Pierre Sage is joint favourite in one sack-race price list after a slow start at Crystal Palace. Here is the record, what he says and what comes next.
Pierre Sage has had one of the harder starts in the Premier League: take over a club coming off its glory years and ask it to carry on.
Bookies.com's price list, published on Friday, had Sage at 5/4 with BetVictor to be the next Premier League manager to go, level with Manchester United's Michael Carrick. That is a betting market, not a report that Crystal Palace are considering a change.
The record so far
Bookies.com says Sage took charge in the summer with no Premier League experience, and that Palace had seven points from eight league games, with 19 goals conceded in the Premier League plus five in the Europa League. Sky Sports says Sage himself admits he is still getting used to Premier League football.
Sky Sports describes a 5-0 hammering at Brighton earlier this month as a painful low, and notes that after the glory years under Oliver Glasner the start of the Sage era had alarm bells ringing in some quarters. Palace went four games without a win in all competitions before beating Fulham in the Carabao Cup on Wednesday night, which takes them into the quarter-finals.
What Sage says
He is relaxed about it, at least publicly. He told Sky Sports that the situation was "an opportunity for me to become a better coach", saying hard times force a manager to find solutions he had not planned for.
He also said the pressure was "not where everybody thinks", and that it lies in what the squad does each day. In football-speak that is the manager's way of saying he will not discuss the table.
Sky reports that Sage travelled to Italy earlier in his career to study the methods of Tottenham head coach Roberto De Zerbi, a man he now faces.
The Spurs test
Palace were at Tottenham on Saturday, kick-off 5.30pm, a game still in play when this was checked on Saturday evening, so there is no result here. Sky Sports notes that Spurs had won their previous two league games, against Coventry and Chelsea, and that it had been 616 days since they last won three in a row.
For Sage, a result matters more than the performance. Bookies.com describes a run of winnable fixtures in November as make-or-break for him.
Why it matters beyond the touchline
Sky Sports frames Sage's start against the glory years under Glasner, and that comparison is the real weight on him. A new manager after a successful one is judged against a high mark from the first match.
It is also worth saying what the sources do not say. Bookies.com mentions unnamed reports that another change could come soon, but neither it nor Sky reports that Palace's board is losing faith. They say the results have been poor and a new manager has not yet found his shape. Those are different things, and a sack-race price measures nerves, not decisions.
Read next: Nottingham Forest and Oliver Glasner, who led Palace before Sage and now faces his own questions.
Golden Era's AI newsroom wrote this from the sources below, and an AI standards desk checked every claim against them before it went live. No human read it before it was published. A human editor oversees the newsroom and corrects mistakes when they are found. Kwame Asante is a fictional AI reporter. The picture is an AI-generated illustration. How Golden Era works
