Interesting article in the Telegraph stating boards should consider carefully before sacking managers. Where I think the article is wrong in this case is that I do not believe our board would sack BR just to get an immediate bounce, I believe they would only replace him for a new strategy with a manager that would be here for the long term.
There are two games left before the international break, if we are hammered on Saturday then I think BR position as manager will be untenable.
The stats which could save David Moyes, Graham Potter and Brendan Rodgers from the sack
New manager bounce has become part of football's vernacular, but the underlining numbers simply do not support it.
Whether the next one goes to David Moyes, Graham Potter, or Brendan Rodgers, we can expect that Premier League P45s for this year are not done yet. Eight managers in the English topflight have already been sacked this season; 37 managers, across the 92 clubs in the top four tiers, have already been dismissed so far in 2022/23.
In the short-term, sacking a manager normally works: a team’s results tend to improve under a new coach. Only, this isn’t because a new boss motivates the players better or transforms their tactics. When a side is struggling their luck tends to have bottomed out – and the manager is sacked. Under a new manager, they cease to be so unlucky.
A study, by the football consultancy 21st Club, analyses the points earned by teams in the big five European leagues in the eight games before and after sacking a manager this season. In the eight games before a manager leaves, their teams earned 0.7 points per game on average. In the next eight games, they average 1.2 points. But based on expected goals – the metric that analyses the underlying quality and quantity of chances created and conceded, which is less volatile – the team’s performances could have been expected to earn 1.2 points per game in the eight games before their old manager left, exactly the same as under their new boss. Underlying performance didn’t change; results did.
But clubs don’t need a change in manager to get a change in luck. A study of 15 years of the Premier League, by a group of Dutch academics, analysed clubs who suffered a terrible run – significantly below how they could be expected to perform. The first group of clubs changed their managers; the second kept the faith. Both groups of clubs saw their results improve by, on average, the same amount. The finding is striking on average, sacking the boss made no difference to how a club subsequently performed.
Consider Leicester, who got just one point from their first seven Premier League games this season, intensifying calls to sack Rodgers. They didn’t and got 16 points from their next eight games. Or consider Nottingham Forest. After they got just four points from their first eight Premier League games this season, there were rumours that Steve Cooper would be sacked. Instead, he was given a new contract. Forest have got 22 points from 17 games since, and now lie 14th.
What we think of as the ‘managerial bounce’ is a chimera: regression to the mean, borne of a side’s run of unsustainable bad luck ending. Analysis of the Dutch Eredivisie, and a new study of Ligue 1, back up what has happened to Leicester and Forest this campaign. On average, results of struggling teams improve by the same regardless of whether they sack their manager. None of this is to say that no managers should be sacked, or revisionism about Nathan Jones’s tenure at Southampton. As Tommy Docherty said: “The Press got me the sack at Man United. They kept printing the results.” But clubs often mistake randomness for a reason to sack a manager.
Consider Marco Silva, arguably Mikel Arteta’s nearest rival as Premier League manager of the season. Silva is emphatically delivering on what his club promised when they hired him: “attractive, attacking football” and someone who “wants to work with young players, make them better”.
Only, these comments were not made when Fulham, who are within sight of an all-time record points tally in the top flight, hired Silva in 2021. Instead, they were made when Everton hired Silva in 2018. In his first season, Silva led Everton to eighth place. But, 15 Premier League games into his second campaign, Silva was sacked.
Everton, it is true, then recovered, rising from 18th to 12th in the table under interim manager Duncan Ferguson and then Carlo Ancelotti. Yet a closer examination of Silva’s reign suggests that his team weren’t really falling apart. They had lost two games to 94th-minute winners.
Silva’s side had nine points fewer than they could have expected, based on expected goals when he was sacked, analysis by 21st Club found. In the remainder of the season, Everton’s underlying performance was 1.5 points per game – exactly the same as earlier under Silva. What changed was not the quality of their performances but their luck: where Silva’s expected 1.5 points a game translated to only 0.9 points per game, Ferguson’s and Ancelotti’s expected 1.5 points translated to 1.5 points. Everton went from very unlucky to simply performing as their underlying numbers suggested.
They were not the first club to make the same mistake about Silva. In 2017, he made an outstanding start as Watford manager, getting 21 points from his first 13 games. Watford’s results led to Everton trying to appoint him: they were even willing to pay Watford £10 million in compensation. Just two months later, Watford sacked Silva. So both Everton and Watford, at various points, considered Silva to be worth at least £10 million, yet both soon sacked him. Fulham will be glad that they did.
When Antonio Conte was sacked by Chelsea in 2018, a year after winning the Premier League, it cost the club £26 million. Not sacking managers so willingly means a club has more money to spend on player transfers and wages, training facilities, scouting or their academies.
When sacking managers midseason, teams seldom get their pick of the very best head coaches. Barring exceptional circumstances – Liverpool appointing Jurgen Klopp in October 2015 stands out – clubs looking for a new manager in midseason are fishing in a pool of the mediocre and the unemployed.
The prosaic truth is that the vast majority of a team’s performance is governed by what they spend. There is a 90 per cent correlation between teams’ wages and their results, Soccernomics shows; only 10 per cent of Premier League managers consistently overachieve when wages were taken into account. Barring a few unusually bad managers, the other 90 per cent are managers who, based on their results over an extended period of time, are essentially interchangeable.
This tendency to be “fooled by randomness”, as Nassim Taleb put it, is not confined to football alone. Consider another industry in which there is high turnover, with people hired and fired based on their publicly available results: fund managers. “Year-to-year correlation between the outcomes of mutual funds is very small, barely higher than zero,” Daniel Kahneman writes in Thinking, Fast and Slow. “For a large majority of fund managers, the selection of stocks is more like rolling dice than like playing poker.”
Sacking a manager can be the catalyst for progress. But, much more often, it is simply an expedient way to obscure a club’s deeper failings, or an overreaction to a short-term dip. It is a truth that Tottenham Hotspur might reflect on. In 2019, six months after reaching the Champions League final, Mauricio Pochettino was sacked. After four years spent wondering whether they really could find anyone better, now this outstanding manager is being linked with a return to Spurs.