Howay the managers: click here to see how recent Toon chiefs have compared

What are they doing? What are they doing? What are they doing? That’s what everyone is saying about Newcastle United. At least everyone who is not a fan or on the Newcastle board.

But the Fink Tank exists to challenge conventional wisdom, not simply to accept tamely what “everyone” is saying. So Dr Ian Graham and Dr Henry Stott have been running the numbers to see if Sam Allardyce’s departure was merited.

Let’s take the main arguments made about the former Newcastle manager, one by one. First, there are those who thought him a useless choice to begin with. I think we can dispense with this pretty quickly.

One can draw a line that relates the wage bill to the number of points a club get. Managers above this line are providing good value for money, while those below the line are providing poor value for money. Allardyce was an above-the-line manager for Bolton Wanderers appointed by a below-the-line club. He was a good choice.

Next, there is the question of how Newcastle have done. Has Allardyce been good, bad or indifferent? We need to look at whether the team are above or below expectations. Not fan expectations but statistical ones.

Each season the Fink Tank looks at the fixture list and calculates how many points we expect a team to gain by a particular stage of the season. We use an average of two years of a team’s strength in order to do this. This makes it quite a tough test for Allardyce. Newcastle have declined during this period, so the average strength on which we base the expectations is higher than the strength of the side that Allardyce inherited.

So how did he do? Some teams are wildly above expectations – Manchester City, say, are 15.4 points up. Some are wildly below – Wigan Athletic are 10.4 points down. Newcastle? They are 0.7 of a point down. Basically they are doing as we expected. And their overall team strength has improved this season. This certainly puts a big question mark over Allardyce’s departure.

There is a response to this, of course. It is that he has spent some money, yet failed to lift a below-the-line team. This is the strongest point against him. The Fink Tank player model looks at every kick of the ball by every player and sees how they have performed in terms of points compared with the average in that position. Every Allardyce buy, except for Mark Viduka and Claudio Caçapa, has lost points compared with the average. And even Viduka hasn’t been as good as last season.

Yet even this attack may be unfair. It is very early to conclude that these signings are failures. Allardyce’s history is to build a good team out of players with disappointing individual ratings – and that takes time. It is, frankly, ridiculous to conclude that we already know he won’t succeed.

Finally there are those fans who think Allardyce’s side were boring.

Well . . . shots per game, up; shots on target per game, up; goals per game, up. Boring, boring Allardyce. And on the defensive side they are stopping the opposition shooting as much. All would be rosy if Shay Given wasn’t having such a terrible season. The conversion rate of shots against Newcastle into goals has soared.

So there is a good case for getting a new goalkeeper, although even this would be a fairly drastic reaction. But getting rid of Allardyce? What are they doing?

finktank@thetimes.co.uk