Revealed! How popular Newcastle's Rafa Benitez is - compared to fellow Premier League managers

Rafa Benitez is the 7th most talked about manager in the Premier League - according to a recent study

The new study monitored football fan messages on Twitter to determine which managers are the most and least popular with their supporters.

Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to understand the sentiment and emotion behind fans' tweets, BetVictor produced The Most Talked About Managers study to analyse the 2018/19 season so far.

And research has estimated Benitez to have generated 127,945 discussions on Twitter, with only Jurgen Klopp, Maurizio Sarri, Ole Gunnar Solskjær, Unai Emery, Mauricio Pochettino and Pep Guardiola mentioned more.

However, due to Benitez’s ongoing issues with owner Mike Ashley alongside protests from Newcastle supporters, who want the 54-year-old to sell the club, the Spaniard was positively mentioned in just 44% of tweets.

In fact, only two managers - Sean Dyche and Marco Silva - have been mentioned more in tweets that were categorised as negative sentiment.

Much of the negativity from the United faithful has fallen on Ashley’s refusal to back Benitez with the sufficient funds in the transfer market.

Anger suffered last summer when the 58-year-old was handed given £22.5million to acquire seven new additions to his squad, the highest fee being £9m for Yoshinori Muto.

And with a week of the January transfer window remaining, Benitez has followed in similar, if not worst fate, with the Magpies yet to bring in any new recruits.

There are fears the ex-Liverpool boss will walk away from St James’s Park the end of the season, all of which arguably contribute to these findings.