and Tottenham) is unsurprisingly top of our list, having made a total of £97,674,480 across those three jobs.

Thanks to the steady influx of cash into top flight football in the UK from sponsors and broadcasters, player wages and transfers have sky-rocketed to the point where players are earning almost half a million pounds per week, and nine-figure sums are often talked about as being ‘fair value’ for a player, with manager wages now reaching those same levels.

With the impact of those aforementioned managers, along with the likes of Mourinho, Mauricio Pochettino and Antonio Conte, the profile of a manager has never been higher than it is today, and that means they demand a high price and eye-watering contracts.

Everyone knows who the richest footballers in the Premier League are, but which managers have made the most money in the last 10 years?

Managerial Payouts has collected the annual wages (according to their most recent signed contract) of every manager in the list of 71 to be sacked in the last 10 years to work out how much they were each paid per day, and used their overall days in charge to work out the total wages paid to them in their time at each club.

With that total amount made, their managerial records can then be broken down to reveal how much money they made per game and per win in their time in the Premier League.

Payouts offered to managers following their sackings were not counted due to inconsistent data being available.

With a total of nearly £98m made across his collective 2,315 days in charge of those three huge clubs, Mourinho ultimately was paid £266,870 per game and £467,342 per game won in the Premier League.

However that’s not even the most in the list, with Manuel Pellegrini officially the worst value of all, costing West Ham £622,146 per win in his time at the London Stadium and making a total of £14,931,507 from his annual wage of £10m over 545 days in charge - his time at Manchester City was not taken into account as he departed at the end of his contract, and was not sacked.

Mauricio Pochettino is second on the list in terms of total money made thanks to his contract at Tottenham, making £23,288 for every one of his 1,967 days in charge for a total of £45,806,849.

Of course no Premier League betting tips manager market would be complete without mentioning the old favourites such as Mark Hughes, Sam Allardyce, Alan Pardew, Steve Bruce and Neil Warnock, who have been sacked a total of 10 times between them in the last 10 years, prior to Bruce’s departure from Newcastle.

In total, those five managers have made £43,125,763 in that time, winning 330 matches at £130,684 per win.

Thanks to the big pay packets offered to Mourinho and Pochettino along with Harry Redknapp and Andre Villas-Boas, Tottenham have paid out the most money to sacked managers in the past decade, with a total of £85,919,178, averaging out at £21,479,794 per manager.

No club has paid out more money to managers than Tottenham

This puts them just ahead of Mourinho’s other clubs, Chelsea and Manchester United - suggesting he is the common denominator - while of the top 15 clubs to have paid out the most money, Sunderland and West Brom had the shortest tenure per manager, going through four bosses at an average of 63 and 53 games respectively.

So while Premier League managers are rarely very secure in their jobs, they are more than well rewarded for the pressures and stresses of management with multi-million pound contracts and payouts on offer.

For more information on 101 Great Goals’ Premier League betting tips and other football betting tips, including managerial odds, please visit https://www.101greatgoals.com/football-betting-tips/.

Note: Data for Alex McLeish (Aston Villa), Brain McDermott (Reading), Chris Hughton (Norwich), Ian Holloway (Crystal Palace), Javi Gracia (Watford), Mick McCarthy (Wolves), Rene Meulensteen (Fulham) and Slavisa Jokanovic (Fulham) was not available and therefore they were not counted in the study.

Data Sources: Salary details were collected from a range of news reports from both national and regional news outlets such as the Guardian, Daily Mail and the Sun, with contract details and managerial records taken from Transfermarkt.

Will Jackson

Will Jackson

Sports journalist, formerly of PA Media and latterly a PR manager within XL Media. Long-suffering Leeds United and Yorkshire fan delving deep into the world of Sorare


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