Ranking every Premier League manager by how likely they are to attend the Oasis reunion tour
Oasis are back, in news that is sure to delight away days casuals across the country.
No band enjoys more popularity among football supporters in the United Kingdom than the iconic Manchester band, who are set to play their first gigs in 16 years next summer.
We’ve ranked all 20 Premier League managers by how likely they are to be to attend.
20. Unai Emery
We could just about envisage Emery being into The Cure. The Chameleons might be his Manchester band of choice.
But let’s be honest, that’s entirely based on his jet-black locks. It’s a stretch.
We love Unai, but ultimately he strikes us as fundamentally uninterested in anything outside of football. The kind of man that’d go for a romantic meal with his wife but chew her ear off about how to structure a good mid-block or why the relationist approach of Fernando Diniz could never work in Spain or England.
19. Oliver Glasner
It freaks our nut a bit that Glasner is eight years younger than Noel Gallagher.
Categorically not mad fer it. The diametrical opposite, in fact.
18. Erik ten Hag
It’s not just the fact that the Gallagher brothers are Manchester City’s most famous celebrity fans, but Ten Hag doesn’t strike you as the gig-going sort, does he?
This is a man who once wore a linen suit on the touchline. Not a chance is he risking getting covered in beer or p*ss.
17. Nuno Espirito Santo
Once you’ve read the description of the Nottingham Forest manager as a wizened old Jedi, you’ll struggle not to think of it every time you see him.
Can you picture Nuno at an Oasis gig? Exactly.
16. Marco Silva
We like Silva. He’s doing a superb job at Fulham.
But he also feels like some kind of lab-made footballing replicant. A journeyman playing career in Portugal followed by a string of managerial jobs in England. We are frankly unable to imagine him in any context outside of standing on the touchline or giving hacky looks to poor BBC reporters.
Seeing Silva at a gig would be like seeing your old geography teacher in Tesco. Weird and somehow wrong.
15. Julen Lopetegui
Santo, Silva, Lopetegui… We’re not on the most “fun” run of names here, are we? Throw us a bone here, Premier League.
Lopetegui will not be going to the Oasis comeback gigs, no. Don’t be daft.
Meanwhile we’re left daydreaming about an alternate reality in which a 75-year-old Neil Warnock is doing the futile job of trying to keep Coventry City up, wholly unafraid to play to the gallery and descend into self-parody in his post-match interviews. Speaking of which…
Enjoy it lads , but enjoy it by being disciplined…@NoelGallagher @liamgallagher
— Neil Warnock (@warnockofficial) August 26, 2024
14. Thomas Frank
There’s a fair degree of overlap between the two, but those wide, wild eyes speak more of The Hacienda than Knebworth.
More likely to see Frank spending Brentford’s off-season next summer queuing from head to toe in black at Berghain than paying £9 for a lukewarm pint of Camden Hells at Wembley.
13. Ange Postecoglou
“Listen, mate… The only dates at Wembley I’m interested in are the cup finals next year.”
We can already hear those slightly sycophantic journalist guffaws when Big Ange gives a withering response to the final ‘fun’ question at the end of a Thursday press conference. Fully focused on the task at hand.
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12. Andoni Iraola
He’ll consider it. Those cardigans are the hallmark of a man with a surprisingly large vinyl collection.
More of a Pulp or Belle & Sebastian man, though.
11. Eddie Howe
He’ll consider it. If only to give Jason Tindall some company.
More of a Blur man, though.
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10. Mikel Arteta
Arteta will go. In a private box, of course.
Sure enough he’ll enjoy the gig, but the whole time he’ll be making mental notes for his next LinkedIn spiel when the Arsenal squad return for the first day of pre-season.
It’ll be all about how the performance emphasised the value of teamwork and why the Gallaghers burying the hatchet ought to serve as inspiration for forming brotherly bonds.
Pass us the bucket.
9. Fabian Hurzeler
As with every other mention of the Brighton manager anywhere, we’re obliged to start with Hurzeler’s age. We don’t make the rules. Thirty-one years old, don’t you know?
The German was only a year old when ‘Definitely Maybe’ was released and 16 when Oasis played their last gigs back in 2009.
As uncomfortable as we are with the very concept of the Millennial Premier League manager, Hurzeler represents a key cohort of who’ll make up the crowds at Oasis’ comeback shows – those who were too young to see them the first time around but grew up listening to them thanks to their parents.
Full apologies if we’ve sent you spiralling into an existential crisis, there.
READ: A mindblowing XI of Premier League players we can’t believe are older than Brighton’s manager
8. Enzo Maresca
More on Pep Guardiola in a bit.
If Pep himself is there, so too will be his replica.
7. Arne Slot
We’re still getting to know Slot. It’s early days, but the first impressions are he’s a pretty unassuming guy.
The shininess of that bonce would be right at home in a metal or techno crowd, but those incredibly superficial judgements aside we reckon his taste is pretty strait-laced.
As confirmed by our gumshoe digging, which brought us to a recent profile in The Mirror:
“Arne Slot loves pop music. From the Beatles to Bruce Springsteen, the new Liverpool boss is such a sucker for a good tune that he once went to a rock festival just days before leading Feyenoord into the Europa Conference League Final.
“Slot is a regular gig-goer. He never misses the Amstel Live event in Rotterdam – even when Jose Mourinho’s Roma are on the horizon. It is only a matter of time until he turns up at the famous Cavern Club to see where the Fab Four first thrilled their fans.”
Bang on.
6. Gary O’Neil
We mean no disrespect when we say how difficult we’ve found it to find anything interesting at all to say about the fella.
It’s precisely that sheer normalness that makes him a strong candidate to feature in the upper echelons of this ranking. Ask a 41-year-old British bloke their favourite band and Oasis is surely as close as you’ll get to a stock answer.
5. Steve Cooper
“I wouldn’t say it’s a hidden talent. It’s something I can do, it’s usually to myself and no one else can listen!” Cooper told Nottinghamshire Live after performing an impromptu Oasis cover during Nottingham Forest’s promotion celebrations a couple of years back.
“I was lucky enough to meet Noel Gallagher once at the Sports Personality of the Year and that was a real honour. He won’t remember but I do. I like my music but you won’t see me playing the guitar too often, certainly not in public.”
Anyway, here’s Wonderwall:
4. Pep Guardiola
*Pep Guardiola voice* He will be there. So so happy. Like you wouldn’t believe.
For obvious reasons, Guardiola has to be somewhere near the top.
And yet… We’re not saying that Pep doesn’t not like Oasis. He chose ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’ as part of the soundtrack to his life in an interview with the BBC and sounded pretty genuine. He’s also a big fan of Coldplay, so we’re not suggesting he’s too cool for school.
Call us cynical, but as with him modelling that trying-too-hard official Man City Hacienda merch, we just don’t buy Guardiola as an adopted Mancunian. Too Catalan sophisticate. Man’s never worn a kagool in his life.
3. Kieran McKenna
Ipswich’s inspirational manager might’ve been born and raised in London, only spending a couple of years serving as part of Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s coaching staff at Old Trafford, but he possesses the face of a Mancunian.
We can’t explain it, he just does.
Would you bat an eyelid if we told you he spent a few years as a guitarist for some Oasis-inspired landfill indie band called The Minks?
Their 2006 debut single reached 34 in the UK charts but they were dropped by their label before an album ever saw the light of day.
2. Russell Martin
Don’t ever doubt we’re a serious journalistic outlet here at Planet Football. We do our research. And in doing so we’ve come across this TikTok where the Saints boss discusses his music taste.
“A bit of Gerry Cinnamon, a bit of Lee Dunford. I love The Beatles, I love Fleetwood Mac, I love Oasis… I’m a sucker for anything with a guitar,” he says.
Case closed.
1. Sean Dyche
Call us unimaginative but Dyche is the ideal figure for our ongoing Premier League manager rankings. Pint test? High. The ‘High Performance’ grading? Low. A contestant on ‘The Traitors’? High, obviously.
The man doesn’t do half-measures, and we honestly felt a bit lost in those six months or so between his time at Everton and Burnley.
Make a Venn diagram of every key demographic queuing up for Oasis tickets and the intersection will resemble the face of Sean Dyche. He’ll be 54 years of age next summer, meaning he was 23 when they first broke through.
He’s got the disposable income, loves live music and is on the record as an Oasis fan. You better believe he’ll be relieving the glory days of his youth along with tens of thousands of other blokes who look and sound just like him.
You know what? Absolutely fair enough.