Inside This Season's Premier League Sack Race

For a Premier League manager, job security is not one of the main perks. The sack race has become a key storyline that runs through every campaign.

As Fulham crashed to a 3-0 defeat at home to Bournemouth on Saturday, it was Slavisa Jokanovic who became the latest manager to experience how it feels to walk the plank.

Promoted in May in a shower of glory at Wembley, he was praised for his pretty style of football. Now, less than three months into life as a top-flight boss, he has been installed as favourite across the board to become the next manager to leave his post.

"It's rare that we are this deep into the season and have not had a manager leave his job," explains John Hill, PR manager for Coral.

"Jokanovic is the favourite at the moment because Fulham have been in disappointing form. They might look towards January as a time to make a change."

This season seems different from the past. Last season, Crystal Palace sacked new manager Frank de Boer after just five matches in charge, and managerial casualties reached an all-time high. There were 10 changes in all after the season began, rounded off by West Bromwich Albion's decision to replace Alan Pardew with Darren Moore.

Jokanovic is already the fifth different man to lead the market this season, though, with the previous four scrambling for safety. Before a ball had been kicked, Watford boss Javi Gracia was deemed most likely to lose his job. Since then, Mark Hughes, Jose Mourinho and Claude Puel have all seen their position come under intense scrutiny as their odds dropped.

"We have a lot of bets still pending from August and September," says Hill.

"Because there has been no stand out favourite, this market is more interesting to us than usual. We have taken a lot of money—in fact, a record amount of money for this time of year."

There has been no panic yet, and even the experts do not seem totally sure who should be fearing for their job the most.

The media and bookmakers play off each other, reacting to news stories and big punts to create a vision of how clubs are thinking. It's become a subplot as widely discussed as any other aspect of the sport. Radio phone-ins, TV debate shows and newspaper and website columns are regularly filled with comment and opinion on who should lose their job.

It's the traders and experts at the betting companies, though, who are often the first to know when a manager really is under threat.

"Although this is a novelty market, it offers more insight than others," says Lee Price, head of Paddy Power PR. "Some people bet on it because of a gut instinct, but others have genuine insight, so we have to carefully measure bigger bets. If something seems suspicious, we review the situation.

"It is fascinating, and we have to make judgement calls on just how serious the punts are.

"There was a mad one a few weeks back in our Norwich store as someone wanted to put 100 grand on Sam Allardyce to become the next Norwich manager. We didn't take the bet! Generally we don't set a limit on bet amounts, but once you get over a couple of hundred quid on this market, we look into it further and weigh it up.

"We have insight on manager situations sometimes earlier than anyone. There might be a sudden movement with lots of people betting on the same thing at the same time—or there have also been occasions when punters make a bet and we can see from their email address that they actually work at the football club they are betting on. That's a bit of a giveaway in a market like this—they probably know something!"

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Jokanovic's situation is not quite as ominous at it seems on paper. No one seems to have had a major swell of bets on him, but Fulham's poor form would traditionally suggest the boss will be under pressure.

Those inside the club say it is not the case. Insiders at Craven Cottage told Bleacher Report that American owner Shahid Khan is going to continue to support and believe in Jokanovic's approach.

That will not stop the rumour mill—especially if he loses his next match at Huddersfield Town on Monday night. But if he isn't shoved first, who will be?

Behind Jokanovic, it is Mourinho, Hughes, Rafa Benitez and Claude Puel who are listed by bookies as most in trouble.

Mourinho's position was certainly precarious at the start of the month. A report in the Daily Mirror by David McDonnell suggested he would be sacked no matter what Man United's result was against Newcastle over that weekend. Yet he remains in his job, and results—including the Newcastle win—have helped move the spotlight away from him. The Guardian's Jamie Jackson even reported on Monday that he will be given backing in the January market.

From sources around those other clubs, it appears that Hughes and Benitez are both walking a tightrope, though. Insiders believe it will only take a couple of bad results to lead both Southampton and Newcastle into looking for a new manager.

The fascination surrounding this aspect of the game has led to the rise of The Sack Race, a website successful in its dedication to delivering managerial news bulletins. So why are people so obsessed?

"I think it reflects modern society," says Gabriel Sutton, writer for The Sack Race. "Without generalizing too much, there's evidence to suggest that the younger generation have shorter attention spans than previous ones and that's largely due to the rise of social media, which has come partially at the expense of longform content. One of the impacts of consuming information in no more than 280 characters at a time is that it has become preferable to view situations in simplistic terms.

"Often, because the manager is the person at the club most visible outside matchdays due to their media commitments, they come under the most scrutiny.

"Personally, I do not take pleasure in seeing anybody getting sacked. I can understand why some from the outside would look at the name 'The Sack Race' and wonder if it's just about making light of people losing their jobs—the title is, perhaps, deliberately intriguing.

"However, if you look at the content, you can see that the website itself is very much about analysing managers. I write a lot of positive articles on managers, and I like to think that whenever I do question one of them, I do so with utmost respect for the difficulty of the job they have and try to factor in mitigating circumstances—but I'm not lenient."

Ten games into this Premier League season, we are waiting to discover who wins the sack race. Jokanovic, Hughes and Benitez are treading carefully—but it is the Mourinho situation that punters are most excited about.

"Mourinho is the most notable one involved in this market, without doubt," admits Coral's PR man Hill. "A lot of people are waiting on whether he is first to go. It's where the most interest has come from for us and obviously it is a huge name to be talking about in terms of losing his job.

"Even though he weathered the storm recently, it is clear that plenty of people still do not feel he is going to last the season."