Should Premier League strugglers stick or twist as pressure on managers mounts?

Unusually, all clubs in the top flight have the same manager with whom they began the season – but the first sacking may not be far away

No Premier League manager has yet lost his job this season. In only three of the past 10 campaigns was November reached without a club making a managerial change.

The 2026-27 season commencing with 11 managers who were appointed at some point in 2026 has probably contributed to the early season stability. They have to be given a chance to fashion their side as they see fit. But with roughly a quarter of the season played and only one more round of fixtures before an international break, the first sacking may not be far away.

Michael Carrick remains the favourite to be the next manager to leave his post. He is unsurprisingly followed by the managers of the clubs who occupy the relegation zone: Pierre Sage of Crystal Palace, Sunderland’s Régis Le Bris and Oliver Glasner at Nottingham Forest. It seems almost inevitable that Carrick will leave soon so the more interesting analysis lies among the bottom three.

Sunderland sit 20th and are predicted by Opta to finish there. However, they have had a testing start to the season. Le Bris’s side have faced five of the current top seven clubs, the joint-most along with Liverpool. The manager also has enormous reserves of goodwill thanks to taking the club back to the Premier League and then into Europe.

Despite their tough schedule, Sunderland came into the weekend within one expected point of Chelsea, Manchester United and Tottenham before losing 3-1 at Coventry with the xG count 1.8 to 0.7 in their favour. It was a familiar outcome for a team that has scored 6.2 goals fewer than expected this season.

With Sunderland’s next five league opponents being Chelsea, Aston Villa, Tottenham, Liverpool and Newcastle, the challenge of staying up will not immediately get easier. At least their chance-converting woes are not as bad as those of Nottingham Forest.

Their shots have been worth 14.7 expected goals, the fourth most in the division after the matches on Saturday. But not once in a game this season have the goals they scored at least equalled their xG, let alone surpassed it. It is a finishing issue, not a question of opposition goalkeepers having super-human performances against them.

The analytical step above standard expected goals is xG on target (xGOT). It measures the likelihood of an on-target shot becoming a goal based on chance quality and shot placement. Forest’s xGOT this season is 7.4, little more than half of their expected goal tally.

This inability to test goalkeepers severely enough explains why Glasner’s men have scored just six times. They are squandering almost one goal per game on average according to their expected goals, a significant shortfall. None of the 96 teams in Europe’s big five leagues were worse than 0.5 goals per match below xG last season, which suggests Forest’s luck should turn for the better.

Is Evangelos Marinakis patient enough for that to happen? Forest’s expected goal data is much stronger for Glasner than it was under any of the four managers their owner fired last season. Whether he pays attention to such numbers is a different issue.

Glasner hinted at a physical deficiency in the squad after defeat at Brentford. “We are outrun by the opposition in every single game. We have to change it,” he said. Distance covered data from Fotmob suggests that is not quite the case, albeit Forest have been outran in their past five league games. Both the underlying xG data and physical statistics are worse at Glasner’s former club Crystal Palace though.

As expected goals have a far greater bearing on future performance or results than running stats, those numbers are the greater concern. Equally, Palace’s average of 96.9 sprints per match is the fewest in the Premier League (after Saturday’s matches).

The club has been through similar teething troubles with new managers before. Palace’s previous two appointments that occurred between seasons were Frank de Boer and Patrick Vieira. The former was sacked after only five matches in all competitions in 2017, the latter won just one of his first nine league games four years later before recovering to finish 12th.

While Palace are a little wasteful in attack, they have not been as bad as Forest or Sunderland. Their defence is a much bigger problem, which is unusual as Sage’s Lens conceded the fourth fewest expected goals in Ligue 1 last season. Palace are second worst for that metric in the Premier League in 2026-27, rock bottom if penalties are excluded. Some of that may be down to starting seven different combinations of players in the back three thanks to injuries and Axel Disasi’s three-match suspension, but it is imperative that a manager overcomes such inevitable difficulties.

Palace host Liverpool next weekend. They return after the international break with potentially winnable matches against Coventry and Hull. Will those fixtures represent a good opportunity for Sage to kickstart his reign or an excellent chance for his replacement to hit the ground running? Only the chairman, Steve Parish, will know the answer but Palace are the strugglers who look most in need of managerial change.