Should Premier League strugglers keep faith with managers as pressure mounts?
By 1 November 2026, every Premier League club still employed the same manager who started the 2026-27 season and no manager had been sacked, but with roughly a quarter of the campaign gone and one more round before the international break the first dismissal could be close.
Only three of the previous 10 campaigns reached November without a managerial change, and the 2026-27 season began with 11 managers who were appointed at some point in 2026, a factor that has probably helped early stability; those coaches have to be given a chance to fashion their sides as they see fit.
Michael Carrick remained the favourite to be the next manager to leave his post, followed by Pierre Sage of Crystal Palace, Sunderland’s Régis Le Bris and Oliver Glasner at Nottingham Forest, though the piece argued the more intriguing scrutiny should fall on the bottom three clubs rather than Carrick alone.
Sunderland sat 20th and were predicted by Opta to finish there, a position compounded by a testing start: Le Bris’s side had faced five of the current top seven clubs, the joint-most in the division along with Liverpool, and entered the weekend within one expected point of Chelsea, Manchester United and Tottenham before losing 3-1 at Coventry despite registering an xG of 1.8 to Coventry’s 0.7; Sunderland have scored 6.2 goals fewer than expected this season and face Chelsea, Aston Villa, Tottenham, Liverpool and Newcastle in their next five league matches.
Nottingham Forest’s attacking numbers told a different story: their shots were worth 14.7 expected goals, the fourth most in the division after Saturday’s matches, yet they had not once in a game this season scored at least as many goals as their xG figure; their xG on target (xGOT) stood at 7.4, little more than half of their expected-goals tally, and they had scored just six times, a shortfall described as almost one goal per match on average against their expected goals.
The article noted that 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, and posed the question of whether owner Evangelos Marinakis would be patient enough for that to occur.
Glasner pointed to a physical issue after the defeat at Brentford, saying: "We are outrun by the opposition in every single game. We have to change it," and distance-covered data from Fotmob was cited as suggesting that is not quite the case, albeit Forest had been outrun in their past five league games. Both the underlying xG data and physical statistics were reported as worse at Glasner’s former club, Crystal Palace.
Palace were recorded as averaging 96.9 sprints per match, the fewest in the Premier League after Saturday’s fixtures, and their defence had conceded the second-most expected goals in the 2026-27 Premier League, rock bottom if penalties are excluded; some of those defensive problems were linked to starting seven different combinations in the back three because of injuries and Axel Disasi’s three-match ban. The piece recalled Palace’s previous between-seasons appointments — Frank de Boer, who was sacked after five matches in all competitions in 2017, and Patrick Vieira, who won just one of his first nine league games four years later before recovering to finish 12th.
Palace were due to host Liverpool next weekend and, after the international break, returned to fixtures against Coventry and Hull; the article closed by noting that only the club’s chair, Steve Parish, would know whether those matches represented a timely chance for Sage to arrest the slide or an opportunity for his replacement to get off to a fast start.