Followers of this blog – and my Twitter feed – will know the story by now. In June, I tweeted that Swansea City was extremely fortunate to have finished 8th in the Premier League last season. In early August, I showed that Garry Monk was indeed a lucky manager who had done a subpar job in his first season. In late August, I suggested that Swansea’s first four matches of the new season had been atypically good and asked whether something had changed. Today, there is a change: Monk is out.

I can’t say whether this was the right decision for Swansea, since I don’t know what the club’s next move will be. What I can say is that Monk – while still subpar – was getting better. With a slightly improved squad at his disposal, he didn’t do as much damage to his team’s prospects as he had in the 2014-15 season. That may sound like faint praise, and it is. But to be completely fair, he was better than any of Swansea’s other recent managers:

(Here a “good” manager is one who achieves better underlying results than predicted by one of NYA’s metrics for the innate ability of the squad. A “lucky” manager is one whose team wins more points than those underlying results would normally garner in the Premier League. The colors of the dots indicate the quality of the squad, weighted by actions on the field, relative to historical averages. The numbers behind the chart are adjusted for the strength of the opposition in each match and do not consider the portions of matches where one or more teams is playing with fewer than 11 men.)

As of a couple of weeks ago, NYA’s metrics suggested that Swansea was playing roughly like a 10th-place team. In contrast with last season, the club had been unlucky. Still, even with its bad luck, Swansea might have been expected to end up in 12th place this season.

That’s not terrible. And with time, who knows? Monk could have become a manager who actually made the whole greater than the sum of its parts. Yet time is money in the Premier League, and there are many better managers out there.

One who was recently sacked despite very good underlying numbers is Gary Bowyer. Where Monk rode his luck and became a darling of the press, Bowyer couldn’t catch a break. But at Blackburn, he somehow made a pretty poor squad play like a mid-table Championship team. So, Huw Jenkins, if you’re listening, you could do worse than give Gary – that’s Gary with one r – a call.