By Tony Attwood
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The flurry of articles this summer saying that Arteta should be sacked and a new man brought in to run Arsenal, caused some anxiety at Untold, since we have several times argued that sacking a manager is more likely to see a club collapse than see it rise up the league.
So we thought we would do a little bit more research ourselves into this. In this we took the Premier League in five year batches, calculating how many managers had been let go during that period. In doing this we used, as we often do, Transfermarkt for the raw data.
Thus, to begin we took the five years from 1999/2000 season to the end of 2003/4, and we found that there were 28 managerial changes, making an average of 5.6 managerial changes per season. So roughly a quarter of the managers were moved on.
Our second bunch took us from 2004/5 up to 2008/9. In that five-year period there were 40 managerial changes, making eight moves per season. Quite an increase.
Our third review was 2009/10 to 2013/14. This time there was a massive leap and we had 83 managerial changes making 16.6 managers going per season
Next it was 2014/15 to 2018/19, and here we found 81 managerial changes making 16.2 per season. A very slight decline suggesting that if clubs had not fully realised that changing managers never did them any good, there were at least pondering.
But then from 2019/20 to 2023//24 we found 81 managerial changes making again 16.2 per season. That might suggest that things are settling down at last but an early review of 2024/25 suggests that this is going to be another bumper year.
Of course one of the things that makes the numbers look particularly bad is the fact that some clubs sack their managers over and over again. Tottenham for example have had five managers in the last five years, while Arsenal have had just three in seven years , those being Emery, Freddie and Arteta.
And Arteta is an important point to note. In his first season, Arsenal came eighth, with him having taken over from Emery about four months into the season. The second season his team came eighth again, despite him making some fairly huge decisions. But Arsenal stayed with him. He moved the club up to 5th, and then the three second place finishes. And here’s the point. Every year there are calls for him to go!
But that eighth-place finish wouldn’t be enough for some clubs, just as winning the Europa is not good enough for Tottenham. On they go, sacking managers over and over.
The average number of managerial moves per season is going up all the time as we are now looking at an average across the five years of 63.4 managerial changes in the past five years.
Quite clearly this is insanity. Let’s look at Tottenham. From 2015/19 they were a top four club. In the following six years they have slipped right down the league as they have changed managers over and over. Mourinho was in the club from 2015to 2019 and since then they have had six managers.
As their experience shows, and that of many other clubs also shows, changing managers does not change the fortunes of a club for the better. Normally, it does change the fortunes but for the worse. And the Tottenham experience is not atypical of clubs that don’t win things.
Because of this, I have found the talk of sacking Arteta because of threee second-places in a row and the notion that he doesn’t have a winning mentality to be completely misjudged and misplaced. Indeed, we have also shown that Tottenham’s experience of multiple managers is not unique. Other clubs that change the man at the top over and over and over tend to do poorly.
And this doing poorly is not only in terms of the league position but also the cost of compensation to the manager paid out by the club. Yes, sometimes a new manager will improve the situation in a club – Arteta was an obvious example. But it takes time – and Arteta again was the example.
Of course, the way Tottenham, Manchester United and others have behaved and the lack of results they have achieved should be a lesson to everyone. But consider this. Of the clubs that have had the most managers in the past 25 years in the Premier League, no one has had more than Tottenham Hots. And if that doesn’t show you that changing managers is not a good idea, nothing will.
