This is the time of year when coaches in European football’s top-five leagues can finally catch their breath, raise a glass and give thanks for surviving the season in their jobs.
OK, perhaps the scene doesn’t look quite like that. Top-level coaches typically rank higher than the human average on the self-belief scale — if they did not, they would not last long. But private relief and gratitude would not be unreasonable emotional responses to reaching the summer without getting sacked, given the remarkable scale of coaching turnover that has become normalised within European football.
During the 2025-26 season, there were 11 coaching departures in the Premier League. That figure does not include caretakers — such as Calum McFarlane at Chelsea or Mike Jackson at Burnley — nor does it factor in Pep Guardiola, Andoni Iraola, Marco Silva and Oliver Glasner enjoying the rare privilege of leaving clubs on their own terms after the final matchday.
It was a similar story in Europe’s other major leagues: there were 10 coach departures in the Bundesliga, nine in Ligue 1 and eight apiece in La Liga and Serie A. It was not a particularly exceptional season, either, when you look at the average number of coach exits for those leagues in the last five completed campaigns (below).
The extent of European football’s coaching instability appears even starker when compared to the four major sports leagues in the United States.
On the surface, the average number of coach departures per season appears greater for Major League Baseball (MLB) and the National Hockey League (NHL), while the National Football League (NFL) figure looks in line with Ligue 1. The National Basketball Association (NBA) stands alone as a relative coach’s paradise.
But a fair comparison can only be made when accounting for the number of teams in each league — 30 for the NBA and MLB, 32 for the NFL and NHL, while the Premier League, La Liga and Serie A each have 20 clubs, and the Bundesliga and Ligue 1 have 18. When average coach exits are viewed as a proportion of the league as a whole, a truer picture emerges:
In the last five completed seasons, head coach departures in Europe’s top five leagues are at least 10 per cent more frequent on average than in the NHL and MLB, and between 15 and 25 per cent more frequent than in the NFL and the NBA.
To understand the reasons, it helps to dig into why European football coaches get sacked in the first place. An unceremonious in-season exit can be influenced by tensions with owners, a loss of faith in the dressing room, a toxic atmosphere in the stands, or all of the above. Fundamentally, though, it tends to follow a bad run of results that leave the season either doomed or in danger of falling short of expectations.
Falling short of expectations invariably means losing a lot of money — from not qualifying for the Champions League, from missing out on European football altogether or, most terrifying of all, being relegated. For Premier League clubs, any one of these represents the loss of tens of millions of pounds in broadcast income, and significant financial knock-on effects for matchday and commercial revenue.
“Football is unique, probably in any industry in the world, in terms of the revenue cliff edges that exist,” says Omar Chaudhuri, chief intelligence officer at Twenty First Group. “You have these huge drop-offs if you don’t qualify for the Champions League, if you’re not in Europe. The impact of relegation is massive and well-documented. You’re going to panic as an owner if you’re on the wrong side, or if you look like you might be on the wrong side of those cliff edges.
“There is an inherent culture in football that the only way to change results mid-season is to change the head coach. But I would say that particularly in English football, one of the big drivers is the prospect of not making as much money next year as you did this year.”
Ange Postecoglou was one of Nottingham Forest’s four coaches as they fought against relegation (Shaun Botterill/Getty Images)
Alex Stewart, CEO of Analytics FC, agrees. “Promotion, relegation, access to continental competitions and also just the scaling of prize money dependent on finishing places are huge incentives to chop and change,” he says.
Relegation is not a concern in the U.S.’s closed major sports leagues. Making the play-offs can serve as a loose parallel to qualifying for the Champions League or European competition in a sporting sense, but less so in a financial one (even if hosting multiple extra high-stakes games in a deep postseason run can be very lucrative). Varying degrees of revenue sharing help even the worst teams to operate with far greater financial certainty.
“You know the revenue is going to be there and they’re going to generate money,” says Billy King, former general manager of the Philadelphia 76ers and Brooklyn Nets. “You have the TV contracts, and you have the cap, so you can control your costs. That’s in the NFL, and it’s the same in the NBA. NHL, too, and baseball is trying to get there.
“If there was a relegation system (in the NBA) where the top 16 teams make the play-offs, and the bottom four get relegated to the G League (the NBA’s developmental division), you would see teams playing very differently. The pressure would be on because that would drastically change your revenue structure.”
The absence of that existential threat below removes one key incentive for U.S. sports teams to fire a losing coach. Another critical factor is the vast difference between how talent acquisition occurs in European football and in the major American sports leagues.
‘Project’ has become the most tediously overused word in football in recent years, particularly since the open nature of the transfer market, coupled with financial regulations that fall some way short of a hard U.S.-style salary cap, actively work against the desire for patience. Clubs with significant budgets can rebuild or reboot their squads within a single summer, often at eye-watering expense in the Premier League, and generate immediate expectations.
“There’s no European-wide salary cap, so the owners can spend, and when they spend money to bring in top talent, they’re expecting to win,” King adds. “There are salary rules in almost all the U.S. sports, except baseball, that limit your ability to be good quickly, so you have to give the coach time because the rules don’t allow you to go get two or three top players.
“It takes time in the NBA because usually a coach is not taking over a team that’s ready to win. They’re coming in to help build and develop a new culture and a system. Very rarely do you get a situation like the New York Knicks, where one coach gets to the conference finals (last season), they make a change, a new coach comes in, and now they go to the finals.”
Rebuilding slowly and steadily can be a highly attractive and rewarding path in the major American sports leagues, where a bad season not only lacks the downside risk of relegation, but in most cases actually increases a team’s access to elite talent through the draft.
The Tennessee Titans struggled last season and benefitted from it in the draft (Emilee Chinn/Getty Images)
“You’re basically guaranteed a really steady level of income, almost irrespective of how badly you do (in U.S. sports),” adds Stewart. “And actually, if you do badly, you’re going to get a higher draft pick. Whereas there’s no upside to performing badly in football, because there is a guaranteed diminishment of everything.”
“In European football, if you’re in February and the results are bad, you can’t just wait until May and then expect to get loads of good players in — you could be relegated by that point, and your ability to sign players is going to be tough if that is the case,” Chaudhuri says. “If it’s November in the NFL and you’re not going to make the play-offs, it’s not the end of the world because next year maybe you’ve got a better draft pick.”
As well as being hugely beneficial for competitive balance, draft incentives also create a much more forgiving environment for coaches, who can focus on player development and longer-term priorities rather than worrying about being fired for immediate results.
The bad news is that very little of the above can be applied to improve the job security of European football coaches. But perhaps there is one thing that can be: a more egalitarian culture of accountability for failure within U.S. sports teams that goes beyond the head coach.
It is not uncommon for general managers to hold press conferences at the end of each season where they field questions about what went right or wrong, and explain their decisions. They also get fired with far greater regularity than senior football executives, at least in the Premier League, when owners deem them to have underperformed.
King believes this is also a product of the differing mechanics of American sports leagues. “If you’re signing guys in soccer and they have a track record but they’re not playing well, you can be like, ‘OK, it can’t be him, because he’s done it everywhere else he’s been, so it’s got to be the coach’.
“In the NBA, when you draft a guy, and it doesn’t turn out well, and the guy drafted three spots behind you is playing better, it shows. That’s where it’s easier to be judged (as an executive).”
But things may yet change in European football. Last month, having missed out on Champions League qualification by finishing fifth in Serie A, Milan sacked their head coach Massimiliano Allegri, as well as CEO Giorgio Furlani, sporting director Igli Tare and technical director Geoffrey Moncada.
It would not be hugely shocking if more European football club owners start to respond to failure more like owners in U.S. sports — particularly since, increasingly, they are the same people.
