Up and down the country you can feel the panic of certain Premier League owners and fans as their team lurch from one bad result to another. The likes of Stoke, Swansea, West Ham and Sunderland have endured difficult starts to their Premier League campaigns, to say the least.
While Mark Hughes, Slaven Bilic Francesco Guidolin and David Moyes may be enjoying restless nights, a certain ‘Special One’ at Old Trafford will also be looking over his shoulder, after three consecutive defeats in all competitions.
However, it is the bosses further down the top-flight table that have the most to worry about and nobody wants to win the sack race!
The favourite to be the next Premier League boss to leave his position is Stoke’s Mark Hughes. The Potters are rock bottom of the table, having picked up just one point this season in the top-flight.
Hughes is the sort of boss that comes into a club spends quite a bit of money to make a team mediocre and then moves on to another club and repeats the trick. He is a decent manager, but it would be a stretch to label him a good Premier League boss.
Sparky seemed to have made some bright purchases in the likes of Wilfried Bony and Bruno Indi Martins this summer, but still, the Potters struggle and the former-City bosses position is precarious.
Swansea’s Italian boss Francesco Guidolin is right up there in the betting for the chop. The experienced Italian’s summer transfer dealings seemed strange, as at one point during the summer the Swans had no strikers.
Guidolin decided to sign Spanish strikers Fernando Llorente and Borja Baston, who have been about as effective as a chocolate fireguard this season so far, with the latter barely featuring for the Welsh side.
However, the biggest reason that Guidolin could be set for the chop is that Welsh club sold their two best players in Ashley Williams and Andre Ayew and have not really re-invested much in their squad. The Italian getting the sack before Father Christmas would not be a major surprise.
West Brom’s Tony Pulis is right up there in the betting to leave his club in the near future. However, the Welshman’s a survivor and a 4-2 win over West Ham last time out showed that there may be shoots of recovery at the Hawthorns in the next few weeks and months.
Football is fickle and a couple of weeks ago it seemed certain Pulis was leaving the Hawthorns, but with less than a year left on his contract, the former Stoke boss may just survive till next summer.
Things have all gone a bit pear-shaped for West Ham and Croatian boss Slave Bilic so far this season. The Hammers are in the bottom three of the top-flight, having suffered four defeats from their first five Premier League games this season.
The heavy metal-loving former-Croatia manager has gone from discussing a new contract to wondering when his current one will be terminated within just a few months.
The Hammers do have quality in their squad and may turn it around any minute, but Bilic’s position is still a vulnerable one despite it only being very early in the campaign.
Then we come to current Sunderland boss David Moyes, who has lurched from one failure to another since a mildly successful 11-year stint at Everton.
The Scot joined a club whose team perennially defies gravity by managing to stay in the top-flight, despite always seeming too poor to do so. Last season Sam Allardyce was the purveyor of the annual Stadium of Light miracle.
Moyes inherited a threadbare squad and brought in ten players in the summer and two free agents after the transfer window shut. The quality of player that the Scot brought into the club was greatly influenced by the fact that Black Cats owner Ellis Short has big pockets but short arms.
The Black Cats have struggled and Moyes himself admitted very early in his tenure that his team are in a relegation battle. His only saving grace may be that he has only just arrived at the club and that means he will be given at least a bit more time to make things worse.
It seems crazy talking about bosses losing their jobs this early in the season, but football is a results driven business and it would not be a major surprise if one of the aforementioned bosses lost their job in the near future.
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