Is there some Moneyball method to the madness of the managerial merry-go-round?

The 2021-22 Premier League season ends on Sunday. Of the 20 clubs who kicked off the campaign last August, 11 still have the same manager, although because Watford have sacked two managers the number of departures stands at ten, equalling the record set in 2013-14 and 2017-18.

Some of the exits were anticipated. Xisco Munoz was favourite on bookmakers' sack race markets at the start of the season and obliged, although that was surely more down to the notorious trigger-happy tendency of the Watford ownership than it was to Xisco's ability.

Steve Bruce was widely seen to be hanging on as soon as Newcastle announced their new owners while lying 19th in the table, and there was no ignoring poor results for Manchester United's Ole Gunnar Solskjaer and Tottenham's Nuno Espirito Santo.

But others came out of the blue, in particular Burnley's dismissal of Sean Dyche, while Leeds's decision to part company with Marcelo Bielsa had been on the cards for a while but was not generally well received by the Elland Road faithful.

Both announcements were derided, not just by supporters of the two clubs, and accompanied by the usual barrage of buzzwords - “short-sighted”, “knee-jerk” and “panic button” among others. Considering what both men had achieved in their positions, in Dyche’s case over a period of nearly ten years, it was hard to see how the club’s owners could make a case for dismissal.

It’s nothing new for fans to be left baffled when a popular manager gets the boot. It’s nearly ten years since Chelsea dismissed Roberto di Matteo, who had led them to Champions League glory just months before, while later that season Reading parted company with Brian McDermott a month after he had been named manager of the month.

In a further twist, McDermott was replaced by Nigel Adkins, who himself had been sacked by Southampton two months earlier. It was a scenario that was re-run this season when Dean Smith was shown the door at Aston Villa, then took over at Norwich after Daniel Farke’s dismissal.

Those kinds of machinations add to the fans' view that owners and chairmen really don’t know what they’re doing, and it’s fun to level that charge at them from the stands. But when it comes to the top men in the very top tier, deep down we know they simply aren’t a bunch of inept clowns lurching from one crisis to another.

The primary motivation to change manager in the Premier League is to avoid relegation. Five of the nine clubs who changed manager this season are the current bottom five, while Newcastle were second-bottom and Aston Villa 15th when they got rid of their bosses. Leeds and Burnley are among those fighting to avoid the drop on Sunday.

Staying in the Premier League may be a short-term aim but given the financial benefit it brings and the difficulty of coming back up once relegated, surely it is one that will eclipse all others? Can you justify losing a manager who has served you well, in Dyche’s case for nearly ten years, if it means staying up? Presumably the answer from the money men is yes.

The other half of the question is then, what will bringing in a new manager achieve? If there has been a better boss sitting out there doing nothing all this time, why wasn’t he in the post in the first place?

Well, maybe it’s the simple act of change itself that is seen as decisive rather than its effects. It’s a long-established business tenet that all change is good and a company needs to be constantly evolving, no matter how successfully it is running.

In his brilliant book Moneyball, writer Michael Lewis outlines how Billy Beane, general manager of baseball team the Oakland Athletics, adopted a statistical approach to player recruitment, ignoring star names in favour of undervalued players who produced better results. The A’s reached the playoffs in consecutive seasons even though their budget was one of the smallest in all of Major League Baseball.

Many critics had to concede that maybe there was something in it, but then said Oakland would get found out in the playoffs. Over a 162-game season, yes the statistical model can yield results, but in the short, sharp unforgiving playoff series it’s the intangibles that count - a player’s innate class, a touch of magic, whatever. And Oakland’s poor playoff performances allowed them to claim they were right.

The characteristics that many players pick out in highly regarded managers is their faith in their systems and players, their consistency and loyalty, unflappability and resolve. But what happens when you’re faced with a relegation run-in, a short burst of crucial games much like a playoff series, when focus has to be sharper than ever and everyone has to step up a few gears?

The same message of “stick to our principles and it will come good in the end” can’t transfer to the new high-pressure situation. There has to be a sense of change, a new voice, a different dynamic to raise the levels.

So replace “short-sighted” with “focused on new, crucial short-term goal” and the decision becomes easier to accept. And for businessmen, being able to say in hindsight that they did something, made a change, took positive action, is preferable to being criticised after the event for doing nothing, even if the outcome is the same.

Burnley and Leeds fans have been through a lot this season and will have felt similar emotions at hearing of their manager’s sacking. But at least one of those clubs will be celebrating survival on Sunday, and who knows, that may just be enough for them to forgive, if not entirely forget, what has gone before.

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