Tony Pulis has backed Keith Andrews to be one of the standout chelsea managers at Tuesday’s League Managers Association awards dinner, praising Brentford’s rookie boss after a season that defied the early odds. Pulis, who won the Premier League manager of the season award with Crystal Palace in 2014 and the Division Three manager of the season award with Gillingham in 1996, said Andrews had produced work that was “amazing”.
Brentford were widely tipped to go down at the start of the campaign, and Andrews was the bookmakers’ favourite to become the first manager sacked. Instead, they came within a whisker of qualifying for Europe for the first time. “What Keith Andrews has achieved at Brentford, in his first season as a manager, is amazing,” Pulis said, adding that good managers need time and that if they are given it, success can follow.
The annual dinner comes after a Premier League season shaped by Arsenal and Manchester City, the two outstanding teams, with Mikel Arteta and Pep Guardiola expected to have strong runs in the individual awards. But the wider field has been richer than the title race alone suggests. Bournemouth have already secured European football for next season for the first time in the club’s history, while Andoni Iraola has been there since 2023 and needed 10 attempts before his first league win arrived at the end of October.
Pulis said Bournemouth’s progress matters because they have had to keep selling their best players during Iraola’s time in charge, a pressure that would have broken many managers a few years ago. He also pointed to Daniel Farke’s turnaround of Leeds under real pressure at the end of November, and the work done by Regis le Bris to keep Sunderland in the Premier League. “He showed why good managers need time,” Pulis said, arguing that the modern game has become less forgiving of promoted clubs and less patient with those trying to build.
The voting history of the award says as much as this season does. Over the past 33 years, only 14 winners of the overall LMA Manager of the Year have been Premier League title-winning managers, and seven have come from outside the top division. That leaves room for seasons like this one, when the most persuasive cases may come not from the champion’s podium but from the dugouts where survival, adaptation and overachievement have been the real test. For Pulis, that is why Andrews belongs in the conversation.
