Liam Manning: George Elek's EFL manager of the year.

The EFL Manager of the Season awards often go to those who lift trophies, but what about the bosses who transform clubs against the odds?

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George Elek

Burnley, Birmingham, Bradford. Scott Parker, Chris Davies, Graham Alexander. Three promoted teams, three promoted managers, and the three winners of the EFL Manager of the Season awards.

In many respects, the managerial awards have morphed into an accolade celebrating a team, rather than the work of its boss. A manager’s performance is inextricably linked to results in a way that players’ performances don’t always have to be. If you’re winning games, then you’re likely doing a good job, and vice versa. 

And that makes sense, doesn’t it? While things such as player development or uniting a club’s fanbase may also fall into the remit of a manager, it all feeds into the overarching aim: to win games of football and amass as many points as possible. In that sense, maybe it’s fair that the official awards for managerial prowess should go to those at clubs who have achieved something tangible; those who have delivered a season that will always have a place in the hearts of fans and the annals of time.

I’d argue, though, that context is so important in analysing a manager’s performance. Rather than starting with the results, we should look at the environment they came into, and any external factors that would impact the job they’re being asked to do. 

Take your own job. Yes, I’m talking to you, and yes, this is a bit weird as I break down the fourth wall, but bear with me. 

I have no idea what you do, but imagine trying to do your job except that the three tools or bits of equipment most important to doing it to a high level aren’t fit for purpose. And you have a five-hour round-trip of a commute every day. And you haven’t been paid for two months. Also, your colleagues are underqualified and lazy, and people stand outside your office twice a week to tell you that you’re a wanker while waving A4 pieces of paper with P45 written on them in biro.

It’d be tough, wouldn’t it? 

So, when assessing your competence and success in the job, you would hope or demand that those factors were taken into account, especially in comparison to others in the same role who don’t have the same factors impacting their ability to do their job. Some even have top-of-the-range equipment and an incredibly supportive working environment, with people clapping them in and out of work.

It doesn’t take a genius to work out where I am going with this, and while the Parkers and Farkes of the world will always be the ones to dust off their tux and head to London in late April, it’s the John Eustaces and the Gary Rowetts who, pound for pound, have surely done the job which surpasses what we could have expected with the tools that they were given.

Rubén Sellés, whose working environment was so hazardous that it never would’ve passed a health and safety check, deserves his own special award for the job he did at Reading. That job – taking a club at threat of extinction, who’d had points deducted last season, straight into the Top 6 with a team of youth products who didn’t know if they’d be paid on time – will go without official accolades, and so will others of its kind, because there will always be a gaffer elsewhere who picked up better results with better players in an environment much more conducive to winning games. 

There’s one manager, though, who I think sits apart from the rest this season, and that manager is Liam Manning at Bristol City. 

Now, Manning’s side are not the best team in the Championship. There’s even a fair argument that they’ve had some fortune in forcing their way into the play-offs. However, there is a clear on-pitch progression and a story of overcoming adversity that makes what he has achieved incomprehensibly impressive. 

To understand the scale of the job, we have to start at the beginning, when Manning arrived at Ashton Gate in early November 2023. 

The Bristol City fanbase was largely united in their anger at the club’s decision to sack the ever-popular Nigel Pearson. Given that Manning had recently been sacked by an MK Dons side who were subsequently relegated from League One, and had earlier that year been appointed by Oxford to stave off relegation from the same division, he wasn’t the Championship’s tried-and-tested ‘sure thing’ that fans crave (if only there were such a thing).

It was also just not a very happy football club, with the season-on-season agony of missing out on the play-offs having been replaced by a malaise which suggested that a move through the trapdoor of the division was as likely as through the sunroof. Fingers were pointed at chairman Jon Lansdown and technical director Brian Tinnion for this period of regression, and those who didn’t like Manning’s appointment added a perceived lack of ambition to the list of reasons to point. 

(As an aside, I’m convinced that new managers – not counting those promoted from within – who are labelled the ‘cheap option’ have a much better success rate than the big-name ‘proven’ mob. But that’s for another day.)

Bristol City were 15th when Manning took over, and they struggled for much of the next few months. Picking up 18 points from their last 10 games secured 11th spot and bought him some time, as did some impressive wins over the likes of Southampton and Leicester, with supporters largely taking up position on the fence over summer rather than demanding another change. 

So, that’s last season – but the context is important. Manning had, at best, a lukewarm reception on arrival at a pretty unhappy club in a lowly league position, and he struggled to win over supporters in the first few months of his reign while often being used as a stick with which to beat club officials.

Now, before we look at this season, some wider context. 

Bristol City have tried and failed to break into the Top 6 in the Championship every season since 2007/08, apart from a brief two-year sojourn into League One between 2013 and 2015. They came close under Lee Johnson, particularly when finishing 8th in 2018/19, when a poor end to the season cost them their chance. 

But finishes of 19th, 17th and 14th in the seasons ahead of Manning’s arrival show that the foundations for mounting a promotion challenge weren’t necessarily in place. Yet the ambition of the club’s owners and fans meant that this always remained the aim (if not expectation), ever since Dean Windass’ stunning Wembley volley broke Robins’ hearts in 2008.

In terms of the playing squad that Manning inherited to achieve this goal, it maybe says a lot that Pearson remained popular despite City’s modest league position. There was a feeling that while it was an underachieving squad, one with potential, it lacked the star quality you’d think a club would require to challenge at the sharp end. 

In Jason Knight and Max Bird, City have two Derby County academy graduates whose promise has always been evident, but it’s only under Manning this season that they’ve grown into top Championship players. Scott Twine and Anis Mehmehti can be electric in flashes; however, those days don’t come often enough. And while Luke McNally was a colossus at the back before his injury, he had arrived at Ashton Gate having been unable to force his way into the Burnley fold. 

Maybe that’s the way to measure this squad up against the aim for a Top 6 finish: how many of its players would feature regularly for Leeds or Burnley? As McNally and Twine have shown, it’s very few, if any. And when it came to January, with plenty of injuries limiting the talent that Manning had at his disposal, not a single player was signed – and still he delivered Bristol City their first Championship Top-6 finish in 17 years.

Now we have to confront something that I’m sure Manning wouldn’t want to be held up to enhance his own credentials, but it’s impossible to ignore when assessing his frankly titanic achievements over the last nine months or so. Theo, son to Liam Manning and his wife Fran, and brother to Isaac, tragically died in October 2024.

Thankfully, most of us can only imagine the pain that this inflicted on the 39-year-old and his family, and it would have been glib of me to include it in the hypothetical external job factors that I mentioned earlier. If you do stop to think about what it must have taken to lift himself off the floor and find a way not just to get to work, not just to get into his boots and walk out onto the training pitch, not just to find his seat in the dugout, but to actually excel beyond expectation and deliver what no Bristol City manager has been able to achieve for nearly two decades… well, it’s almost unfathomable. 

In my opinion, the best managerial tenures are those that reroute the very course of a club in the time that they are in post. With reports this morning that Manning is a potential candidate for the soon-to-be-vacant Leicester job, a future without him is something that Bristol City fans may have to confront soon. 

In the meantime, we can be sure that Manning will be laser-focused on upsetting the odds and beating Sheffield United over two legs to get Bristol City to the brink of the Premier League. Whether he is successful in doing so or not, the club has changed beyond recognition in his short time at the helm. 

An unpopular appointment, stepping into the shoes of a popular manager, at a perennially underachieving club, seemingly without a squad of the quality to achieve what he set out to achieve. Given where they are now, and the esteem in which the Ashton Gate faithful hold him, it’s impossible not to put the change down to this manager and the job that he has done. 

Liam Manning: my EFL manager of the year.