Premier League owners are not necessarily a group renowned for their patience but things feel a bit different this season. As we approach the final international break of the year, we are still waiting for the first managerial sacking of the season.
A manager has left his post before November 11 in seven of the last 10 Premier League seasons, with the first sacking of 2022-23 coming after the first four rounds of matches, when Scott Parker was dismissed by Bournemouth on August 30 following a 9-0 defeat to Liverpool.
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Manchester United’s Erik ten Hag, Sheffield United’s Paul Heckingbottom and Bournemouth’s Andoni Iraola are the bookmakers’ favourites for ‘the sack race’ but no Premier League manager has been told to clear his desk since Julen Lopetegui left Wolverhampton Wanderers by mutual consent a few days before the start of the season.
In a recent edition of The Athletic Football Podcast, host Ayo Akinwolere asked The Athletic’s Jay Harris, Duncan Alexander and Dominic Fifield to explain why. Read a transcript of the best bits below or listen to the episode add-free and in full on The Athletic app.
Ayo Akinwolere: Why have we not seen any managers get sacked yet this season?
Jay Harris: Sheffield United are in a tricky situation because they sold their best players in the summer including Iliman Ndiaye and Sander Berge. Heckingbottom’s working with his hands tied behind his back.
Burnley have gone on this great cultural revolution under Vincent Kompany and he is, maybe foolishly, trying to stick to that. Similar with Bournemouth and Iraola where they’re trying something new and fresh. Maybe Bournemouth are thinking we need to ride this out a little bit longer.
Duncan Alexander: Last season we had the World Cup in the middle, which concentrated all the games into a very short period, but it concentrated clubs’ minds as well. The World Cup break gave them a chance to reset if they wanted it.
Managers such as Unai Emery and Lopetegui came in but this season feels a lot more set. The three teams that came up rank lowest for open play xG (expected goals). We haven’t seen all three promoted teams go down straight back down since 1998, so it doesn’t happen often and only once in the Premier League era. That gives owners in the lower half of the league a little bit more confidence that their teams can turn it around.
Dom Fifield: When a club that needs to be in the Premier League for the revenue streams is looking over its shoulder and thinking, ‘We could get hauled into a relegation battle’, that’s when the panic button is hit and the change tends to happen.
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A lot of clubs in that danger zone are thinking, ‘With what we’ve got, we’re not going to get dragged into a relegation battle this season’ because Sheffield United, Burnley and Luton are strong favourites for the bottom three, with Bournemouth another possibility. It sounds harsh and maybe if one of those clubs goes on a run and lifts themselves clear of trouble — that would be when other clubs start to panic.
At the moment, clubs are looking at this season as a bit of a free hit. They think, ‘There’s not much point changing our manager now and spending all this money on compensation. We could just get by now and then readdress things next summer’.
Akinwolere: Is it fair to judge any manager from last season? It was such an anomaly due to the World Cup.
Fifield: The last game before the World Cup break, if Palace had won at Nottingham Forest, they would have gone into the World Cup seventh in the table. They lost 1-0 — Wilfried Zaha missed a penalty at 0-0. The next thing you know, they have gone on a run of one win in 17 matches and Patrick Vieira has lost his job, with Palace really looking over their shoulder. They went back to what they knew with Roy Hodgson.
It was like two seasons in one last year. With that break in the middle, there was an opportunity to have a mini pre-season.
Alexander: You look at teams like Aston Villa and Wolves who did make changes before and they were fine. You look at a team like Leeds that left it longer and it was too late. When to sack managers is the key thing. We all remember the early ones like Scott Parker last season but generally, the most common time is late October and early November.
People say, ‘Don’t look at the league table until 10 games in’, and it actually turns out that is quite a wise saying because after 10 games, roughly 80 per cent of the positions teams are in are set. It takes quite a big shift to move from where you are now to the end of the season. The next few weeks in the Premier League will be the time when if changes are going to be made, then they’re going to happen.
Harris: This time last year, the rumours and whispers around Brendan Rodgers losing his job at Leicester City were massive. There were reports that Thomas Frank was being lined up to take over. In the end, Frank stays at Brentford and Rodgers doesn’t go until March or April. You’ve got six, seven, eight months of just constant noise around Rodgers’s position and then when he does go, it’s too late for Dean Smith to do anything. Leicester slide through the trap door. And how many times did we hear, ‘That squad is too good to go down’?
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Alexander: You look at how Leicester are doing this season in the Championship and it might calm Premier League owners. You can go down, keep some of the key players and invest in new ones, and you can bounce back pretty easily. We’ve seen that with Burnley last year and presumably with Leicester this season.
Alexander: When you get rid of a manager later in the season, there are fewer options to replace them. Leicester struggled to find anyone to take over. Leeds turned to Sam Allardyce. In February 2012, Wolves sacked Mick McCarthy and couldn’t get anyone else to come in for the rest of the campaign. If you do it earlier in the season, a manager from abroad who’s quite good might think, ‘I’ve got plenty of time to turn that around’.
Fifield: Someone asked me, ‘Which managers deserve to be under pressure based on what we’ve seen so far this season?’. There are not that many. Steve Cooper will be under pressure because of the owner at Nottingham Forest. But you have to go further up the table to Chelsea and Manchester United.
Alexander: How people understand the sport has progressed over the last decade. I’ve seen a lot of people say, ‘Bournemouth have had statistically the hardest start based on fixtures’, which is true, and that’s given Iraola a bit of a wriggle room. At Everton, the underlying numbers have been really good, even if results did not match up at the start.
Akinwolere: What about Cooper at Forest?
Fifield: They needed to spend the money last year because they had no players. It got utterly insane in the last week of the transfer window when they did what they did last year but up to then, it had been quite sensible. If you go to a Nottingham Forest match the fanbase could not be more behind the manager, but it’s not about that. It’s about the relationship between Steve Cooper and the owner, Evangelos Marinakis.
Harris: It’s also an incredible achievement to inherit that many players — I’m sure Cooper wouldn’t have wanted all of them last season and this season. To actually make it work is not easy. Anthony Elanga has looked completely rejuvenated. As much as it’s about Cooper receiving a lot of very talented players, like Ibrahim Sangare from PSV Eindhoven who was linked with some of the top clubs in Europe, he is a very good coach and very good at making players better.
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Akinwolere: How big a factor will the prospect of relegation and missing out on Premier League TV money be in clubs’ thinking…?
Fifield: The context is different with each club. Burnley did spend an awful lot of the summer. But the three teams that come up anticipate it being a struggle and if they go down then they might be in a better position to respond. That isn’t too damaging with the parachute payments next year and the Championship isn’t maybe the same kind of division as it was a few years back. But if you’re one of the established teams, going down would be disastrous.
This is Crystal Palace’s 11 season in the Premier League. They’re very clever with their budgets and don’t overspend. But going down would have a cataclysmic effect. Look at Stoke City and Sunderland to see what happens. If you’ve been in the division for a long time, you’re used to paying big money to players — if you get relegated and you suddenly lose the vast majority of those revenues, you are in serious trouble. That will shape how they treat their management, but those are the guys who are looking at it thinking, ‘This is probably going to be the easiest year to stay in the division’.
Akinwolere: What about the ‘new manager bounce’?
Harris: In a lot of those situations, some players are probably just so relieved the managers left that there is an uplift in mood. Frank Lampard had stopped picking Abdoulaye Doucoure but after Sean Dyche came in, Doucoure went on to score some crucial goals to help Everton stay up. He’s one of the first names on the team sheet now.
When a manager leaves, sometimes there is a weight that gets lifted from players. Hiring and firing managers constantly is only going to get you so far. It’s about having a long-term strategic plan… which might sound boring to people who love the chaos.
Alexander: Our colleague John Muller wrote a piece at the end of last season looking at this and said it’s where the clubs hit that point where they need something to change. He had a line saying the club could have simply held a press conference to announce a ‘vibe shift’ and it’s true. Often you will get a couple of wins in the first few weeks of the new manager but then generally, statistically it settles back down to where they were.
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Harris: You always hear the classic line that ‘the new manager’s come in and banned ketchup’. Or ‘training’s fun again’.
Akinwolere: How many times have we seen players step up for one manager and not for another?
Fifield: For 17 games last season, things weren’t working at Palace under Vieira. The fixtures were easier at the end under Hodgson but the place needed a fresh vibe. It was about organisation and making the training sessions different. Footballers are affected by things like that. If they lose faith in what a manager is doing day to day, the training techniques, team selection, the tactics, then it’s very difficult for that manager to turn things around.
Alexander: In two of the first four Premier League seasons, only one manager left during the season. But then you also had a transfer window that was open until the end of March. Back then, it was often easier to change players than it was to change your manager.
Fifield: You didn’t have this fear of, ‘Oh my God, if we get relegated, we will collapse financially’. That didn’t happen back then. You could go into the Championship and think, ‘This might be nice as we might win some games now’.
Akinwolere: Does sticking with the manager work?
Alexander: David Moyes and Cooper were under pressure last season. They stayed and kept their teams up. There are other examples, such as Nigel Pearson at Leicester. It’s easy for fans to think a change will make a difference. But fans are becoming a little bit clever and understanding that it isn’t just a case of a quick change.
Fifield: You’re talking about managers presumably that change in February or March or April. But what about in the build-up to a transfer window? Emery and Lopetegui came in before the transfer window opened and could sign players in January to suit their plan. A lot of clubs will be thinking, ‘We’re going to sack the manager because, in January, we’ll have a chance to change the squad’.
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Akinwolere: Who will be the first to get sacked?
Fifield: I wouldn’t suggest that Heckingbottom is on particularly safe ground, even with the trouble last summer. Again, it comes down to the relationship between manager and owner rather than the aspirations of the club. If there’s a difference there, that’s a problem.
Alexander: I think if you’ve got bottom in your surname, it’s a worry. At the other end of the table, there are clubs with a history of making decisions where you didn’t expect them to. We could be in for a season where there are some unexpected changes.
Harris: It’s difficult to tell with Burnley because Kompany does have a lot of credit in the bank. But I just remember sitting in his press conference (after Burnley lost 3-0 to Brentford in October) and his comments made me think this is not going in the direction he expected. It made me worry for him a little bit.
If Manchester United lost to Brentford on Saturday, just before the international break, the pressure will mount on Ten Hag. But it also might depend on what happens with Sir Jim Ratcliffe and when that ownership deal goes through.
Fifield: If you’re an underachieving club though, apart from Lopetegui, who would you appoint? Who would you go for? I don’t think there are that many candidates out there…
(Top photos: Getty Images)
