Ryan O’HanlonFeb 10, 2026, 06:00 AM ETCloseRyan O’Hanlon is a staff writer for ESPN.com. He’s also the author of “Net Gains: Inside the Beautiful Game’s Analytics Revolution.”Follow on XMultiple Authors
Hutchison: Carrick has made a mockery of Amorim’s Man United (1:39)ESPN’s Don Hutchison believes Michael Carrick has made a “mockery” of Ruben Amorim’s Manchester United. (1:39)
The averages, of course, say no. The average manager in England lasts just under a season and a half on the sideline. Put another way: any head coach in England that survives two full seasons has defeated the odds.
There’s enough pending volatility before we’ve even mentioned that the World Cup is this summer, which means a number of the world’s most famous coaches — Thomas Tuchel, Julian Nagelsmann, Carlo Ancelotti, and Mauricio Pochettino, to name a few — might be looking for new gigs in a couple months, too. And it also means that a bunch of the richest national teams might be looking for new coaches.
So, ahead of what feels like a coming sea change at the top of the managerial ladder, we’ve put together the 25 biggest club and country jobs in the world — and then we’ve ranked them from most to least desirable.
As usual, simple is better for ranking methodologies. So, this list has got three inputs, all weighted equally: (1) How much does the coach get paid? (2) How stable is the job? And (3) How talented is the team?
For the first, I dug around for reports of various managerial earnings and then made estimates where I had to. This is based on whatever the current coach is getting paid. It’s not perfect, but that’s why it’s rated equally with the other two variables. Otherwise, I’d weigh the potential salary as the highest factor.
For stability, I just looked at how many different managers have coached at least 10 games for the team this decade. And for talent, the market valuations from Transfermarkt will be our proxy.
And to pick the 25 teams that deserved to make the cut: I’ve included the “Big Six” in the Premier League, the “Big Three” in Spain, Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund in Germany, the two Milan clubs in Italy, and Paris Saint-Germain in France. For national teams, I went with the “traditional” top nine of Argentina, Brazil, Spain, France, England, Germany, Portugal, Italy, and the Netherlands. And then, because I know my audience, I added in Mexico and the United States.
Pep Guardiola has been the manager for nearly 10 years, he makes a ton of money, and he has one of the deepest and most talented squads in the world.
Man City have the backing of essentially unlimited sovereign wealth, and that money is spent using a massive, professionalized global infrastructure — not at the whims of some disgruntled prince. For a club that could afford to make rash, emotional decisions, City rarely seem to do it.
This is a similar situation to the City job — minus the quandaries that come with getting paid by a sovereign nation. You don’t get the same money for yourself or your team, but you also get to live in London. And I think Arsenal have a squad better suited for the near future.
Much like with City, though, the next Arsenal manager after Mikel Arteta probably won’t get the same patience and power as Mikel Arteta. Still, broadly this is a rich team that’s willing to spend, has now proven they know how to spend, and they won’t fire you at the first run of bad results.
If I were creating tiers, this would be the end of the top tier, and I think that speaks to how unique Guardiola, Arteta, and Diego Simeone are in the modern game. They’re, by most estimates, the three highest-paid coaches in the sport — with Simeone at No. 1. And they’re the three-longest tenure coaches at the Champions League level — with Simeone leading the way, now into his 14th year.
Zoom out far enough and Atletico Madrid looks like the perfect job: you get paid more than anyone in the world to be the coach, you get to live in a major city that easily attracts players, and you don’t have to deal with the absurdly high expectations of managing Real Madrid. If we zoom in, then it looks even better: Simeone might be the sport’s last true manager. He influences what happens at Atletico Madrid more than any “head coach” at any other big club.
The question, though, is for how much longer? Apollo Global Capital, a private-equity firm with around $900 billion in assets, bought Atletico Madrid in November. Do you really think they’re going to let the coach keep making all of the club’s major decisions?
These are the two most talented national teams in the world, and it’s hard to see that changing any time soon. Didier Deschamps has been the France coach since 2012, while Gareth Southgate lasted nearly a decade before being replaced by Thomas Tuchel, who immediately became one of the highest paid national team managers.
You’re not going to make what you could make at one of Europe’s top clubs and you won’t be able to develop talent or install any complex principles as you can in a club-team environment. But, you get to coach players who are just as good as at any club, it’s way less stressful, and you actually get to spend some time with your family.
Do you want to get paid a ton of money to coach the best players in the world, but also get fired just because those players decide they don’t like you or someone in a suit doesn’t realize how random the Champions League knockout rounds really are?
I’d probably bump this one up if these were subjective rankings because Liverpool showed they were willing to pay a manager tons of money in Jürgen Klopp, and they make the most measured decisions of any club on this list. Plus, there’s a pretty good track record of their organizational structure working.
Spain paid Luis Enrique more than they’re paying current manager Luis De La Fuente, so a bigger name could still make good money coaching La Roja. And you’re hitching your wagon to Lamine Yamal, so you’ve got potentially 15 more years (?) of elite play from your do-it-all superstar.
But I still think England and France are less likely to have a talent drop off in any given generation than Spain are.
Coaching Lionel Messi with Argentina seems like the surest thing in sports. Despite no track-record of top-level managing, Lionel Scaloni got to do it, and now he’s won three straight major trophies, is the defending World Cup champ, and has been the coach since 2018.
But if we look back past 2018? No major trophies, lots of psychological drama, and three managers in the three years prior. I wonder how stable and close-to-automatically successful this job will look once Messi finally retires.
Having to manage Cristiano Ronaldo right now would be a nightmare: you basically have to find a way to convince one of the most famous and powerful athletes to ever live that he needs to come off the bench or that he can’t play 90 minutes every game. And if you can’t do that, which you won’t, you have to find a way to build your team around a mostly immobile 41-year-old striker who still takes bad shots and does zero defending.
That said, the Portuguese federation has only had five different full-time managers since the 2002 World Cup, and there is still a ton of talent waiting to be unleashed in the post-Ronaldo generation.
This is purely a coincidence, but Germany and Bayern Munich earned the exact same score from the three different inputs. Yet, I’m not sure they could be much different gigs.
The German federation overhauled the domestic landscape in 2004 and are just generally one of the more forward-thinking governing bodies in the sport. Unlike the bruising, dour teams of the past, the modern version of Germany seems to want to play the kind of aggressive, creative, possession soccer that we see — er, used to see — at the highest levels of the club game. There have been three Germany managers since 2006.
This is one of the few national team jobs that can rival some of the top club jobs in potential salary. Plus, Brazil simply just has a massive, mostly soccer-playing population that is always going to produce a ton of talent.
But the expectations are pretty much impossible: you’re supposed to match the past success of a country that’s no longer the talent center of world soccer, while also maintaining the free-flowing, joyful style of play that everyone associates with the country. If there’s anyone who could pull that off, though, it’s probably current manager Carlo Ancelotti.
While they have stabilized under Hansi Flick, we don’t have to look too far back to remember an era where Barcelona were pulling levers to sign Robert Lewandowski and attempting to publicly shame Frenkie de Jong into taking a pay cut.
The club paid a lot of money to simply bring Thomas Frank over from Brentford, which suggests a willingness to invest money in the manager. And although they’ve had five coaches since 2020, I’d say that has more to do with the kinds of choices they’ve made rather than a quick trigger finger.
Plus, the decision-makers have changed over the past half decade, and Thomas Frank has the team near the relegation zone. I think he would’ve been fired at a bunch of other clubs on this list already.
Italy haven’t won a World Cup game since they literally won the World Cup final in 2006. Regression to the mean suggests that if you take this job, you’re likely to improve on that just by sheer dumb luck. The talent level, though, seems significantly lower than all of the already mentioned countries, and I’m not sure it’s getting any better any time soon.
The highest paid coach in the world is former Inter Milan manager Simone Inzaghi, who is reportedly making close to $30 million a year with Al Ahli in Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, current Inter Milan manager Christian Chivu might be the lowest paid coach on this list.
And yet, Inter are still humming along and look like they’re easily the best team in Serie A this year. The past decade of success has established Inter as the clear number No. 1 club in Italy.
A lot of American fans think this is a great job, and it finally became one when a couple hedge-fund billionaires decided to pool enough money together to pay the U.S. men’s national team manager $6 million a year to potentially only coach three meaningful games in two years.