Manager Career: Top-club managers are being sacked far too quickly

I’ve noticed an issue with the manager market and AI manager sackings in Manager Career Mode.

Managers at clubs expected to compete near the top of the league appear to be under extremely aggressive and unrealistic pressure if their team isn’t immediately meeting its highest objectives.

For example, managers at clubs such as Manchester City and Arsenal can be sacked very quickly simply because the club isn’t first in the Premier League, sometimes by around January. I’ve also seen established managers such as Arteta, Maresca and Iraola lose their jobs very early.

The problem isn’t managers being sacked — poor performance should absolutely have consequences. The problem is that the game appears to give managers at high-expectation clubs far too little time to recover from an underperforming period.

A team expected to challenge for the title might realistically be 2nd, 3rd, 4th or even lower midway through a season without immediately sacking its manager, particularly if that manager has previously been successful or has built up credit with the club.

It also creates a knock-on problem for long-term Career Mode saves because the managerial landscape changes far too quickly. After only a relatively short period, many of the recognisable managers have already been removed from their clubs, not because those clubs have catastrophically failed, but because they haven’t perfectly matched what appears to be a very rigid board expectation.

I think the AI manager job-security system needs to take more factors into account, including:

• Previous-season performance and trophies
• How long the manager has been at the club
• The manager’s previous success with that club
• Current league position relative to the stage of the season
• Points gap to the club’s objective rather than simply league position
• Performance in domestic and European competitions
• Recent form and whether results are improving or deteriorating
• Whether the club is still realistically capable of achieving its objectives

There should also be significantly more patience earlier in the season. Being outside the title position in November, December or January shouldn’t automatically put the manager of a title-challenging club on the verge of being sacked.

The aim shouldn’t be to make managers almost impossible to sack. It should be to make sackings feel contextual and believable. A major club having a disastrous season and changing manager is realistic. Several major clubs repeatedly firing established managers because they aren’t first halfway through the season isn’t.

This would make the Manager Career world feel much more stable and realistic over multiple seasons while still allowing managerial changes to happen organically.

I think that last distinction is important because it heads off the obvious solution of EA simply reducing the sacking frequency globally. You don’t actually want that. You want the game to understand the difference between “Arsenal are third in January” and “Arsenal are 14th in January and have lost eight of their last ten.”