Gary O’Neil has been sacked as the Wolves head coach after Saturday’s 2-1 home defeat to Ipswich. Wolves have won only two out of 16 league games this term, and are second from bottom with nine points.
Wolves’ only two victories came back to back, at home to Southampton and away at Fulham, to potentially revive O’Neil’s fortunes. Since then, though, Wolves have lost four in a row. Defeats to Bournemouth, Everton and West Ham piled the pressure on and Jack Taylor’s late winner for Ipswich at an angry Molineux proved the last straw.
O’Neil took charge in August 2023 after Julen Lopetegui’s departure and guided the team to a comfortable 14th place in his one full season. The summer departures of Pedro Neto to Chelsea and Max Kilman to West Ham weakened Wolves in a window when profitability and sustainability concerns framed their dealings.
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Defensive frailties have been repeatedly exposed. Wolves have conceded a league-high 40 goals – six more than any other team. Now, the club’s patience has run out, despite chairman Jeff Shi publicly backing O’Neil earlier this week.
Frustrations had boiled over in Monday night’s defeat to West Ham when Mario Lemina scuffled with Jarrod Bowen after the full-time whistle, resulting in the Wolves midfielder being stripped of the captaincy. Wanderers were then beaten by Taylor’s stoppage-time header on Saturday having taken an early lead through Matt Doherty’s own goal and following the full-time scuffles, O’Neil said his players needed to “take some responsibility”.
“We deal with things like that very, very seriously, as you saw last week,” O’Neil said. “It’s annoying in that we’ve got enough to do at this moment in time, we’ve got enough to fix without me having to spend time on things that go on off the pitch.
“So the players do need to take some responsibility. But I’ll help them with all of it so we get back to work on Monday morning.”
O’Neil also expressed frustration with the goals his side conceded, calling the first “unacceptable” for the ease with which Liam Delap barged past Nelson Semedo before crossing, then claiming his players had swapped assignments to allow Taylor the space to score the winner.
“The set-play goal, I would happily take responsibility for it if the players were stood in the right place,” he said. “For some reason two of them have decided to change roles very late on in the game. I’m 100% confident if they were in the right spot our player heads it away.
“That’s the players’ decision-making under stress. Players will change things around and try to find fixes all the time but that’s a real poor decision from them in an important moment.”
