We’re approaching the time of year when it becomes socially acceptable for the Premier League’s daftest clubs to consider going early on a managerial change to try and shift the season’s course.
You may think it sounds mad, but the current crop of still-intact Premier League managers have already made it further than the first Sack Race fallers in two of the last five seasons.
And it’s not hard to come up with possibilities for an early victim this time around. Alvaro Arbeloa is already looking out of his depth at Fulham, Oliver Glasner has two points from three games under the ever-twitchy eye of Mr Marinakis at Nottingham Forest and Roberto De Zerbi looks about ready to burst at the sheer unrelenting and unstoppable Spursiness of Spurs.
But does making an early managerial change even work? A quick look at the first manager to get the ol’ Spanish Archer in each of the last five seasons doesn’t provide compelling evidence of a successful strike rate.
2025/26: Nuno Espirito Santo (Nottingham Forest)
When: September 8
Replaced by: Ange Postecoglou
Did it work?
Not as such, no. The cracks in Nuno’s relationship with maverick Forest owner Mr Marinakis had first appeared at the end of the 24/25 season, most infamously when an enraged Marinakis strode on to the pitch to remonstrate with Nuno after their Champions League hopes were hit by a draw with Leicester.
The key phrase there really should have been ‘Champions League hopes’ but Forest and Marinakis had by this point got entirely carried away with themselves. An unconvincing truce was declared that lasted through summer but only three games into the new season when, after one win, one draw and one defeat, Nuno was dismissed.
Ange Postecoglou, who had lost his job at Spurs despite Europa League glory at the end of the previous season, came in the next day. He lasted six weeks and eight games, none of which he won. His last game was a 3-0 home defeat to Chelsea, with the axe falling less than 20 minutes after the final whistle.
Sean Dyche was brought in as a firefighter in what was by now a relegation battle with Forest inside the bottom three by the time Postecoglou was relieved of his duties.
Dyche did steady the ship but lasted only until February himself, before Vitor Pereira took Forest to pretty serene Premier League safety and the semi-finals of the Europa League. His reward was, of course to be sacked in the summer. He was replaced by Oliver Glasner who is, for now, still in position.
Just to be entirely clear: all of these managerial changes have taken place within the last year and a day.
2024/25: Erik Ten Hag (Manchester United)
When: October 28
Replaced by: Ruud van Nistelrooy (interim) and then Ruben Amorim
Did it work?
Nope. Not that getting rid of Ten Hag could be called an error. He should, if anything, have gone earlier. The stay of execution secured by an against-the-odds victory over Man City in the 2024 FA Cup final proved a serious misjudgement from United’s decision-makers, and it would not be the last.
He made it only as far as October before a defeat at West Ham that left United languishing in 14th proved too much. He went, and Ruud van Nistelrooy came in for a few games that went largely okay (in large part because two of them were against Leicester, it should be said. So impressed were the Foxes that they appointed Van Nistelrooy themselves, which also did not go well).
Then came what was widely considered at the time to be the significant coup of convincing Ruben Amorim, a long-time target and the hotshot manager of a swashbuckling Sporting side that had just crushed City in the Champions League, to leave the good thing he had going in Portugal and head for United mid-season.
He managed to be worse than Ten Hag, giving Man United fans a stark and unexpected lesson in how even when you think you’ve hit rock bottom there is always a way for things to get worse.
Despite a thrilling and entirely illusory late comeback win at City early in his reign, Amorim’s rigid adherence to his beloved back three made United a pitifully soft touch for all but the Premier League’s weakest sides. Between that mid-December win and a final-day triumph against Aston Villa, United won just four league games; one against Fulham, and one each against a trio of historically wretched relegated teams in Southampton, Ipswich and Leicester.
To fully understand the true horror of Amorim’s United reign, he managed to lose three games in three competitions to Tottenham, including the ultimate ignominy of doing so in an actual final. A feat many had come to believe was physically impossible.
He clung on to his job in the summer, but made it only halfway through the 25/26 season before he was sent packing and replaced by Michael Carrick, who introduced such tactical masterstrokes as ‘picking Kobbie Mainoo’ to propel United from mid-table to in-the-end-comfortable Champions League qualification.
2023/24: Paul Heckingbottom (Sheffield United)
When: December 5
Replaced by: Chris Wilder
Did it work?
In a way, we guess. Sure, the returning Wilder was not able to miraculously save a rock-bottom team that managed one win and five points in total from 14 games before Heckingbottom was canned. But he did manage to cobble together 11 points from the remaining 24 games to lift them all the way to… well, still rock bottom but at least managing to crush Derby County’s hopes of escaping their certain fate to remain forever unbeatable as the Premier League’s worst ever team.
They did manage to match Derby’s goal difference from the infamous 2007/08 season (-69) and set a new Premier League record by shipping 104 goals in a single season.
Wilder is still Sheffield United manager today, having been sacked in the summer of 2025 and hastily reappointed in the September after his replacement Ruben Selles lost all five of his Championship games in charge.
2022/23: Scott Parker (Bournemouth)
When: August 30
Replaced by: Gary O’Neil
Did it work?
Yes! It actually did! Having got Bournemouth back into the top flight, Parker had actually started the season with a 2-0 win over Aston Villa. That sounds particularly impressive now, but you have to remember that despite feeling like startlingly recent history this was still a time when Villa were managed by Steven Gerrard and were in fact crap.
That was thrown into starker relief by the subsequent results that did for Parker. Three straight defeats to Man City, Arsenal and Liverpool by an aggregate score of 16-0.
It was the 9-0 defeat at Liverpool that sealed Parker’s fate, but not in the obvious way you might expect a 9-0 defeat to seal a manager’s fate. It wasn’t so much that Parker lost the game 9-0 as the fact he chose that moment of indescribable weakness to go on the offensive against the higher-ups and declaring he was ‘not surprised’ by the result because he’d been saddled with an ‘ill-equipped’ squad.
He muttered darkly about there being more days like this ahead for Bournemouth if things didn’t change. Bournemouth decided to sod that for a game of soldiers and, with some justification, settled on the thing that most urgently needed changing being Parker himself.
In came Gary O’Neil, first as an interim and then on a permanent basis. The scale of what O’Neil achieved has perhaps become slightly exaggerated over time due to the significant grumblings that greeted Bournemouth’s decision to immediately bin him off post-survival in favour of Andoni Iraola. Another decision that, looking back, you have to say was pretty solid. And to the way Parker overplayed his hand and overstated the paucity of the squad he had at his disposal.
Indeed, after an initial six-match unbeaten run, Bournemouth slipped back into real trouble, winning just once in a nine-match spell that bookended the 2022 World Cup break in November and December.
They were even briefly bottom of the table as late as March before a shock win kickstarted a spring renaissance that ultimately sealed safety with a bit to spare. The victims of that shock March win? Obviously, Liverpool.
2021/22: Xisco Munoz (Watford)
When: October 3
Replaced by: Claudio Ranieri
Did it work?
Not really. Watford bloody love a managerial change as we all know, and we suppose there was a kind of neatness to the fact that each of their three managers in the 21/22 season managed a pair of Premier League wins.
Xisco actually had seven points from his seven games when he was canned. Ranieri managed a few more points in total but only a Xisco-matching brace of victories – albeit memorably via crushing 5-2 and 4-1 successes against Everton and Manchester United respectively, bright gleaming shafts of lighg in a sea of unremitting shod.
He’d gone before January had to be replaced to almost no tangible effect in any direction as Roy Hodgson oversaw the formalities of what soon became an inevitable return to the Championship.
Hodgson himself left that summer, and Watford have had nine permanent managers and a caretaker in the four and a bit years since. And you have to say that’s magnificent.