I’ve been happily chirruping in the last few days that losing Mick McCarthy wouldn’t be a good idea, but I do want to reassure myself that that’s more than my own brand of the blind loyalty that he’s so regularly accused of showing to certain players. Because, let’s be clear about this: I think have great respect for him as a down-to-earth, honest manager and want to believe he can stay at the club for many years to come. But I do also want to believe that this is also the right thing for the club.

So I decided to geek it up and take a look through statistics for past managerial sackings during the season to see if my general impression that jumping ship mid-season it’s not a good idea is borne out in fact. This is a big task, so I decided to limit myself to the bottom third of the Premier League (because we are talking most immediately about the impact of management change on relegation in this division) and to the last six years (because there’s only so many hours in the day).

To get an alternative idea of what happens to teams who decide to stick with their manager, I also looked at teams who moved out of the relegation zone without resorting to sacking. For this it was necessary to pick a starting date – not a direct comparison, but relevant enough. I chose today – 23rd November – to see how many teams in the last six years in the relegation zone at this point of the season finished outside of it without sacking their manager.

Because you gotta have a picture

Full results and notes are linked below for the geeks but, in brief, sacking your manager makes next to no difference to moving up the table. Of course, there are lots of other factors involved in all of this, but the average number of places moved up the table for bottom third clubs in the past six years is a pretty pathetic 0.8. Even this is with cheating the above parameters a little to include Spurs who actually finished well outside the bottom third in 2008/09, but were in an unsually low 19th when they sacked their manager. Exclude them, and the average move is precisely zero.

Vital statistics:

• Three teams in the past six years who were in the relegation zone when they sacked their manager moved out of the zone by the end of the season (Bolton, Spurs and Sunderland).
• One team (Birmingham) finished in the relegation zone having been out of it when they sacked their manager.
• Six teams stayed in the relegation zone after sacking their manager.
• Five teams in the relegation zone on 23rd November ended out of the zone without changing managers (Blackburn x2, Wigan, Bolton and, of course, Wolves).
• This compares to six who went down with the same manager, and two who stayed up with a managerial change mid-season (Spurs and Bolton – both of whom had in fact already sacked their manager in October). Therefore no one in the bottom three at this stage of the season stayed up by sacking their manager after this point.
• Nine relegated teams had the same manager throughout the season.

(Source: Managerial sackings / Managerial continuity)

There’s a couple of ways to look at that, depending on your frame of mind. You could say the odds are that if we’re there now, whatever happens we’re quite likely to be in the relegation zone at the end of the season, but I choose to say we’re more likely to get out of the relegation zone right now by keeping the same manager than by sacking him.

Well done if you got to the end of that! If you did, surely you must be interested enough to follow me on Twitter. I’ve finally dragged myself kicking and screaming to the cutting edge of five years ago and set up a Twitter account (WolfieWandering on Twitter – some dog had taken WorldWideWolfie – how depressing). It will be updated with any details of new articles published, and if anyone’s reading, other stuff too