Carrick, Sage or Le Bris next? The last 10 Premier League managers to be sacked during an international break

The international break is just around the corner and that can only mean one thing: it’s sacking season.

Depending on this weekend’s results, Pierre Sage at Crystal Palace and Regis Le Bris at Sunderland might be most concerned about getting the chop. Alvaro Arbeloa at Fulham may have been too, but they’ve – kind of? – turned a corner recently. And who knows what’s going on with Michael Carrick and Manchester United?

There’s a general feeling that an international break is a good time to make a managerial change, giving the new incumbent ample time to prepare for their first matches. Never mind that half of their players might be away with their countries.

The November international break appears particularly perilous. We’re far enough into the season now for honeymoon periods to be wearing off for new managers like Sage, or concerns about a club like Sunderland’s trajectory to be setting in. What’s more, this break will be the last before the busy festive period and the January transfer window as well, the latter also frequently having a bearing on potential managerial changes. If a club want to have a new manager in place before all those shenanigans, then now might be the best time to act.

But how often do international break sackings actually occur in the Premier League and how does it work out for the teams who do it?

Here are the last 10 managers to be dismissed during an international break and what happened next.

Igor Tudor (Tottenham Hotspur) – March 2026 You know it’s bad when even an interim manager can’t see out the season. But this was 2025-26 Tottenham Hotspur, found next to ‘catastrophic’ in all good thesauruses.

Tudor took over in February 2026 after the sacking of the doomed Thomas Frank. He was only a few months fresh from his own most recent dismissal, with Juventus sending him packing earlier that season. It looked a peculiar choice by Spurs from the get go.

For his first game in charge, Tudor replicated Frank’s unwanted achievement from earlier in the season: losing 4-1 to Arsenal.

There was never really any sign of recovery by Tudor’s Tottenham. Losses to Fulham and Crystal Palace followed, before a 5-2 thrashing by Atletico Madrid in the Champions League.

It was abundantly clear that Spurs weren’t heading in any other direction to Frank with Tudor at all. By the time the March international break rolled around, not even two months after his appointment, Spurs and Tudor parted company by mutual consent.

Tottenham took their opportunity to appoint a permanent successor, picking out Roberto De Zerbi as their preferred candidate. He was technically out of work when Frank was sacked, but only by a few days after his departure from Marseille and thus wasn’t really readily available.

Spurs handed the Italian a five-year contract, which was a bold move while the threat of relegation was still looming. He lost his first game 1-0 to Sunderland, but a draw against his former club Brighton steadied the ship somewhat and then, in their last game of April, Spurs finally won their first league match of 2026.

It went down to the final day, but De Zerbi kept Tottenham up. They’ve been hit and miss – well, the other way round if we’re having to be chronological – this season so far, but still feel in safer hands with De Zerbi than what came before.

Nuno Espirito Santo (Nottingham Forest) – September 2025 The September international break was the least likely to include a managerial sacking, simply for how close it came to the start of the season. But it wasn’t impossible for clubs to let their early doubts get the better of them – especially ones with an owner as ruthless as Nottingham Forest’s.

Nuno is a funny manager to judge. He seems to flip-flop between doing relatively well at one club and failing to at the next. His spell with Forest was one of his more successful ones – their seventh-place finish in the 2024-25 season earned European qualification – but Evangelos Marinakis showed him little sympathy.

Just three games into the new season, as its first international break began, Forest parted ways with Nuno. They’d most recently collapsed to a 3-0 defeat to his future employers – where, surprise surprise, he didn’t do well – West Ham.

It was their only defeat of the season up to that point, but Nuno’s dismissal wasn’t strictly result-based. Tensions rose between the manager and Marinakis, with Nuno not afraid to voice his dissatisfaction with that summer’s transfer window. His position soon became untenable.

Forest handed the reins to Ange Postecoglou, hoping he could recreate some of the higher points of his own up-and-down Tottenham spell. He could not, and also faced the sack a month later.

His successor Sean Dyche wasn’t the right man for the job in the long term either, and it ultimately took a fourth manager of the season, Vitor Pereira, for Forest to find some stability and secure their Premier League status. But he didn’t last either, because… Forest.

Antonio Conte (Tottenham Hotspur) – March 2023 There was a time, not so long ago, when being fourth in the Premier League was bad enough to get you sacked by Tottenham. Fourth!

Spurs and Conte went their separate ways during the March international break of the 2022-23 season, his last game having been a 3-3 draw away at Southampton.

He didn’t exactly help himself by calling his players “selfish” and firing shots at the Spurs board right after that setback, but Conte’s gonna Conte.

Any club who takes on Conte should know what they’re getting. An intelligent tactical disciplinarian who will more often than not cause chaos and turbulence with his demands behind the scenes. Some decide it’s worth putting up with, then just end up in situations like Spurs did.

Daniel Levy didn’t immediately react to Conte’s outbursts, but eventually pulled the plug on his reign – dressing it up as a decision by mutual consent; Conte won’t have been too miffed to get out, after all – almost a week into the international break.

Cristian Stellini, a member of Conte’s backroom staff, stepped up to a caretaker role. He drew his first game in charge against Everton, with Spurs once again conceding a last-minute equaliser.

And then, erm… remember what we said about interim managers not seeing out a season? Yeah, that. Only Spurs.

Claudio Ranieri (Watford) – January 2022 The 2021-22 season offered the curiosity of a late-January international break – well, sort of. The Premier League’s winter break coincided with some World Cup qualifiers for non-UEFA nations.

It also coincided with Watford’s decision to sack Ranieri. Of course, they’re not a club to hang on to a manager for too long, but Ranieri only got three months.

With only two wins in that time – thrashings of Everton and Manchester United, funnily enough – Ranieri eventually paid the price after a 3-0 defeat at home to Norwich City. It’s hard to say he was their biggest problem – and definitely not the root cause – but it couldn’t go on much longer.

Watford went down the experience route again when picking his successor: Roy Hodgson. He kicked off with a goalless draw at Burnley, but it was mostly downhill from there.

There were only two more wins that season for Watford, who went down to the Championship, from which they are yet to return.

Dean Smith (Aston Villa) – November 2021 Aston Villa have come a long way in recent years. It was Smith who lifted them out of the Championship to set their upward trajectory in motion, but by November 2021, suspicions set in that he’d taken them as far as he could.

Smith left Villa with their gratitude, but a run of five consecutive defeats in the Premier League had done him no favours. His time was up.

Villa promptly appointed Steven Gerrard for his first taste of Premier League management on the back of his success in Scotland with Rangers. And the early signs were that he might be able to replicate it, starting with back-to-back wins over Brighton and Crystal Palace.

It didn’t last. Gerrard guided Villa to a 14th-place finish but didn’t see the end of the October of what should have been his first full season in charge.

Daniel Farke (Norwich City) – November 2021 Smith didn’t have to wait too long to find his next job. Just a few days later, he was appointed by Norwich on the back of their own international break sacking.

Farke was the victim in their case, with the Canaries fearing a repeat of him taking them straight back down to the Championship after his previous promotion.

Their fears were understandable, since they’d only won once in the league that season. Even the fact that it was in their most recent game didn’t save him.

This was a fair while before Leeds United faced their own doubts over whether Farke was good enough to keep a club in the top flight, no matter how good he is at getting them there. They, of course, have put their faith in him and been rewarded.

Norwich’s gamble did not pay off. Smith, whose last game in charge of Villa had been against Southampton, faced Southampton in his first game in charge of Norwich. This time, instead of losing 1-0, he claimed a 2-1 win.

But in the long run, he couldn’t prevent Norwich’s relegation. He left partway through the subsequent Championship campaign.

Xisco Munoz (Watford) – October 2021 Fancy seeing you here again, Watford. The axe fell on Xisco at the start of the October 2021 international break, with the Spaniard afforded no sympathy despite overseeing their promotion to the Premier League.

He had managed to win his first Premier League game on the touchline, 3-2 against Aston Villa, but three losses in a row followed, with Watford failing to score in each of them.

A win over Farke’s Norwich gave them a glimmer of hope, but their next slide commenced with a draw to Newcastle and a loss to Leeds, which proved to be the final nail in Xisco’s coffin.

Ranieri was swiftly installed as their next manager, despite his reputation in England no longer being what it was in his Leicester days due to his subsequent ill-fated Fulham reign.

Sure enough, Ranieri started off with a 5-0 defeat at home to Liverpool and, as we’ve addressed, also faced the wrath of the Watford board before too long.

As for whatever happened to Xisco, he’s now managing Johor Darul Ta’zim in the Malaysia Super League.

Mauricio Pochettino (Tottenham Hotspur) – November 2019 Things can change quickly in football. Barely half a year after leading Tottenham into the Champions League final, Pochettino found himself being sacked after only winning three of Spurs’ first 12 games of the new Premier League season.

It was a ruthless decision, but Spurs were languishing in 14th place in the table. And these were the days when that represented a fall from grace rather than a decent season.

Pochettino probably deserved better. He established Spurs as regular contenders near the top throughout his time in charge. They were nearly men, sure, but there were factors limiting him in the background and he still kept them aiming high.

Unfortunately, they were too far away from their ambitions when the November 2019 international break came around. With one of the world’s most famous and successful managers available, Spurs rolled the dice and replaced Pochettino with Jose Mourinho.

There was some scepticism from the Spurs fanbase, not least because of his previous connection with London rivals Chelsea, but it was undoubtedly a high-profile, ambitious move that created a degree of fascination.

After the break, Mourinho won his first game in charge 3-2 against West Ham, kicking off a run of five wins in seven in the league to get Spurs right back up there. At the halfway stage of the season, they were sixth. It was starting to look like their ruthless call could pay off.

But sixth is where Spurs finished in the end, their lowest placing since the 2013-14 season. Things unravelled the following season – like with Conte, Mourinho is the kind of manager with whom you have to take the rough with the smooth – and the so-called Special One was dismissed before it ended.

With the misfortunes that have followed, there are still Spurs fans who pine for their former manager to come back. But that former manager is Pochettino, not Mourinho. Maybe it wasn’t worth it after all.

Javi Gracia (Watford) – September 2019 Fancy seeing you here again, Watford. Another of those rarer September sackings here, with Gracia only getting four league games at the start of the season before getting his marching orders.

The season had started with three defeats in a row and a draw with Newcastle wasn’t enough to convince Watford that Gracia was turning the tide.

They reverted to a familiar face by re-appointing former boss Quique Sanchez Flores in a pretty random move. Once the international break was over, he got up and running with a 2-2 draw against Arsenal. But it was back down to earth the following week with an 8-0 loss at Manchester City.

It took until their 12th game of the season for Watford to pick up their first win in the league. It was the only one Sanchez Flores managed before he too was sacked, to be replaced in December by Nigel Pearson.

Watford went down by the end of the season, with Hayden Mullins seeing the season out as a caretaker manager after they pretty much just gave up.

Slavisa Jokanovic (Fulham) – November 2018 Jokanovic was the architect of Fulham’s promotion via the play-offs in 2018, but the Premier League is not an easy league to step up into.

After 12 games, Jokanovic had only overseen one win in the top flight. He was on a run of six consecutive league defeats by the time of the November international break that year.

A mildly ambitious summer transfer window was not bearing the fruit it had promised and Fulham were falling behind. Even one of the sides they came up with, Cardiff City, put four past them on the path to Jokanovic’s dismissal.

After an unsuccessful attempt to lure Arsene Wenger back into management, Ranieri was chosen as the man to transform their fortunes. Whatever he did over the international break in his first days in charge must have worked, as they bounced back with a 3-2 win over Southampton. But there were then six league games without a win for Fulham.

Ranieri ultimately only lasted until the end of February and Fulham, under the stewardship of Scott Parker as a caretaker, finished in the relegation zone.