The most recent entrant on this list, Igor Tudor was the first man tasked with merely saving Tottenham from relegation to the Championship during the 2025-26 season after the sacking of Thomas Frank. All he did, however, was accelerate their plummet down the table.
Tudor was hired as a firefighter, with recognition that he tends to get results over the short term rather than in the long run. Crucially, though, he had never managed in England before and had underestimated how much trouble Spurs were in. It was only after his first game, a 4-1 loss to Arsenal in the north London derby, that the hard-man Croatian realised what he had signed up for. “This is a situation that I never saw,” was his assessment.
If we are to be fair to Tudor, he arrived amid an unprecedented injury crisis that saw him have only 13 senior fit outfielders for his first match, and the problem only relented at the very end of his 44-day reign. But in that time, he is said to have disillusioned much of the squad he had left available to him, not least goalkeeper Antonin Kinsky, who was hooked 17 minutes into a 5-2 defeat to Atletico Madrid in the Champions League.
It seemed a last-gasp draw at Liverpool would be the ignition Tudor needed to kick-start Spurs’ survival campaign, but that ended up being his penultimate Premier League game in charge, as a 3-0 defeat at home to relegation rivals Nottingham Forest followed one week later. Tragically, Tudor’s father passed away during that fixture, and all parties decided it would be best to mutually part ways there having not won any of his five Premier League matches at the helm.
