West Ham United have sacked their head coach, Nuno Espírito Santo, a decision the club confirmed on Tuesday even though the Hammers began the week sitting third in the Championship and firmly in the hunt for an immediate return to the Premier League. The club said in a statement on its website that a review of the season’s start had convinced the board that “a change is necessary at this time” to keep its promotion objective on track.
The dismissal is unusual for its timing. West Ham had taken 22 points from their opening 12 league games and trailed the leaders, Middlesbrough, by only three points going into last weekend’s home fixture against West Bromwich Albion. Few clubs part with a manager from such a position, which points to a board that expected not merely a promotion challenge but a convincing one.
Alongside Nuno, the club confirmed the departures of assistant head coach Rui Pedro Silva and goalkeeping coach Rui Barbosa. West Ham thanked the three men for their work and said the search for a successor was already underway. In the interim, former club captain Mark Noble, Steve Potts and Gerard Prenderville have been placed in temporary charge of first team preparations ahead of the club’s midweek trip to Cardiff City.
Nuno’s exit closes a turbulent 13 months at the London Stadium. He arrived on 27 September 2025 on a three-year contract, replacing Graham Potter, and took the job only weeks after being dismissed by Nottingham Forest following a breakdown in his relationship with the club’s owner. His brief at West Ham was simple and difficult: halt a slide that was already dragging the club towards the drop.
He could not. West Ham ended the 2025/26 campaign 18th in the Premier League and were relegated on the final day, their 14-year stay in the top flight brought to a close despite a 3-0 win over Leeds United, as Tottenham Hotspur’s victory over Everton sealed the Hammers’ fate. The club finished on 39 points with a goal difference of minus 19, having conceded 65 goals across the season, and went down alongside Wolverhampton Wanderers and Burnley. It was West Ham’s first relegation since 2012.
What followed was a decision that now looks harder to explain. Rather than change manager after relegation, the board kept faith with Nuno in May, pointing to his record in the second tier and to signs of improvement over the closing months. The reasoning leaned heavily on history, since Nuno won the Championship with Wolverhampton Wanderers in 2018 on 99 points, and the club framed promotion at the first attempt as the clear goal.
The early weeks of the new season tested that faith. West Ham took only two points from their first three Championship matches and lost at home to Charlton Athletic, leaving Nuno under heavy criticism by the start of September. A sharp recovery followed, built on attacking football that produced heavy wins, including 6-0 victories over Wrexham and Lincoln City, and lifted the side back towards the top of the table.
The gains, though, sat on shaky foundations. West Ham scored freely but defended poorly, keeping only one clean sheet in their opening eight matches in all competitions and conceding three at home to Southampton in late October. For a squad regarded as one of the best resourced in the division, and backed by home crowds of around 60,000, the board appears to have concluded that an uneven promotion push was not good enough.
The move also extends a long spell of instability in the dugout. Nuno was the third permanent head coach West Ham have appointed since 2024, following Julen Lopetegui and Potter, and the club must now find a fourth in little over two years. Each change has carried a cost, in compensation, in recruitment shaped by different managers, and in the patience of a support base that has already watched the club fall out of the Premier League.
Nuno leaves with a strong overall record that the London Stadium spell has dented rather than defined. Beyond the Wolves title, he guided that club to consecutive seventh-place finishes in the Premier League and a Europa League quarter-final, led Nottingham Forest to seventh and an FA Cup semi-final in 2024/25, and won the Saudi Pro League with Al-Ittihad in 2022. He has also managed Tottenham Hotspur, Valencia and Porto.
For West Ham, the questions are immediate. The club must appoint a head coach capable of sustaining a promotion challenge that is already in motion, settle that appointment into a squad assembled by others, and do so without surrendering the ground gained in the opening months. The board has staked its credibility on the belief that someone else can finish the job more convincingly, and the weeks ahead will show whether that gamble was worth taking.