Many fans are saying the same thing about Cesar Peixoto after Wolves' win at Preston

The new Wolverhampton Wanderers head coach is causing a stir on social media thanks to his resemblance to another extremely well-known manager.

WIth a comfortable win at Preston North End under their belts, Wolverhampton Wanderers have kick-started their season, but some online fans have spotted something about the club's new head coach, Cesar Peixoto.

Wolves' 2026-27 season has begun. There were some glum faces around Molineux following their opening weekend 2-2 draw with Blackburn Rovers. This was not the sort of result that a team playing to win their way back to the Premier League should be achieving on the opening weekend of the season, when one of the main aims of any team will be to send out a message to the rest of the division.

But the mood around Molineux has been lifted by the team's performance at Preston North End over the weekend. A commanding 3-1 win at Deepdale, with two goals from Fernando Lopez and one from Adam Armstrong, pushed them up to fourth place in the early-season Championship table and served a timely warning that Wolves do not intend for their stay in this division to be a lengthy one.

The result was also a personal triumph for head coach Cesar Peixoto, who arrived at the club following the surprise sacking of Rob Edwards in June. But it's the manager's close physical resemblance to a former England manager that has been occupying some online fans recently.

Cesar Peixoto's resemblance to Gareth Southgate has been noted by fans on social media

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Peixoto spoke to the Wolves website after the Preston win, offering a clear-eyed assessment of his team's performance. Just as everything related to his team's performance against Blackburn, he stated, so not everything to come from their performance at Preston was good.

The head coach was particularly pleased to have delivered an away win for the long-suffering travelling Wolves fans, whose last league win away from Molineux came at the start of April 2025 against Ipswich Town, describing the away support as "amazing." And he was disappointed that his defence didn't keep a clean sheet, although he did praise his players for their performance.

But Wolves fans may have spotted something else during this interview, because Peixoto bears an uncanny resemblance to the former England manager Gareth Southgate. Fans of the club will be hoping that the new Wolves boss can have the same transformative effect on his team that Southgate had on England when he took over that job in 2016.

What fans are saying about Cesar Peixoto on social media

Plenty of fans have spotted the similarity between Cesar Peixoto and the former England manager Gareth Southgate, but he's not the only manager who the new Wolves boss has been compared with.

This fan feels that the former England boss's dad might have some explaining to do:

This fan sees an amalgam of different managers going on:

This fan sees a similarity with another manager, but with one key difference:

Wolves fans won't care who Cesar Peixoto looks like if he can get them back into the Premier League

Cesar Peixoto's arrival at Molineux during the summer was a shock for Wolverhampton Wanderers supporters. Former manager Rob Edwards had been unable to keep the club in the Premier League at the end of the 2025-26 season, and at the time that the news of his departure, local newspaper the Express & Star canvassed local opinion and found considerable surprise that Edwards, who'd only arrived at Molineux from Middlesbrough the previous November, wasn't being given an opportunity to prove his methods in the Championship.

The big concern over Peixoto's arrival at the club was his lack of experience in England. After a reasonably accomplished playing career during which he turned out for two of Portugal's big three - Porto and Benfica - and won one international cap, he didn't enter management until 2019, but arrived at Molineux with his most successful season under his belt, having taken Gil Vicente to sixth place in the Portuguese Primeira Liga at the end of 2025-26.

One of the bigger concerns over Peixoto at the time of his appointment was his complete lack of experience as either a player or a manager, but coaches have succeeded without that experience before, and the early signs - especially from his team's performance at Preston - have clearly been that he's able to get a tune out of this squad of players.

The opening weekend Blackburn match had been a huge disappointment for Wolves. Against a team which is - although this may yet be proved wrong - widely expected to struggle in the Championship this season, they required a stoppage-time penalty converted by returning hero Raul Jimenez to secure a point. But the Preston game brought both a better performance and a better result, and will have calmed some nerves around the club after their opening match.

There is a certain irony to Peixoto's resemblance to the former England manager. Just as with the national team in 2016 when Gareth Southgate was appointed into that position, so Wolves were in need of a little tender loving care following a disastrous 2025-26 season in the Premier League. But if the new man can take this famous old club back into the Premier League at the end of this season, Wolves fans won't care a jot which other managers he may or may not physically resemble.