Does sacking the manager work? I checked every Premier League sacking since 2010
Leicester sacked the manager who had won them the Premier League, nine months after the title. In the ten games before, they had taken 0.5 points a game. In the ten after, 2.2. Chelsea sacked Frank Lampard in January 2021, doubled their points a game, and won the Champions League four months later.
Those are the stories that every board remembers, and they are why the decision feels obvious every time a run goes wrong. Before taking it, a club should know one thing: does it actually work? I did not want to answer that from memory, so I checked every mid-season sacking in the Premier League since 2010 and compared each one with clubs in the same position that kept their manager.
The short answer: a team that sacks its manager usually gets better. So does a team on the same run that does not.
How I tested it
I took every manager who was sacked, or left "by mutual consent", while a Premier League season was running, from 2010-11 to 2025-26. There were 112. A hundred had at least five league games before and after the change, and 88 had at least ten games left to measure, which is the main group.
For each of those 88, I compared points per game in the ten league games before the sacking with the ten league games after it.
