We took every permanent manager's spell at every club from Wikipedia's list of Premier League managers, checked each departure against the managerial-changes table of its season, and matched both to every Premier League result from football-data.co.uk. A departure counts when it came between a club's first and last league game of a season; caretakers are left out. That gives 215 in-season departures in 34 seasons: 151 sackings, 32 resignations, 19 exits by mutual consent, nine managers hired away by another club or country and four moved to another job at the same club.
Premier League manager sackings by season
Sackings have doubled. The first 17 seasons, 1992-93 to 2008-09, had 50 in-season sackings; the last 17 had 101. The record is 2022-23, with 11 sackings among 14 departures, and 2025-26 came next with 11 departures, eight of them sackings. The quietest seasons were 1992-93 and 1995-96, with one departure each.
Three clubs account for about a fifth of all sackings: Chelsea with 11, and Southampton and Tottenham Hotspur with 10 each. Counting every kind of departure, Tottenham lead with 15, one more than Southampton.
When do Premier League managers get sacked?
Before Christmas, mostly. November and December alone produced 55 of the 151 sackings, 36 percent, with December the busiest month at 29. The opening weeks are quieter, 15 sackings in August and September combined, and so are the last two months, with 13 in April and May, when a new manager has little time left to change anything.
| Month | Sackings | All departures |
|---|---|---|
| August | 4 | 6 |
| September | 11 | 16 |
| October | 15 | 24 |
| November | 26 | 35 |
| December | 29 | 34 |
| January | 18 | 27 |
| February | 20 | 25 |
| March | 14 | 23 |
| April | 8 | 17 |
| May | 5 | 7 |
| July (2019-20 only) | 1 | 1 |
| Total | 151 | 215 |
How many games do Premier League managers last before the sack?
Half of them do not get a full season. Of the 150 managers sacked mid-season since 1993-94, the median had 42 Premier League games in charge, and 75 were gone within 38, the length of one season. Only 32 lasted 77 games or more, two full seasons.
| Premier League games in charge | Managers sacked | Share |
|---|---|---|
| 10 or fewer | 8 | 5% |
| 11 to 19 | 26 | 17% |
| 20 to 38 | 41 | 27% |
| 39 to 76 | 43 | 29% |
| 77 or more | 32 | 21% |
The shortest reigns lasted four league games: Frank de Boer at Crystal Palace in September 2017 and Scott Parker at Bournemouth in August 2022, who had led the club to promotion the season before. Ange Postecoglou lasted five at Nottingham Forest before being sacked on 18 October 2025. At the other end, Sean Dyche had 258 Premier League games at Burnley and Mauricio Pochettino 202 at Tottenham.
Does sacking the manager improve results?
On the face of it, yes. Across the 134 sackings with at least five league games either side, clubs took 0.94 points a game before the change and 1.18 after it, and 105 of the 134 improved, 78 percent.
But clubs sack managers at a low point, and teams at a low point tend to recover anyway. To separate the two, we took the 102 sackings with ten league games either side in the same season and compared each with every ten-game stretch, out of 10,303 since 1993-94, in which a club took the same number of points and then kept the same manager for the next ten games.
| Ten-game stretch | Points per game before | Points per game after | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Manager sacked (102 cases) | 0.79 | 1.23 | +0.44 |
| Manager kept, same points before | 0.79 | 1.18 | +0.39 |
The sacked clubs went from 7.9 points in ten games to 12.3. The clubs that kept their manager after the same run went to 11.8. The new manager is worth about half a point over ten games, and only 51 of the 102 sacked clubs, exactly half, did better than the matched clubs did on average.
Do clubs that sack a manager in the relegation zone stay up?
Fewer than half do. Counting each club and season once, 64 clubs sacked their manager while in the relegation zone, the bottom three or the bottom four in 1994-95, usually after about 14 games. Twenty-eight of them stayed up, 44 percent, and only five of the 26 that made the change while bottom of the table.
The clubs beside them in the zone that kept their manager did no worse. Taking every club in the relegation zone on the day of one of those sackings that made no change for the rest of the season, 25 of 54 stayed up, 46 percent. Both rates are in line with the bottom three in general: of the 93 clubs in the bottom three at Christmas since 1995-96, 58 went down, and how many points it takes to escape is in our count of the relegation line.
Premier League sackings in 2026-27 so far
No manager has left a Premier League club since the season began on 21 August. Five matchweeks have been played, the last on 20 September, and the league resumes after the international break on 10 October. In 12 of the 34 previous seasons a manager had already gone by this point, within the club's first five league games; the quickest were Kenny Dalglish at Newcastle United in 1998-99 and Paul Sturrock at Southampton in 2004-05, both after two.
The turnover came in the summer instead. Nine clubs started the season with a manager appointed since the last one ended, the most in Premier League history by our count, one more than in 2016-17, and a record by the bookmakers' count too. Two were sackings: Liverpool dismissed Arne Slot on 30 May, and Nottingham Forest sacked Vítor Pereira in July. The nine:
- Bournemouth: Marco Rose, replacing Andoni Iraola
- Chelsea: Xabi Alonso, after Calum McFarlane's interim spell
- Crystal Palace: Pierre Sage, replacing Oliver Glasner
- Fulham: Álvaro Arbeloa, replacing Marco Silva
- Ipswich Town: Gary O'Neil, replacing Kieran McKenna
- Liverpool: Andoni Iraola, replacing Arne Slot
- Manchester City: Enzo Maresca, replacing Pep Guardiola
- Newcastle United: Matthias Jaissle, replacing Eddie Howe
- Nottingham Forest: Oliver Glasner, replacing Vítor Pereira
Five of those nine clubs are in the bottom half of the official table. Fulham are 19th with two points, Bournemouth 17th, and Manchester City top under Maresca with five wins from five. Tottenham Hotspur, under Roberto De Zerbi since March, are bottom with two points, level with Fulham, and Coventry City are 18th with three. The Premier League table shows where things stand, and the Premier League simulator lets you play out the rest of the season.
Premier League manager sackings: frequently asked questions
How many Premier League managers are sacked each season? About four and a half on average: 151 in-season sackings in 34 seasons from 1992-93 to 2025-26. Counting resignations and other departures, about six.
Which season had the most Premier League sackings? 2022-23, with 11 managers sacked and 14 departures in all during the season.
Does a new manager bounce exist? Results do improve after a sacking, from 0.79 to 1.23 points a game over ten games, but clubs that kept their manager after the same slump improved almost as much, to 1.18.
What is the shortest Premier League managerial reign before a sacking? Four league games: Frank de Boer at Crystal Palace in 2017 and Scott Parker at Bournemouth in 2022.
How this was built: every permanent manager's spell from Wikipedia's list of Premier League managers as of 7 October 2026, with the manner of each departure from the managerial-changes table of each season article, and every Premier League result from 1993-94 to 2026-27 from football-data.co.uk. Three spells the list ends mid-season are not counted as departures (Brian Clough retired after Nottingham Forest's last game of 1992-93; Gérard Houllier's 2001 heart surgery; Bryan Robson stayed Middlesbrough manager after Terry Venables joined in 2000), and John Deehan's resignation at Norwich City in April 1995 is added. Sackings are departures recorded as sacked or contract terminated; mutual consent is counted separately. Positions, points per game and relegations come from our own tables built from the results, three points for a win; the 1992-93 season, which the results data does not cover, adds one sacking to the counts only. Relegation-zone sackings are counted once per club and season. The 2026-27 table, through matchweek 5, matches the league's own standings.