Stop Blaming the Manager. It's the Sporting Director's Fault.

Players win games. Money buys players. And it's some suit in a conference room, not the guy on the sideline, who decides how that money's spent.

One winter evening in London, could be tonight, three rectangular Russian men will emerge from a tinted SUV outside a luxury condo and return a few minutes later carrying an especially large, especially squirmy blue gym bag branded with a squiggly cartoon 3. Or maybe the rectangles will be American and the unhappy bag, now red, will want you to Fly Emirates. One way or another, some formerly promising Premier League coaching career will be cut down in the flower of its youth and despite everything—despite the lack of qualifications, despite the losses, despite the embarrassing press conferences on the topic of responsibility or pure maths—the key thing to remember is it wasn’t actually the manager’s fault. Come on, guys, unzip the bag and let him go.

Coaches don’t matter. Let’s get that out of the way up front. This question has been studied to death and almost everyone agrees that firing your manager midseason doesn’t make much difference. You’ve probably heard this story before: the table suggests sack-happy teams are rewarded with a “new manager bounce,” until researchers compare those clubs to a control group that stood by their man through a similarly sackable dip in form and find these teams bounced back too. “An extraordinary period of poor performance is just that: extraordinary,” Chris Anderson and David Sally write in The Numbers Game. “It will auto-correct as players return from injury, shots stop hitting the post or fortune shines her light on you once more.” The moral of the story is that soccer scorelines are noisy and firing the coach for dropping a few points is, in the words of Soccernomics author Simon Kuper, “football’s version of the Aztecan human sacrifice.”

To be fair to coaches, the sack race studies may say less about what they bring to the table than about directors who can’t tell the difference between a few unlucky misses and a fireable offense. But Kuper thinks the sport has fallen victim to a great manager theory of history. “The best predictor of a club’s success is not who picks the team but the squad’s total wage bill,” he wrote for the Financial Times. “Averaged over 10 seasons, correlation between wage bill and final league position is about 90 per cent.” There’s a reason big clubs can get away with handing a whistle to some famous ex-player who thinks tactics are colorful little breath mints. It’s the economy, stupid.

The relationship between spending money on good players and winning soccer games is strong enough to give us a baseline for estimating what coaches really contribute. In 2013, English researchers modeled Premier League clubs’ expected performance using wages, transfer fees, and player availability, then compared that to how teams actually did to look for “manager fixed effects.” The coaches who beat the model by the most included familiar names like Alex Ferguson, Guus Hiddink, José Mourinho, Arsène Wenger, and Rafa Benítez. Talent is real! On the other hand, another of England’s best leaders was No Manager, whose interim stints outperformed expectations 96% of the time thanks to that sweet new manager bounce. Most coaches fell somewhere in the middle, performing close enough to expectations that it was hard to say for sure if they were good or bad.

So yeah, roster spend matters most, then injuries, then maybe coaching and other stuff at the margins. That’s the general takeaway from studies that have tried to measure managerial skill. Just to give you a sense of the scale of the elements here, one 2017 paper estimated that a major increase in spending improved a team’s performance by around 8.5 points, an injury crisis could cost 8.3 points, and keeping or losing a manager was generally worth plus or minus a single point. With all due respect to Johan Cruyff, who famously said he’d never seen a bag of money score a goal, coaches don’t score goals either. Players do. And bags of money can be exchanged for players’ services.

“In Britain the role of the manager has almost become a cult figure. It is perceived that these guys have some magic formula or secret algorithm for success. The adulation results in absolute power and ultimate decision making being demanded by these big ego celebrities.”
—Premier League club vice chairman of football, 2018

But if spending is destiny, why does Roman Abramovich keep siccing his goon squad on coaches he just hired? It’s partly the profession’s own fault for being a little too good at self-promotion. There’s an English gaffer archetype that goes back to Arsenal in the 1920s, when Herbert Chapman decided he wasn’t content to earn a living running practice and writing out team sheets. On top of his coaching duties he demanded total control over the club’s operations, all the way down to picking records to play over the PA system at halftime, while still somehow finding time to write a regular soccer column for the Sunday Express and lobby London Transport to change the nearest tube station’s name to Arsenal. The cult of the manager was born. Jonathan Wilson’s Inverting the Pyramid quotes an anonymous newspaper columnist arguing in 1925 that clubs “are ready to pay anything up to £4,000 and £5,000 for the services of a player. Do they attach as much importance to the official who will have charge of the player?”

Chapman must have realized the guy in charge of the player mattered less than the guy in charge of the £5,000, because he took over Arsenal’s transfer operations, too. Over the next century the English managers big enough to get away with it threw sharp elbows to keep directors out of their business. By the end of the Second World War, according to Barney Ronay’s book on the position, the manager “was indisputably in charge now. More than this, he was famous. He’d had his hair done and his voice fixed. He spoke not just to the terraces but to the gossip pages and to the burgeoning academics of management theory. Life was good.”

There was a certain auteur logic in elevating a coach to “manager” and giving him control over his own squad, but it required a person who was equally good at man management, training, tactics, and overseeing scouts and transfer negotiations—while juggling all those jobs at once. Even if a club lucked into hiring a human Swiss Army knife, the impact when he left was … well, just ask Manchester United or Arsenal how the last decade has gone.

“What strikes me the most about being a football manager now is the shift in power. Even at the top end—and don’t get me wrong someone like Alex Ferguson is massively influential—but I bet even he has noticed a shift in power over the time he has been manager at Manchester United. Decisions now are not always made by the manager but by the Chairman and Board of Directors … who think they know a lot about football.”
—English manager, 2010

To keep things a little more stable, European clubs developed an org chart in which the coach coached while another, different person called the sporting director saw to squad building. Lately England has come around. “Twelve years ago when Tottenham Hotspur FC first appointed one, the press were very anti-sporting directors—‘It will never work in England, blah, blah, blah, blah’—but now everybody has got one,” one Premier League exec said a couple years ago. Sporting directors oversee recruiting operations that are getting more professional and analytical as global competition and ballooning transfer fees drive up the stakes of each transfer window. In a recent Athletic article, Chelsea’s head of international scouting echoed that 1925 columnist’s question, aimed this time at scouts and data analysts: “If you are going to make a capital investment of £50 million in one player, how are you going to discover what you are getting for your money?”

The rise of sporting directors has been a big deal, but fans have struggled to keep up. Front offices are hard to understand. Sporting directors might be called technical directors, directors of football, or heads of football operations, except when those positions coexist in a single front office, in which case job descriptions are anyone’s guess. When Chelsea’s last technical director left after some bad transfer business in 2017, the club expanded the role of its head of international scouting to report directly to Abramovich’s right-hand woman Marina Granovskaia, who has oversight of transfers. Then they named Petr Cech technical and performance adviser, which apparently means something totally different than technical director. In case you weren’t confused enough about who’s calling the shots, Chelsea insists all of its recruiting “must ultimately serve the needs of the head coach.” Listen, guys, just tell us who we’re supposed to blame for you dropping a quarter of a billion dollars in transfer fees last summer without improving the team.

Managers, on the other hand, are easy to understand. They talk on TV a lot. They stand on the sideline during games and wave their arms like they’re practicing semaphore. It’s possible to pretend the head coach is still a one-man sporting department, and even though we know better it’s just so much cleaner, you know? Stories about how a team lost a few points year-on-year because murky front office processes led to a below-average transfer hit rate over a few windows, stars aging out of their prime, young talent stagnating on loan, and a rash of injuries at a position they were waiting to reinforce in the next Financial Fair Play period are about as fun to read as a 10-K filing. Pinning it all on a coaching change is classic hero goes on a journey/stranger comes to town stuff. He’s the club’s single most visible character. It’s storytelling 101.

If most coaches don’t really matter but everyone acts like they do, it’s just good business to fire them. Fans like it (season ticketholders reported a 6% increase in intent to renew following a coaching change). Markets like it (publicly traded English clubs saw their share price rise 0.3% the day after a sacking). Even players like it (65% of players in one Turkish case study reported positive feelings after a “blood change”). Meanwhile sporting directors can shuffle their spreadsheets in the background, doing the long-term squad building work that’s going to determine whether the next coach gets to be a hero or a villain.

Is all this coaching churn counterproductive? Yeah, probably. To the extent that modern managers do more than just put their best eleven on the field in some kind of shape that makes sense, it happens gradually, over months and years of working on little things in practice to develop players and get everyone singing from the same hymn sheet. That’s probably why research suggests that losing a coach who’s been there a while hurts more than a short-term hire. But we’re talking marginal gains from the technical area. In the end it’s talented players who win games, which means it’s money spent wisely that wins trophies. Call off your goons, Roman. Hire a competent sporting director and keep cutting those checks. ❧

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Further reading:

• Bas ter Weel, Does Manager Turnover Improve Firm Performance? Evidence from Dutch Soccer, 1986–2004 (De Economist, 2011)
• Bell et al., The performance of football club managers: skill or luck? (Economics & Finance Research, 2013)
• Anthony Constantinou and Norman Fenton, Towards Smart-Data: Improving predictive accuracy in long-term football team performance (Knowledge Based Systems, 2017)
• Gilfix et al., Longevity differences in the tenures of American and foreign Major League Soccer managers (Journal of Quantitative Analysis of Sports 2020)
• Simon Kuper, Why star Premier League managers matter less than ever (FT, 2016)
• Liam Twomey et al., Covert scouts, modern data and Marina the leader: Chelsea’s transfer revolution (The Athletic)
• Susan Bridgewater, Football Management (Macmillan 2010)
• Daniel Parnell et al., Routledge Handbook of Football Business and Management (Taylor and Francis 2018)
• Barney Ronay, The Manager: The Absurd Ascent of the Most Important Man in Football (Little, Brown, 2010)
• Chris Anderson and David Sally, The Numbers Game: Why Everything You Know About Soccer Is Wrong (Penguin 2013)
• Jonathan Wilson, Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Soccer Tactics (Bold Type 2013)
• David Goldblatt, The Ball is Round: A Global History of Soccer (Riverhead 2006)

Image: Adriaen Isenbrant, Man Weighing Gold