Pulis backs Arteta and Guardiola, hails Brentford's Andrews for awards

Tony Pulis used the League Managers Association’s annual awards dinner to make a familiar football case with a sharper edge: the best managers are not always the ones at the top of the table, but the ones who outperformed expectations. The top-flight award has gone to the league leaders in all but four years since the LMA awards began in 1993, yet Pulis said this season offered several examples of managers who did more than merely inherit strong squads.

Pulis, who won Premier League manager of the season with Crystal Palace in 2014 and also took the Division Three award with Gillingham in 1996, said those honours remained among his most treasured memories. He pointed to Arsenal and Manchester City as the Premier League’s outstanding sides, putting Mikel Arteta and Pep Guardiola firmly in the conversation, but he argued that the fuller picture lay below the title race, where several managers had materially changed the fortunes of their clubs.

One of the clearest examples, he said, was Keith Andrews at Brentford. Andrews was appointed head coach in June 2025 after Thomas Frank left for Tottenham Hotspur, and the Premier League had already highlighted him and Sunderland’s Régis Le Bris as the two managers taking charge of top-flight teams for the first time in 2025-26. Pulis called Andrews’ first season in management “amazing”, noting that Brentford were widely tipped as relegation candidates and that bookmakers had him down as the first manager likely to be sacked. Instead, Brentford came close to European qualification.

That level of over-achievement was ultimately delivered by Bournemouth’s Andoni Iraola, whose side finished sixth and booked a place in the Europa League for the first time in the club’s history after a 1-1 draw with Nottingham Forest. Iraola had been in charge since 2023, needed 10 league matches to record his first Premier League win at Bournemouth and did not get it until the end of October, yet the club kept improving despite repeatedly selling key players. Iraola later said qualifying for Europe had once seemed “almost impossible”.

Pulis also singled out Daniel Farke for turning Leeds United around when he was under pressure at the end of November, and Le Bris for keeping Sunderland in the Premier League after promotion, a result that bucked the modern trend. In Pulis’s view, the awards should reward not just position, but the managers who extracted the most from limited time, unstable expectations and modest margins.