Southampton may be riding high in the Premier League right now under new manager Ronald Koeman, but Saints fans have had got used to never being too settled. After Ted Bates ("Mr. Southampton") and his protege-successor Lawrie McMenemy built the team up through the 1960s, 70s and 80s, establishing Saints as a top flight club, winning the FA Cup and finishing as high as second in the league over a thirty year period in which they were the club's only managers, the thirty years since have been far less stable. In that time 24 managers have passed through the doors of The Dell and latterly the St. Mary's Stadium, including three in as many years recently. Those thirty years have been something of a rollercoaster of success and failure with both types of manager often leaving as quickly as they arrived. While Southampton have done well with the run of Nigel Adkins, Mauricio Pochettino and Koeman, many of their predecessors did more to damage the legacy of Bates and McMenemy than to build on it. This list counts down ten of the worst incumbents of the Southampton hot seat over the last thirty years.
Dishonourable Mention: Clive Woodward
Never actually the manager of the first team and therefore not eligible for a place on this list, England rugby World Cup winning coach Woodward is nevertheless one of the most bizarrely ill-judged appointments to Southampton's managerial staff. Woodward's conviction that rugby and football coaching were virtually identical transferable skills would have been dubious even without the fact that his appalling post-World Cup form had done a fair bit of damage to his reputation as a top rugby coach. Meanwhile Saints fans felt his appointment was nothing but favouritism from Woodward's friend and Southampton chairman Rupert Lowe, doing nothing to help his reputation as a man who couldn't care less about football but loved rugby. In the always ill defined roles of Perfomance Director and Director of Football, Woodward was little but a disruptive influence. His methods and appointments clashed with those of the established coaching staff and constant rumours linking him to the manager's job just made the managers he worked with uncomfortable. After little more than a year Southampton and Woodward parted company in the summer of 2006 and Woodward has unsurprisingly not worked in football since.
