Should Premier League bottom three have stuck rather than twisted with no succession plan?

It’s been a busy season for revolving doors in the Premier League but at the bottom many of these managerial changes have made little difference.

So is that it, then? Are things finally starting to settle? There’s still plenty of time for all of this change, but the bottom three in the Premier League really do look like they could be the bottom three come the end of the season. Leeds United and Leicester City slipped into the relegation places after losing at Manchester City and Fulham, while Everton and Nottingham Forest hauled themselves out with wins against Brighton and Southampton. The Saints themselves are now only hanging onto their Premier League place in a purely mathematical sense.

There have been 40 Premier League managers this season, a new record and a sign of the cold, blind panic that has spread across so many clubs over the last nine months. But has this high attrition rate had a positive or negative effect on the clubs? The evidence would seem to suggest that it hasn’t. The current bottom three have burned their way through ten managers or managerial combos this season – yes, I’m including the Mike Stowell and Adam Sadler era at Leicester, which lasted eight days and took in home defeats against both Aston Villa and Bournemouth – and the results have been at best mixed.

Sam Allardyce came surprisingly close – certainly closer than anyone expected – to getting a tune out of his Leeds team at Manchester City, but in reality we learned very little about their prospects. For one thing, City played as though their minds were elsewhere and wasted a number of chances which, if taken, would have put a very different shade upon their win. And secondly, whether the result had been good or atrocious, Manchester City are a Premier League outlier. How much is it possible to learn from playing a team that is expected to put a hatful past you, whether they do so or not?

Leicester City had a mini-revival under new manager Dean Smith with a win and two draws from their matches against Wolves, Leeds and Everton, but then shipped five goals at Fulham when they really couldn’t afford to be doing that against anybody. And Southampton have only added six points to their tally since Ruben Selles was confirmed until the end of the season after their disastrous Nathan Jones experiment, all of which raises the question of whether they might have been better off had they stuck with Ralph Hasenhuttl in the first place.

The other two of this…