Pulis: Managers should study leaders from history as November 'sacking season' nears
Tony Pulis told BBC Sport's Chris Bevan on 6 November 2026 that with the November international break almost upon domestic football the managerial merry-go-round will accelerate and that out-of-work managers must act quickly to secure new roles.
Pulis said the two-week international pause is often used to blood new incumbents and called it both 'sacking season' and 'hiring season', noting there are usually far more managers looking for work than posts available. Since the start of last season, 60 different managers have resigned or been sacked by teams in the Premier League and Football League; three of them left to take up offers from other clubs but, in total, 37 of them - or 62% - are not currently in management.
Recounting his own early career, Pulis said it has been more than 32 years since he was sacked by Bournemouth and described how Jim Smith, then in charge of Portsmouth and known as "The Bald Eagle", rang him on the second day out of work. He quoted Smith's instruction to him verbatim: "son, you're not a real manager until you get sacked at least three times - so get your backside off the sofa and get on with getting another job" - then he put the phone down!, and said he has since passed that line on to other managers.
Pulis described a separate summer in 1994 when Bruce Rioch, then successful at Bolton and later to take the Arsenal job a few months afterwards, asked him to scout while he sought his next managerial post. Pulis accepted and spent the season scouting for Rioch, a period he credits with teaching him that the players are the essential "product" and that matching player quality and character to the budget and level is a primary determinant of success.
He said those scouting contacts helped when he took the Gillingham job the following summer; the club had finished 89th out of the 92 clubs across the top four divisions and a number of players were out of contract, which allowed him to rebuild. Pulis noted that Gillingham finished second in what is now League Two and gained promotion in his first season, and that the recruits from that window kick-started four years of his career in Kent and produced "some fantastic on-field memories".
Describing how he filled time between jobs, Pulis said watching matches remained central — often from terraces among supporters — and that friends invited him to coach abroad in Kuwait and the United States. He added that he became an avid reader of sports books and biographies of historic leaders, visited clubs including Bayer Leverkusen, Athletic Bilbao and RB Leipzig, and analysed military campaigns and disasters as part of studying leadership.
Pulis highlighted Napoleon Bonaparte for his attention to detail, command of generals and the loyalty of his troops, and recalled being invited by a French newspaper to Corsica for Napoleon's 250th birthday in the summer of 2019 to provide a British perspective; he said he was "amazed by how many people from all over Europe turned up too" and noted Napoleon produced the Napoleonic Code. He also described studying military defeat, citing the Charge of the Light Brigade: he travelled to Crimea to see the site and concluded that Lord Raglan's ambiguous order, passed down via Lord Lucan to Cardigan, led to the disaster because Cardigan questioned the order yet still carried it out — "too many cooks, in my opinion!" he said.
Pulis cited the story of HMS Endurance and Sir Ernest Shackleton, plus his number two Frank Worsley, as examples of leadership under extreme conditions, saying their conduct gave men the energy, desire and determination to survive without once questioning their leaders' abilities. He said those historical studies, together with watching players firsthand, informed his approach to management throughout his career and while unemployed.
Giving advice to managers currently out of work, Pulis repeated the counsel he received from Jim Smith: "pick yourselves up and get off the sofa to get back in work as quickly as possible. You should never be afraid of dropping down a level the way I did, too. It is better to get a job, any job, than be out of football full-stop. That hasn't changed since my day, either." Tony Pulis was speaking to BBC Sport's Chris Bevan.
