Premier League sack race: New Palace manager already under pressure as De Zerbi doubts remain
· Football365
A new Premier League season means a new Premier League Sack Race is too. Alvaro Arbeloa currently ‘leads’ the way from a large pack of contenders.
Depending on your point of view, last season was one of the very best or very worst Premier League seasons for the sack race.
So many managers coming and going, it was at times impossible to keep up. And that was just Nottingham Forest and Spurs.
The absurd Mr Marinakis sacked not one, not two, but three managers last season and has already binned another one off this summer, and in the classiest possible fashion: a full two minutes before the break clause in his contract expired.
It all made Chelsea only getting rid of two managers look positively sedate.
What it all means now, though, is a fascinating start to the 26/27 Premier League Sack Race. Three of the So-Called Big Six, which is what you have to call them now, have brand new managers this season. Five of the So-Called Big Six (see?) have managers appointed only this year.
Those numbers swell to four and six respectively for the Big Eight if we’re still going along with the idea that this could be a thing.
Roberto De Zerbi took the Spurs job in March and is already the 11th longest-serving current manager among the 20 Premier League clubs. Michael Carrick is in the top half. Both are now among the top five to be first out this season. Only five current Premier League clubs haven’t changed their manager in the last two years.
That was a wild start to a brand new Sack Race before we even got to the starting line. And now the season has started, proper crises can start to develop all over the place. Surprise, surprise, Spurs are one of them.
As ever, remember the crucial caveat: we all call it the Sack Race because it’s a fun little name, but it’s not technically correct. It doesn’t have to be a sacking, it’s just the first/next manager to leave their job by any of the various available methods.
You’re just never going to convince us to call it the Mutual Consent And Good Luck With Their Future Endeavours Race. Anyway, here’s the latest on who’s safe and who’s already in peril based on the latest from Oddschecker.
Who will be the first Premier League manager sacked in 2026/27?
20. Mikel Arteta (Arsenal)
Arsenal have started the season as the only real known quantity and after four wins are even warmer favourites to retain their title. With steady year-on-year improvement in the Champions League also leading inevitably and inexorably to success at last in that competition this year as well, Arteta is in a good place.
And that place is specifically, of course, one yard outside his technical area.
17=. Xabi Alonso (Chelsea)
Anyone can struggle in that job, of course, and it doesn’t undo anything he achieved in Germany. It does mean, though, that he arrives in a league where he was hugely admired as a player but not with the club anyone expected to see him join and with some questions to answer.
Essentially, it would be absolutely no great shock to see an Alonso-led Chelsea top of the league by six points in January, or to see Alonso sacked in November after a seven-game winless run leaves the Europe-less Blues nevertheless struggling down in 12th, or anything at all in between.
Two wins followed by a decent performance in defeat at Arsenal followed by careless dropped points against an upstart Hull suggests it’s going to be ‘anything at all in between’ which was to be fair always the likeliest if least interesting option.
17=. Fabian Hurzeler (Brighton)
He is, ludicrously, one of only four managers starting his third successive Premier League season with the same club this season. A 4-0 win over Villa and a 4-3 defeat at Chelsea constitute a lively start, and the 5-0 demolition job on Coventry points to a team that is going to be a lot of fun as it revels in what is, this season, the novelty of continuity.
17=. Enzo Maresca (Manchester City)
Not the same type of impossible job, sure, but impossible nevertheless.
It also strikes us that giving the job to a very good coach was a smart move. It sounds obvious, but not everyone has taken such a sensible approach to this kind of high-wire succession planning.
But the doubts are easily found and very close to the surface. Maresca is lots of very impressive things, but he just isn’t Guardiola, is he? He certainly doesn’t have the same charisma, which really could matter more than it should.
We would also worry about the way he self-fulfilled Chelsea out of very good title-race-fringe positions towards the midway point of the last two seasons. You’re just not going to get away with trying that kind of tactic at Manchester City, although we can already hear Maresca, post-match after a disappointing draw at Nottingham Forest leaves City seventh in the league, that even Pep himself hadn’t really managed a proper title challenge with this City side in the last two years.
Don’t think it’ll fly, but we can certainly imagine him giving it a go. The Community Shield effort was painful, and two of their first three wins from an extraordinarily gentle start to the season were unconvincing.
Which all makes the 10-man derby-day success at Old Trafford feel so important. A big win, from an invidious position, in a big game. The extent of the tactical victory for Maresca over Carrick is also hard to ignore.
15=. Keith Andrews (Brentford)
And business as usual for Brentford will keep Andrews once again well away from the pointy end of any Sack Race discussion. Although he might be the next next manager to leave if Spurs just decide to poach the bloke who embarrassed the great Roberto De Zerbi.
15=. Andoni Iraola (Liverpool)
That was fine at Bournemouth where the winless runs could go harmlessly under the radar and the unbeaten streaks stand out. It’s going to be the other way round for him now.
The good news is that he joined on an 18-match unbeaten run in the Premier League, and that run now stands at 22. The bad news is that this followed an 11-match winless run, and Iraola’s Bournemouth unbeaten runs were always rather draw-heavy.
His current defeat-dodging spell contained a two-month spell between mid-February and mid-April without a Premier League win. Again, just far, far harder to conceal that kind of stuff when you’re Liverpool rather than Bournemouth manager, and three draws in four games – two of them in what really were must-win Anfield games – is an early concern.
But we still have high hopes for Iraolaball with the better quality of player that Liverpool possess. We’re relatively confident it ultimately falls the good way rather than the bad way. But there is no use pretending the bad way isn’t a very live possibility.
12=. Daniel Farke (Leeds)
First, he could actually get them into relegation trouble again; no team – certainly not one in only its second season back in the top flight – should ever feel so cocky as to discount that possibility entirely.
But also he could get himself in danger by doing rather better than that. And that is starting to look like it could absolutely happen now. They already look a very good, very secure Premier League club and that brings with it a sense that this is a club sufficiently large that it might just start to fidget and agitate for more, for the next step, for a push on to Europe and maybe a higher-profile manager to realise that dream.
And then, in all likelihood, the Ollie Holt ‘Careful what you wish for’ columns and even, if we’re all particularly badly behaved and must be punished further, all manner of nostalgia pieces about the original and still best Doing of a Leeds.
12=. Marco Rose (Bournemouth)
Most recently, he was apparently the other main name in the interim frame when Spurs plumped for Igor Tudor earlier this year.
One thing Rose can expect to get at Bournemouth that would not have been forthcoming at Spurs or most other places he was linked is time. Andoni Iraola made a famously disastrous start to his Bournemouth reign and they stuck with him to good effect.
Slightly different this time with Bournemouth having been forced into this change rather than choosing to do so as they did when replacing Gary O’Neil with Iraola, but it would still be a pretty big shock to see Rose come under any real serious early pressure. Certainly not before at least one of the others above him on this list, at least. Bournemouth still look very much like Bournemouth, and that’s absolutely fine.
12=. Sergej Jakirovic (Hull)
11. Regis Le Bris (Sunderland)
That’s the glass half-empty way of looking at it anyway. Sunderland fans definitely shouldn’t be looking at things that way right now, but it explains why one of the managers of the year last season sits so relatively high here.
9=. Matthias Jaissle (Newcastle)
And with good reason. Replacing a popular manager, Jaissle was walking into a very precarious situation at Newcastle that would be too much for many more experienced bosses.
And yet, they deserved more than a point against Liverpool in their opener, clinically dispatched a shambling Tottenham team who are in no small part responsible for Newcastle’s own uncertainties, and then battled back from a terrible start to the game against Bournemouth. It’s an extraordinary start, given the circumstances, but the defeat at Leeds felt far more the kind of thing we feared might be heading Newcastle’s way this season.