Premier League and EFL clubs set record for manager changes 15 weeks into season

Clubs in the Premier League and English Football League (EFL) have broken the record for most manager departures within the first 15 weeks of a season, PA analysis shows.

Thursday’s sacking of Leam Richardson by Wigan took this season’s tally of permanent managerial changes to 26, with the campaign having started just 105 days ago on July 29.

This is a new record for the Premier League era, surpassing the previous mark that was set initially in 2001-02, before being equalled in 2007-08 and 2014-15.

Richardson was the third head coach to leave his post this week, with his departure coming immediately after Nathan Jones had left Luton to take up the manager’s job at Southampton, which had in turn been vacated by Ralph Hasenhuttl’s dismissal on Monday.

Rochdale’s sacking of Robbie Stockdale opened the floodgates all the way back on August 18, just 20 days into the season.

Stoke dismissed Michael O’Neill a week later, before replacing him with Sunderland’s Alex Neil.

Scott Parker was then fired by Bournemouth in the earliest Premier League sacking since 2004-05, with Hasenhuttl this week becoming the fourth top-flight manager to suffer the same fate – after Thomas Tuchel, Bruno Lage and Steven Gerrard at Chelsea, Wolves and Aston Villa respectively.

Graham Potter’s exit from Brighton to fill the vacancy at Stamford Bridge brings the total number of Premier League manager changes to six.

There have been 11 in the Championship, two in League One and seven in League Two.

Early dismissals buck recent trend

While the rate of managers losing their jobs has quickened from an average of 50 per season in the first 10 years of the Premier League era to 64 per season in the most recent decade, the previous four campaigns had seen a return to relative job security.

The number of managerial departures peaked at over 70 in three out of four years between 2014-15 and 2017-18, but since then casualties have remained below 60 per season.

There were just 14 manager changes by this point last year, the lowest for eight seasons and around half as many as in 2022-23.

Five of those were in the Premier League – Xisco Munoz (Watford), Steve Bruce (Newcastle), Nuno Espirito Santo (Tottenham), Daniel Farke (Norwich) and Dean Smith (Aston Villa) – but the remaining 72 EFL clubs had seen only nine departures between them.