Predicting every manager who will lose their job
Why Sam Parry reckons there will be 37 managerial casualties in 2026/27.
Sam Parry
Over the past few weeks, NTT20.COM has surveyed the better part of 1,000 EFL supporters. One of the questions asked respondents whether or not they agreed with the following statement:
“My club’s manager will still be in charge at the end of the season.”
Their options were:
Yes, No, and Uncertain.
Any wild guesses as to how many supporters answered ‘no’? Three in ten? Two in ten? One in ten?
You need a slightly larger denominator. Just one in twelve supporters believed their manager would leave before the season was over: 67 out of 739.
Look, I don’t want to shatter the illusion that your lovely manager is going to remain in charge all season. But, by heck, that is wide of the mark.
I’ll try to break it gently, or at least with purpose, like a plate at a Greek wedding. Because the gap between perception and reality is enormous. So enormous, in fact, that reading the survey convinced me there’s only one sensible course of action: to predict every one of the EFL managers who will lose their job this season, as an enduring demonstration that it pays to be cynical.
The first question is this: how many managers left their post in 2025/26?
Managerial Longevity
Earlier this summer, the English football pyramid lost its two longest-serving managers: one from the very top, as Pep Guardiola departed Manchester City, and one from the very bottom, as Simon Weaver’s Harrogate Town were relegated to the National League. In the EFL, that leaves Nigel Clough as the veteran, after five-and-a-bit years in charge of Mansfield Town.
Longevity is a rare thing in English football. Only Arsenal’s Mikel Arteta, Bromley’s Andy Woodman, Wrexham’s Phil Parkinson and the aforementioned Clough have been at their respective clubs for more than five years. That means 88 currently in-place managers, across a 92-team pyramid, have served fewer than five years – and 51 of those have served fewer than 12 months.
It should by now be obvious that we care about the 72, not the top 20. But for the purposes of this piece, I care about the 67. Why that number?
This time last year, 72 managers were preparing to lead their clubs into the 2025/26 EFL season. By the end of the campaign, three of those clubs had earned promotion to the Premier League, while two had been relegated to the National League. Removing those five clubs leaves 67.
So, how many of those 67 clubs still employ the manager who led them in the opening game of last season? The answer: 33.
The other 34 managers, or 50.7% of the cohort, either left their roles or were dismissed during or after the campaign. They weren’t all sacked. A few were poached by other clubs. Some left for alternative reasons. But, in the main, they were sacked.
Their replacements? Well, the changes came in two main types.
1. The “sticky ones”
These are the 19 clubs that changed their managers last season and head into 2026/27 with those same men at the helm:
