Nedum Onuoha played 14 seasons in the Premier League with Manchester City, Sunderland and Queens Park Rangers before finishing his career with MLS side Real Salt Lake. He joined ESPN in 2020, appearing on ESPN FC, and has since featured as ESPN’s lead studio pundit in England. His columns offer his perspective as a former player on the big issues of the day.

When your team changes a manager in midseason, as a player, it feels like a hostile introduction. You are thrown into what feels like a mini-preseason and must quickly prove yourself in a really uncertain environment. For those Tottenham Hotspur players who have seen Thomas Frank fired and replaced by Igor Tudor, there is the additional issue of knowing virtually nothing about the guy tasked with steadying the ship because he has no Premier League experience either as a player or as a coach.

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The soccer community in England is big, but it also can feel quite small the longer you’re involved. Players have connections — friends, former teammates and coaches — all over the place. A few Spurs players — Rodrigo Bentancur, Radu Dragusin and Dejan Kulusevski — crossed paths with Tudor when he was part of Andrea Pirlo’s coaching staff at Juventus, so other members of the squad will be asking them what he’s like, but also contacting other people they know who have worked with the Croatian to learn more about him.

I can imagine that England under-21 international Lloyd Kelly, who played for AFC Bournemouth and Newcastle United before signing for Juventus last year, will have had calls and messages from Spurs players desperate for information on Tudor, his head coach at Juve for seven months last year.

Tudor was a surprise appointment, and many Spurs players will have had zero knowledge of him as a person or as a coach. But before he took his first session, they will have asked enough people about what he’s like in terms of managing players, his training styles and how he wants players to play, to form a basic picture of his approach to the game.

Whether they are happy with the appointment or not, the Spurs players will still want to start off on the right footing under the new coach, even though he will only be in charge for 12 Premier League games and however long Spurs survive in the UEFA Champions League.

The players may quickly make their judgements about the new coach, but they will also want to finish the season in a better shape than they are now — none of them will want to be part of the first Spurs team to be relegated in almost 50 years — because individual pride is important. And, for many of them, there is the issue of ensuring they go to the FIFA World Cup with their respective countries.

Sunday’s game against Arsenal — Tudor’s first in charge — will mean everything to the players because they don’t want to reach breaking point with the fans. That is something that could happen if they were to lose badly against their biggest rivals on home turf.

And if it starts badly, some players will just check out. I’ve seen it first-hand when a player tells a coach that he will outlast him at a club. When that happens, you know things are turning in a negative way.

The Spurs players will have known change was coming, though. Looking back on my experiences, it’s very rare to be surprised by a managerial change. Managers are human beings, after all. It’s very hard for them to keep doing the same job, pretending that nothing is happening when they are facing the sack.

As things get worse, you start to see almost a sense of resentment toward outcomes, players and things they weren’t previously stressed about. You can also tell when they’ve lost a group. Sometimes that could be due not necessarily to results, but a change you can see in their own principles that they once tried to tell you defined who they were.

So, when a new manager comes in, it is a clean slate and they can become whoever they want to be. If they say ‘we train at 3 p.m.’ and that’s the standard, everyone’s like ‘OK, we train at 3 p.m..’ If they set out the standards they expect, that’s fine. But — and maybe it’s human nature — as time passes, you start to see some people start making concessions for certain individuals. But Tudor’s contract is so short, that he may not get to that stage.

In this interim role, Tudor can go in and have a quick impact, get buy-in from the players — be a motivator and organiser — and succeed in his mission of keeping Spurs up. Their potential is clearly there, but being an interim can make it harder to maintain support within the squad. We saw that during Ralf Rangnick’s unsuccessful six-month spell as interim at Manchester United in 2022.

When Roberto Mancini replaced Mark Hughes as Manchester City manager in 2009, he didn’t have any gravitas among the City players because of who he was, but he was the first appointment of the new owners, so we knew he had all the power in the world to make whatever changes he wanted. There were no discussions. It was his way, his style and that was that. He is the only coach I have ever worked with who told the players that we weren’t allowed to laugh while we were jogging around the training pitch to warm up.

But we knew Mancini was the future, and that allowed him to be a true authoritarian. The Spurs players know that Tudor most likely isn’t the future, so it feels like a risky move by the club to hire him in the situation they find themselves in.

I experienced a midseason change of manager several times during my playing career, and it rarely had a positive impact. Mancini was perhaps the one coach who made things better for the team. But generally, a new coach will come in and the first thing they will say is that the players aren’t fit enough. That’s just a way to buy time if initial results and performances aren’t good because, if the players aren’t fit, it’s the last guy’s fault, right?

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Was Nottingham Forest right to sack Sean Dyche?

ESPN’s Nedum Onuoha and Julien Laurens react to Nottingham Forest sacking Sean Dyche after just 114 days in charge.

The situation at Nottingham Forest is on a whole other level. The players are now on their fourth coach of the season after Vítor Pereira was hired to replace Sean Dyche, who succeeded Ange Postecoglou, the early-season replacement for Nuno Espírito Santo.

They have had a ridiculous season, leaping from one playing style to another, but they have probably landed on the most reasonable appointment of all in Pereira. He knows the league, has the credentials of having an instant impact when he moved to Wolverhampton Wanderers and is also more personable than the coaches who went before him at Forest.

If I was in the Forest squad, four coaches in a season is the type of energy where you probably start doubting whether you’re at the right soccer club, to be honest. But Forest are maybe just two good weeks away from securing Premier League survival, so they can see a path out of their situation.

Spurs should also have enough about them to survive, but there’s no doubt Tudor is a strange appointment. We will discover soon enough whether he is the right one or reckless gamble by the club.

Nedum Onuoha was speaking to ESPN senior writer Mark Ogden